Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project
Yesterday morning I woke up much earlier than I wanted. Instead of lying in bed, wishing I was asleep, I decided to get up and check out Hacker News. Better to waste my time reading industry news than lying around.
Context & Ripple Effects
The move lands six days after Miguel de Icaza called out Dropbox's security shortcomings on his blog, so Dropbox is fighting on two fronts at once: defending its encryption claims while now leaning on an open-source project built around its own service. Razor Fast's account broke the story via Hacker News, which is exactly the audience most likely to treat a takedown of an independent client as a trust question rather than a legal one.
First-order effects
- The maintainers and users of the targeted open-source project face an immediate choice between compliance and forking, with Dropbox holding the leverage over API access.
Second-order effects
- Reaction on Hacker News puts Dropbox's brand in front of the same developer community whose goodwill drives adoption of its sharing links and integrations, compounding the criticism already running since the security post.
Third-order effects
- If cloud-sync providers keep asserting control over independent clients, openness of the client ecosystem becomes a competitive axis among storage vendors, and users learn to price lock-in into their choice of platform.
The trend: Consumer cloud-sync platforms are tightening their grip on how third-party and open-source clients may interoperate as they scale past hobbyist-era tolerance.