iswrong

What is the licensing model in such cases? E.g. assume that person A is using BTSync for work, hence the license requires that they purchase a Pro license. Now A wants to share some files with customer B. B is not a user of Bittorrent Sync, but gets a link from A and installs Sync. Since B is also a business user, that would mean that they'd also have to purchase a Pro license, right? If this is true, it means that this is a large disadvantage of BTSync compared to other services. E.g. If A had a Dropbox Pro account, they could share a file or directory link to B. B doesn't need Dropbox to be able to view and download links. I think a useful alteration of the license and the 10 folder limit would be that 2.0-style read-only folders do not count. In that way, a business can share folders with customers, without expecting customers to (1) purchase Pro licenses, and (2) purchasing Pro licenses if they are getting files from multiple Bittorrent Sync users.

Even high-profile open source projects (e.g. GnuPG and OpenSSL) have/had extreme difficulties to get funding for even a single developer. And these are projects that drive the infrastructure of multi-billion corporations. Most people will never donate to a free (as in beer or freedom) project, because there is little incentive. So, I think it is naive to think it would work in the case of Bittorrent Sync. Selling BTSync as a traditional software package would probably work. Maybe even better than the subscription model, since so many people are principally opposed to software subscriptions.

But it's $50 per year per machine. Also, it's not unlimited, because it removed deleted files from backups after 30 days (which makes it kind of pointless for backups). I find Office 365 a more apt example. Not only does it give you 1TB of Onedrive storage, but also Microsoft Office, and Skype credit, for ~70 per year, or $99.99 for 5 users (a household). I think $40 would be a great price, if you would actually get a software license that you could (in principle) infinitely. Then maybe $20 for updates thereafter. But sadly the industry is moving to subscription pricing to have a reliable and fatter revenue stream.

I haven't gone Pro yet, but this doesn't seem to be a problem: Source: http://help.getsync.com/customer/portal/articles/1901273-getting-sync-pro

I fully agree. The name is not a part of security, since anyone could create an identity with e.g. my name. Security is checking the fingerprint via another channel once so that the other identity is trusted by you. The name is just a handy identifier so that you can check who has access and is currently syncing. There is little reason why the name (as opposed to the certificate) couldn't be changed (theoretically(. So, now if someone has to change their name (e.g. a typo or that person got married), the advise is to do a reinstall, request all past collaborators to reshare and accept you as a peer again? I could see how that works when sharing within a family, but at work that'd be very annoying :/.

Indeed, you are right: http://www.h-online.com/security/features/How-Skype-Co-get-round-firewalls-747314.html But it doesn't work with all NAT'ing firewalls. But I may indeed be overestimating the amount of traffic relay servers receive (based on my own situation). It would be nice to find some statistics on the percentage of cases UDP hole punching works.

In the 10.8 or 10.9 timeframe OS X switched from libstdc++ as the default C++ library to libc++. I guess this is also the reason that 10.8 is indicated as the minimum version on the download page (for 2.0): https://www.getsync.com/platforms/desktop (Darn, this 1 post per day restriction is annoying...) tl;dr: OS X < 10.8 does not seem to be supported anymore.

That's an interesting idea... Though, with many product, the resource-light users also pay the resource-heavy users. Take Dropbox, if everyone would be using up a full TB for $10 per month, they would probably be out of business soon. Most of their profit comes from people who pay $10 per month, but only use a far smaller amount of space (and probably strongly correlated - bandwidth). Of course, since we don't have numbers, it's hard to say how things work for Bittorrent Inc. Although, if this forum is any indication, I would be worried if I were them. Potential customers (including me) clearly dislike software subscriptions. We are still in our trial, and will probably subscribe, because there is not so much competition in P2P products. But, I like to own software. I am still surprised that they didn't follow the obvious way of monetizing Bittorrent Sync: continue to make it a free product, offer read-only encrypted peer hosting. I'd love to have a reliable peer that only sees encrypted data, can provide more bandwidth than our 120/5 MBit upstream home connection, and costs approximately the same as Dropbox.

The webpage of the unofficial packages has instructions on how to get 1.4: http://www.yeasoft.com/site/projects:btsync-deb:btsync-server Looking at the script, you have to change http://debian.yeasoft.net/btsync/ in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/btsync.list and change it to http://debian.yeasoft.net/btsync14/

I think that you have to factor in that Sync is much higher bandwidth. You mention $8 per year as an upper bound, that's 67 cents per month. While Sync is peer to peer, I assume that it will hit the relay servers fairly often (e.g. at work for me it does, because all incoming traffic is blocked). Bandwidth costs money, e.g. average Google Cloud egress (outgoing traffic) is roughly $.15 per gigabyte. I take Google egress costs just as an example, their rates are very competitive. This means for $.67 per month that if a customer pushes more than 4.4 GB through a relay (which doesn't seem outrageous), they are already operating at a loss. This excludes the server maintenance costs, software development costs, etc. In other words, I don't think it would be sustainable to operate BTSync at such prices. Another problem of a home user subscription might be that the average cost of a home user is probably higher than a business user. Business users will primarily sync documents, while consumers sync photo and movie collections.

The good news (about the Pi) is that the Pi 2 is much faster. Per-core performance is usually 1.5 to 2 times better and since it is quad core it performs much better on multi-threaded or multi-process workloads: https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-the-raspberry-pi-2-model-b/performance-improvements As a bonus, it has 1GB of RAM, rather than 512MB. I am currently upgrading my BTSync node (currently downloading the Cortex A7-compatible kernel).

Since the silent minority probably does not take the time to create an account here and comment, let me do that in give my 2c: I see Syncthing being mentioned here a couple of times, but it is not really an alternative in most scenarios, since it requires you to open ports on a firewall. Even if you can do this at home (I can't, since we have an IPv6 connection and IPv4 is tunnelled over DS-Lite, so we do not have a unique IPv4 address), if you are on the go (work, hotels, conference venues, etc.) this is normally not an option. As for the subscription fees, Bittorrent Inc. does maintain infrastructure that is often necessary for non-local sync, such as relay and tracker servers. These cost money and bandwidth. Also, for me there are many useful features in 2.0 (sync all folders of my identity) and the Pro version (changing access rights for existing shares). Given that they have to maintain the infrastructure and software $30 or $40 per month seems to be a fair price. Of course, I would have preferred a one-time purchase, but that does not really help to cover ongoing costs. Comparing with the competition, the pricing is pretty good. I run a permanent peer (Raspberry Pi), which has a large disk. Getting the equivalent amount of storage at e.g. Dropbox would be 10 Euro per month, plus trusting them with my data. (Sure, there are caveats here, since Sync is closed-source, but at the very least it's better than storing all data in the cloud rightaway.) I would switch to a good open source program with the same functionality, but I am fairly skeptical that would work without charging for the necessary infrastructure.