Thank you for your interest in SpiderOak and valuing work to improve the choices available that preserve privacy.
For what it's worth, everything we've built since 2008 has published source code. Most recently that's Semaphor[1], which is written in Go and React.
I think it's very important that products have what Zooko calls an "economic feedback loop" to be successful. As just one example, volunteer projects rarely have staff that do the grinding but necessary work of testing that each release works well on every version of all support operating systems and platforms, because it isn't fun. I think this is why although some teams publish their client source code, very few service providers publish their server source code. It would make it too easy for competitors to emerge and undercut on price while giving little back (the biggest cost is the often the development work itself.)
That said, we've been in business for 10 years and are not going away! Thanks for your feedback.
I'm sympathetic to the economic feedback problem you're describing. I think the BSL addresses the concern about undercutting. Sure, people could pirate your software, but short of that, it probably makes more sense to implement from scratch than either wait ten years, or fork code that is ten years old, which is all your competitors could do with the source. Honestly, I would probably just pay for your service after spending a few hours spot checking the source.
Anyway, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the licensing model, even if you're not considering it at spideroak.
For what it's worth, everything we've built since 2008 has published source code. Most recently that's Semaphor[1], which is written in Go and React.
I think it's very important that products have what Zooko calls an "economic feedback loop" to be successful. As just one example, volunteer projects rarely have staff that do the grinding but necessary work of testing that each release works well on every version of all support operating systems and platforms, because it isn't fun. I think this is why although some teams publish their client source code, very few service providers publish their server source code. It would make it too easy for competitors to emerge and undercut on price while giving little back (the biggest cost is the often the development work itself.)
That said, we've been in business for 10 years and are not going away! Thanks for your feedback.
[1] https://spideroak.com/solutions/semaphor/business/tour