Coming soon: an open source Dropbox alternative with collaboration

Dropbox is a great little service (and app). Developer Hylke Bons seems to like it — but he’s got designs on building an alternative with a few improvements. As he writes on his blog, “Dropbox has a great user experience, but it has downsides as well: you can’t host your own server; it’s not open source and has some freaky things in its license agreement.”

Dubbed SparkleShare, Bons is building his project using Mono, GTK+, and Git. Like Dropbox, SparkleShare sets up a local folder which is automatically kept in sync — though not in the cloud. Instead, you and your friends/coworkers set up connections to each other’s shares (or you can keep everything to yourself, of course). That’ll make SparkleShare an extremely interesting option for teams who need to collaborate via the ‘Net — and for users who want to keep files in sync without floating them in the cloud.

And since you’re hosting your own server, there’s no monthly fees to worry about — which is always a bonus.

A Linux release is the first item on the agenda, with OS X and Windows versions to follow. Bons is seeking contributors — if you’re interested in helping out, drop him a line on the SparkleShare web site!

[via OMG! Ubuntu]

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