SparkleShare puts a shine on sharing

Like using Dropbox but looking for a good open source alternative? The good news is that there is a new online storage sharing application heading your way and it’s completely open source.

It’s called SparkleShare, it is fully free and based on open source software and it is out in beta now.

Licensed under the GPL3 free software licence, SparkleShare is still in its infancy but has a number of features that make it a future contender for Dropbox’s crown. Among these are a built-in version control to keep a record of changes made to each file in case of problems.

One of the major differences between Dropbox and SparkleShare is that SparkleShare is hosted by users on their own servers. Dropbox, on the other hand, is provided as a service only and anything above the basic service is paid-for.

Because SparkleShare is self-hosted by users the amount of storage space or the number of users that can use the service is controlled by the owner, or by the size of the hard disk. On the downside SparkleShare is not as simple to set up as Dropbox. 

According to SparkleShare developer, Hylke Bons, the beta release “adds features that increase productivity in the event logs. Not only does it look a lot prettier, each entry in an event log now has a clickable link for easy access to files. It refreshes automatically on new events as well. The Nautilus plugin now has the ‘Copy Web Link’ context menu item, which makes sharing links a whole lot easier.”

It may still be early days for SparkleShare but it does hold much promise for the future.

SparkleShare << Better than Dropbox