[License]

This is probably one of the most parroted things I've heard in recent history. Just because something is free does not mean you are the product.

It indeed sucks that this is not released as open source, but that's most likely because this is built off a uTorrent codebase, which likely has proprietary portions they are not allowed to release.

I'm not discounting the possibility that you may be the product in this case, however jumping to it immediately without considering anything else is plain conspiracy talk.

It's a pretty reasonable thought if you ask me. This is a product from a company that is willing to include adwares to their "free" software to generate revenue. I am not saying it's wrong. It is perfectly fine because they need to make money.

If you don't like/accept the Terms of Use for BitTorrent Sync - which you agree to if you use the software - then don't use the software! - it really is that simple!

Thank you for making it simple. And thank you for giving me motivation to code similar work.

[License]

Please read "Will BitTorrent Sync remain free, or will they start charging for it once it comes out of beta?" in the Unofficial FAQ

And if Obama says NSA doesn't spy on Americans, would you also believe that? You seem to misunderstand something. All rights currently belong to BitTorrent Inc. because it is not under open source license. As a person who uses this for their private data, you should be looking at every possiblity of being "the product"; if you are not paying for it, you are the product. Who knows what kind of backdoors this thing could have. I was actually surprised that they were collecting some info like the sizes of data being synced.

not necessarily true! if a good open source btsync alternative shows up people could just drop btsync. if i was a btsync developer i'd make it open source or at least open up the btsync protocol. but - not yet! only with the first stable version.

You just said how competition works. That's right. People would just switch over to the better alternative. That is exactly why this is not open source, they want no alternative. They don't want people to fork it and code a better one. If it's just updates you're concern, one can just add notification if they were running an old version, or even add auto-update capabilities.

[License]

A pity because the licensing of this application goes against its very nature -- decentralization, distributed.

The reason why BitTorrent Inc licensed it under proprietary is simply because they want to profit from it. They want no competitor forking similar product. They are a company, it would be stupid for a for-profit organization to give something for free without anything in return. Plain and simple. BitTorrent Inc have never released any open source software. So they said they "might" open source it? No, they wont. It's for press.

But no worries. The idea itself is simple. Just be patient and wait for someone to code a geniune community-driven BitTorrent Sync program.

[email and password better than secret key]

Due to the nature of this application, it's probably not possible. First, it's decentralized, so there is no central place to "register" or "login". Second, it's not wise to generate secrets based on email and password as supplementary.

[Possibly a stupid question, but...]

In terms of probability, the likelihood of your PC or laptop getting stolen is probably higher than someone generating the same secret.