Previously on HN:

Spacedrive – an open source cross-platform file explorer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37841013 | 347 points | 8 days ago | 155 comments

Spacedrive is an open source cross-platform file explorer written in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37721663 | 14 points | 18 days ago | 5 comments

Spacedrive Alpha 0.1.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37841110 | 9 points | 8 days ago | 0 comments

Didn’t we read about this last week as well?

Last week I concluded that since this is an alpha version I’m not going to let it touch my files anytime soon.

Is this going to be truly free and open source or is this one of those situations where for now it's "free" and then in the future people get slapped with some ridiculous pricing and/or license changes?

I don't mind paying for software but I'm starting to get a bit sick of investing my time and money on software that is just looking to generate buzz and then the other shoe drops...

In my opinion this happens because people start projects as a side project, then they get attention and need more and more time. So either you somehow invest more time (work less on your normal job) or get more contributors/ a team. The first option is happening more often, so you need income to replace your normal job where we mostly end with your described situation.

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aspacedriveapp%2Fspacedriv...

shows:

     api_url: "https://app.spacedrive.com".to_string(),
     client_id: CLIENT_ID.to_string(),

     api_url: std::env::var("SD_API_URL").unwrap_or_else(|_| "https://app.spacedrive.com".to_string()),
     client_id: std::env::var("SD_CLIENT_ID").unwrap_or_else(|_| "04701823-a498-406e-aef9-22081c1dae34".to_string()),

Obviously, there's a remote-hosted API over on app.spacedrive.com. And that's a REALLY SUSPICIOUS guid. ^_^

But yeah, if it was actual FLOSS software, and not what seems to be "open source client but closed source for-pay server", I think I'll pass.

And well, I don't them wanting to know my contents, or even my metadata.

They state that they will have paid tiers on the site [0]:

"At its heart, Spacedrive will always be open source and free. However, we do offer optional paid services to boost your experience. For instance, with a subscription to our cloud service, you get an encrypted database and preview media backup, file transfer options, ample storage, and backup plans. These are perfect for individuals, teams, and businesses looking for better collaboration.³

Connections between devices in your network are always peer-to-peer, and never go through our servers. We do not have access to your data, and we never will. Our cloud service is completely optional, and you can use Spacedrive without it."

[0] https://www.spacedrive.com/blog/october-alpha-release

> Is this going to be truly free...

> I don't mind paying for software...

which is it you want because that sounds contradictory.

I think GP is saying that they are fine with reasonable and upfront pricing, but wary of surprises.

Interesting, we're building a similar product called memento, we just did a Show HN yesterday that went mostly unnoticed.

https://www.ionspin.com/

We are bootstrapped and are going in a different direction, closed source initially with plans to opensource clients later on.

I checked the website for the download page and it says > Sorry, this application is not available on your current operating system. > Try downloading it from a desktop or laptop. It would be cool of I could check the available packages from mobile without going to a desktop or potentially spoofing my browser ID.

Thanks for the feedback, I agree, I'll look into improving the conveyor download page to redirect to play store or testflight page when it detects mobile user-agent. In general we support windows, linux, mac, android and iOS (in testflight currently)

Looks like a polished VC funded version of git annex. Not a bad thing, since annex is a bit clunky and unusable for people not using git. I using git annex for a while for all my files (tracking and duplicating files to 2 laptops, external disk, cloud, server). Any one spots a major feature that spacedrive has more than git annex?

It feels more like rclone mount to me. The files are indexed in place and things it provides a pretty interface. That being said a little effort in creating a friendly rclone setup wizard would lap this VC funded app pretty quickly.

Question: does any one know of an existing RClone setup wizard that is for people who are afraid of the command line?

Except that Git Annex has encryption (with OpenPGP support, which is perfect, because I can use a proper HSM) and chunking, and can replicate data across multiple clouds and/or local drives.

This thing mentions encryption, but I think it only exists somewhere on the roadmap.

RClone has a great encryption module too https://rclone.org/crypt/

A VDFS is interesting, devices have smaller storage now Cloud storage has taken over, and files may be distributed over multiple computers and local storage like a NAS.

But in the Cloud scenario in which this was originally conceived it makes more sense as the computers are always on and so the files are available... but what happens here as personal devices are more likely to be on one at a time, with the exception of a NAS.

In that respect this feels like a feature not a product, something that Synology or QNAP would add to make the NAS feel more seamless with your device and not require you to have the files local to your device or to use your device network share to access... for it to feel more native.

