19 ms·

10 years since Google said to “hang tight” about Linux support for Google Drive

520 points by politelemon 5y ago

pmarreck 5y ago
Google got fat and lazy. At least they should sponsor someone motivated to write a client for it.
noasaservice 5y ago
Those were the quaint times when we still believed that Google was awesome and cool, and doing amazing things. Now, it's a "our project is already dead", automated banning hellscape, where the only assistance is from other yet-to-be-AI-killed fellow user attempt to barely help. Or gods forbid, find someone here for a "social media escalation". I used to care. I gave up caring WRT google ages ago. They are not worth the trouble.
munchler 5y ago
Link to the Google product forum on the target page is broken, so this is not informative at all.
- politelemon 5y ago
  Yeah, looks like they broke the groups page, which was 'migrated' from an original Plus page at https://plus.google.com/u/0/+ChadMcCullough/posts/SxDNKR7ehSL https://plus.google.com/u/0/+ChadMcCullough/posts/SxDNKR7ehS...
- charcircuit 5y ago
  Yeah, I'm confused why no one else is discussing this. Who even said to hang tight? Was it someone on a Drive team? Was it a trusted community member? Was it just a optimistic Linux fanatic? There is missing context.
throwaway787544 5y ago
Worth noting that it's not actually "Google" that said to "hang tight". An entire brand does not make a decision like whether to support Linux. It's a two-pizza team with a shitty budget and a remit to just keep the damn thing from going down and working out all the bugs with basic features like moving a file to a new folder in a weird drop-down. I'm sure the team would like to support Linux, if they had a bigger budget, if they could get out from all of their tech debt, if they had one or two specialized engineers added to their team. But the giant corporate behemoth isn't even remotely aware of those problems, nor will it care. There would have to be a clear case that adding a Linux client would create real business value. But considering how small Linux users probably are, and without an additional revenue stream to offset the cost of development, it's a non-starter.
- anonymoushn 5y ago
  Maybe they could ship a linux app instead of deprecating and replacing the mac app next time :)
- stefan_ 5y ago
  The thinking was probably more along the lines of "no one ever got promoted for filling out the basic feature set of a file share me too service" and that promotion is what's standing between them and an extra 9000 pizzas a year worth of salary. With a bonus hint of "nobody cares what somebody promised that left the team a year ago after a year of working on it".
- abeppu 5y ago
  I get what you're saying, but: - The specific actions of a company will _always_ come from a specific subset of people who are interacting with and sometimes constrained by the broader organization. Should this mean that we can never talk coherently about the actions or statements of a company? - Isn't the company overall responsible for creating the organizational constraints and obstacles? Why is that team that size? Why is that their remit, and how has it changed since _someone_ decided to say "hang tight"? Why do they have the staff they have?
- karaterobot 5y ago
  I get what you're saying, but ultimately it is an issue of priority. Google has the money, they just don't choose to spend it on supporting Google Drive on Linux, even after saying they would. So, supporting Linux is by definition a lower priority than anything that did pass the bar for resource allocation in the last ten years. You're right about the motivations: they must not view it as creating real business value, since that's how these decisions get made. My only point here is that it IS a choice someone in an office is making: it's not worth it to support Drive on Linux. They do know about it, because it was on their radar 10 years ago. Somebody took it off their radar.
- jurschreuder 5y ago
  Though Linux might be a small platform it's the only one that really matters.
dang 5y ago
Related How long since Google said a Google Drive Linux client is coming? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24183399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24183399 - Aug 2020 (109 comments) How long since Google said a Google Drive Linux client is coming? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9434643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9434643 - April 2015 (59 comments)
wzm 5y ago
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35904387 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35904387 ipv6 support in GCP is similar, it's at 9 years now.
- dreen 5y ago
  Websockets still not generally available, ticket opened in 2009 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35886348 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35886348
  - dudus 5y ago
    There's really no reason to use AppEngine these days. I believe it still exists for legacy apps. You should be using Cloud run. Cloud run support WebSockets[1]. If you already have an AppEngine App you can always keep it and create a CloudRun app to handle the WebSocket part and they communicate well. [1]: https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/triggering/websockets https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/triggering/websockets
