Well, maybe I’m the wrong target audience but users in my university would barely use something like Google Docs or Dropbox Papers to write scientific papers. I know that Micro$oft is pushing all their Users to their Office365 cloud but I hope it is just a question of time users recognize what a vendor-lockin is and what it means to need an internet connection to write a thesis.
Even the Seafile Wiki would be a real Wiki like MediaWiki (not just Library with a bunch of markdown files) I would always advice against it because it is rarely a good idea to use the same tool for different tasks.
Don’t understand me wrong: I love Seafile because it does a great job in syncing files but there are dozens of other features missing related to this core feature of Seafile:
- Auto upload any folder content for mobile clients
- Keyboard navigation in Desktop client
- Persistent share links (Update: won’t be part of Seafile server CE)
- Rename folders shared with me / individual shared folder names
- “Save as” for mobile clients
btw: Missing file search is real a show stopper (I can not count the amount of users who could use Seafile CE but don’t use it because of the missing file search feature).
I understand that you want to nudge users to the pro edition (I would love to pay for it if it would be fully FLOSS) but maybe you should reconsider your financing model. Proxmox for example (a nice SOHO hypervisor software) is fully FLOSS and the devs earn money by different subscription plans for stable upgrades and official support:
- License without charge: No official support (just by other users) and updates/patches only via beta repository
- Cheapest license: Access to stable updates/patches repo and forum support
- More expensive licenses: 3 support tickets/year up to unlimited support tickets.
For Seafile this could be:
- License without charge: No official support (just by other users) and updates/patches only via beta repository
- 1€/month: Access to stable repository (imagine how many users there are using the CE edition who would like to see a stable funding but want to stay with the FLOSS version of Seafile) but no official support in the community forum
- 5€/month: Access to stable repo and official support in the community forum
- More expensive licenses: Support tickets via email
This way you could drop the CE / Pro separation and earn money without using vendor-lockin techniques (the company behind Proxmox is very successfull in this way because users don’t have the feeling to be dependent of this company).
Yes, this maybe would cause some trouble with users who already bought the Pro license but I think even the Pro users would like to see more a more progressive development of Seafile (for the core features I listed above and the feature you think Seafile has to offer - for both it is not a bad idea to have more money for more developers).
However: Thanks for Seafile!