What is the advantage of using Spacedrive over mounting the network disk with rclone (https://rclone.org/) and using any other file explorer?

It's saving you from an O(M²) amount of device-to-device rclone and the consequent duplication of storage space used.

I specifically mentioned mounting (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/ which may use some additional storage space depending on the caching configuration) whereas you seem to be talking about mirroring the data in the cloud and on other devices.

From what I understand it's their friendly interface that differentiates them from RClone mount. I've only read their documentation but otherwise I can't see any benefit and only the risk of getting involved with a less tested tool.

You still need to manage O(M²) rclone mounts.

The promise of Spacedrive is to have O(M) setup once, and then be able to access all files from all devices.

Rclone is awesome. Great for moving stuff from cloud to cloud.

Yup, it's also very useful for doing stuff like checking archive integrity after upload (got bitten by it once when uploading some archives via FTP) and syncing with cloud - I've had a dedicated client remove files from my PC instead of the cloud after desync, rclone makes it easy to check what will be done and works with pretty much every service available.

How soon will the ancillary services with prices be available?

My assumption is that you think this will become a commodity, and much of the value will come from those services you'll be providing fee for service.

Hopefully they will fund Tauri development because our experience is that any moderately complicated application is utter garbage in performances and compatibility on linux. And on top of that you have a lot more testing surface because of all the combinations of browser engines that run the webviews on various platforms. Made us seriously reconsider moving to electron.

It's nice but id prefer having some sorta Explorer extension than having to rely on a second file explorer. Unless it's meant to fully replace Explorer.exe, then Ig it makes sense

I only use cloud storage for backup (with a rclone / s3cmd script) and never view them, is this ever going to be useful to me, or improve my workflow?

10 employees, 18 investors. You have to consider VC backed open source to be only temporarily OSS. The project almost certainly will be forced to go commercial and become partially or fully closed. Saying "we're open source" is only half true when you're actually just using OS as bait to get people to alpha test your commercial project.

I think that's OK-ish if you are using the software to make money and understand the reality of what you're signing on for. It's definitely not OK for a personal tool that sits at the center of your digital existence.

I don't want to sound negative, but something about this makes me feel weird. It's a very polished presentation and looks very well done at first sight. The license is GPL3, which makes me think they are probably planning to add a commercial license on top of that. This is all fine, but I am very skeptical as to whether this will be maintained for a long time as a real open source project.

I've had multiple occasions where I regretted deeply going all in with all my data on a new product making bold promises. Also, maybe it's because I'm getting old, but I somehow don't think that having all my data available everywhere at any time is as big a deal as I previously thought.

The list of investors is almost twice as long as the list of engineers. So the concern is valid.

I am honestly struggling to see what exactly this gets me above just mounting the drive? So I can search and see what files I can access when I am not connected seems to be the biggest thing but… what value is seeing a file exists if you can’t get it?

I see at least two advantages: speed and a consistent cross-platform interface.

Unless you have a 10 gigabit LAN, browsing large media files over a home network is slooooow. Having everything indexed allows you to do instantaneous searches of all of your files (with search tools / filters that may not exist in your native file explorer or would otherwise be extremely slow (Finder)), show instant previews, detect duplicates among all of your files from all of your storage locations, have a single authority for organizational systems like tags, etc.

Offline is useful when you have a lot of external drives with contents scattered across them. You search for the file you want, it tells you what drive its on, you plug that drive in.

This probably won't be extraordinarily useful to people who don't have a lot of network and/or detached drives or people who are meticulously organized and locked into a preferred solution already. But messy people with lots of data, devices, drives, and OSes? Pretty handy.

Often, just knowing the filename or that you have the file available somewhere, is enough. I think this is something catering mainly to data hoarder and especially the more shady ones who download not so legal stuff from everywhere. Just being able to know whether you already have something, can be useful.

> This is all fine, but I am very skeptical as to whether this will be maintained for a long time as a real open source project.

They got VC funding last year so your worry is a very real one

https://www.spacedrive.com/blog/spacedrive-funding-announcem...

AGPLv3 (switched in 2022 https://github.com/spacedriveapp/spacedrive/commit/8e5c71dea... ) and FWIW I don't see any mention of CLA or other license assignment, so I don't believe they can currently rug pull containing contributed changes since they don't own the license for them: https://github.com/spacedriveapp/spacedrive/blob/main/CONTRI...

OrbStack (https://orbstack.dev) has a very similar logo.