Seadrive open source plan?

I know seadrive isn’t open source yet, but I’d like to know if there’re plans to release it under an open source licence short/medium term ? I find it excellent (thought have some technical issues here and there), but I’m not very comfortable with relying on something not open source.

9 Likes

No one knows ? Or is the plan not to open source it ?

Afaik so far there is not plan to open source it.

That’d be too bad. And I fail to see the benefit for Seafile Ltd. It’s not like the pro version of the server, which is a business model I perfectly understand. Here, the seadrive client is a freeware anyway, and available even for CE servers. Opensourcing it would allow not only the community to enhance it, but more important, the community to package it. I’m lucky right now that the CentOS RPM works on Fedora, but there’s no guarante it’ll in the future. And if I’m not confident I’ll be able to use seadrive in the future, I can’t convince my company, or my clients to use seafile as their main data store.
There’re also tons of Linux distro which can’t use it right now.

4 Likes

I understand you and feel the same way, but most likely cannot change/influence it.

2 Likes

Could someone from Seafile share their thoughts on this matter ?

Didn’t see any roadmap, but my idea is that they don’t have plan to open source it cause seadrive is only BETA and after they fix it for 99%, I think the Drive function will be merged to standard client :slight_smile: This make more sence for me.

1 Like

I just assumed it was Open Source. Is this not the code (https://github.com/haiwen/seadrive-gui)?

If it’s not OS that’s extremely disappointing.

That’s just the GUI part

That signals to me the priorities of Seafile Ltd seriously diverge from mine. I don’t even understand what they gain from a proprietary client.

2 Likes

Because Seadrive IS the killer feature, they probably want to keep some advance before releasing it open source. Implications of a fully functional, POSIX-compliant client are very large : it can be used for mounting homes, with transparent local caching and offline mode, performing simpler and better than all the other distributed filesystems. It’s a big thing, so they are careful…

Well, no prob. I’d just like Seafile Ltd. to tell their plan. If the plan is to never opensource it, I cannot trust it, and should just look for something else

1 Like

That’s understandable but they could do a better job communicating that with the community. Confirm that it will be open sourced and give a time table. I don’t mean to sound entitled, I understand they’re a business. I’d just like to know what their plans are so I can make mine.

2 Likes

The only official answer that i found was this one :

So clearly, i’m will wait for more informations before spending time for deploying Seadrive massively.

The “killer feature” should be “trust by transparency”.

Anyway: I’ve never thought that Seadrive is not open source. Good to know before I tested it.

(as always: thanks for Seafile CE - if money is an obstacle to release the source code consider donation possibility)

2 Likes

If money can help opensourcing seadrive, maybe a crowdfouding can be made. My company could probably participate with a few hundreds $$

1 Like

Sorry for bumping but since my file archive is growing and the Seahub interface is very time consuming moving files from an upload folder to a sub/sub/sub/sub/sub/sub/sub/sub/folder I wondered if SeaDrive is still Closed Source.

Currently it seems that at least seadrive-gui is under Apache License but I couldn’t find a repo for seadrive-deamon.

Important to note: I know that developers have to earn money, I just don’t want to install proprietary software on my systems. I would be very happy if Seafile would have subsciption plans like Promox (everything is FLOSS but only subscribers get double-tested patches and dev support).

Seadrive is open source since several months now. The git repo is https://github.com/haiwen/seadrive-fuse

1 Like