Re:Dropbox Is Struggling and Competitors Are Catching Up
by zurn on Thursday June 25, 2015 @03:08AM
(#9776385)
It's the same reason most restaurants offer vegetarian dishes. You're not just losing the business of the few percent that are vegetarians - you're losing the business of groups that include vegetarians.
(The analogy is incomplete since you'll also get people who don't want to get locked out of Linux even though they don't currently use it)
Also Linux users are very overrepresented in the propellerheads group that you are targeting in the takeoff phase of a DB/Drive like product.
Re:Dropbox Is Struggling and Competitors Are Catching Up
by shanemhansen on Wednesday June 24, 2015 @10:35PM
(#9775635)
The client was just a python program that leveraged a cross platform gui toolkit (source: my Linux laptop and gdb). So imagine getting it to work on Linux wasn't that hard.
I worked on a similar project that even shipped its own FUSE filesystem for osx and Linux (windows used cbfs iirc). Our client had very little platform-specific code.
But fun fact: I visited the dropbox office once (it was like an adult playground) and recall seeing a cultish motivation poster that said something along the lines of "the linux client was written by one person on a plane in two hours".