cloudking 5y ago
The market size is not big enough to justify the internal costs of building and maintaining it. For dev environments, you can workaround it using Windows + Drive filestream + WSL. https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/2999#issuecomment-913194149 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/2999#issuecomment-91...
- jchw 5y ago
  When I worked at Google, almost all developer workstations were running Linux. That alone really should be plenty of justification for having such a client. They did not.
  - cloudking 5y ago
    Internally is a lot different than externally https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-share-of-windows-7/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...
    - jchw 5y ago
      You’re missing my point.
      - cloudking 5y ago
        Your point is a lot of internal developers use Linux so they should make a Linux drive client, my counterpoint is that dedicating engineering resources to building and maintaining such a project is not worth the cost. Management looks at the cost and ROI of developing and maintaining projects, in this case the ROI from having a Linux client that would likely need 5-10 SWEs to maintain is not worth it for them. They have to ensure the client is compatible with multiple flavors of Linux releases, monitor security issues etc it's a big ongoing cost. If more consumers and businesses used Linux, they could justify the cost. I'm not saying this is the right move, but I'm explaining why this project hasn't been funded.
        5y ago
jchw 5y ago
Times have changed in many more ways than one. These days I greatly prefer to own my data more directly, which I accomplish using a NAS. I don’t use Dropbox OR Google Drive, I use Syncthing, which can do stuff that neither of those could ever dream of in terms of syncing between machines. Not only do I not want Google Drive, I don’t even want anything like it. That said, I totally get why it’s still important. I do use Google Drive at work and for that type of use case I would not argue in favor of self-hosting. Syncthing is great for a single person or even a fairly large group of people, but not for a big organization. Not to mention you probably use Google Docs or Office 365 anyways, both of which are integrated with their respective company’s storage offerings. Syncthing won’t give you directory sync, docs integration, or granular ACLs. But that’s actually perfectly fine, because I don’t need any of those things. Hell, I flat out don’t really want them. You could probably get something similar with ownCloud which I did try running, and I’m not even particularly enticed. I’m sure Synology has a full suite as well, but it’s not what I want out of my NAS. Part of being happier with my technology was just as much realizing what I didn’t want as it was realizing what I wanted.
- bpye 5y ago
  I’m curious, what do you use to access files on your NAS? I’ve used Samba for forever but it’s always been kind of annoying to deal with permissions, and whilst running AD would probably solve that, I then have to deal with running AD. I’m tempted to try switching to NFS instead.
  - jchw 5y ago
    Samba. I tried AD very briefly before realizing how absolutely terrible of an idea it was. It just makes life so complicated, and AD integration was not as good as I was hoping. I can see why this market constantly has all kinds of crazy offerings… As far as permissions go, I guess I am mostly ignoring granular permissions. I’m generally only concerned with permissions on a per-share basis. This way, file permissions mostly don’t matter and can be a one-and-done affair. Then, I can split files up into separate shares. NFS also seemed appealing, but honestly it does seem to bring a lot of complexity that SMB/CIFS does not, and everything supports the latter well enough for my use cases. Remote access is another issue, since you should probably not do SMB over the internet, but I guess that can be solved with Tailscale or ZeroTier.
pipeline_peak 5y ago
I don’t think average users even use the Google Drive desktop client.
emilsedgh 5y ago
https://community.kde.org/KIO_GDrive https://community.kde.org/KIO_GDrive
- elkos 5y ago
  I can't thank you enough!
Mikeb85 5y ago
The web app works fine. In fact, it works better than anything OneDrive related for example (which never seems to sync properly). Chrome and all of Google's services make being in Linux-land way easier...
- sgtnoodle 5y ago
  I suspect that there's a fundamental conflict in semantics somewhere between drive and posix filesystems. Any sort of filesystem wrapper on top of drive would immediately require making annoying compromises, and the trade-off is convenience vs. data safety. Targeting a locked down OS like Windows or Mac isn't too difficult, because those compromises can be carefully implemented in a way that avoids accidental data corruption but doesn't negatively impact user workflow too much. On a Linux system, there's hundreds if not thousands of configurations that folk would expect a filesystem to work in, and so it's a lot more difficult to strike that balance. Years ago, I remember a coworker dragged a directory around on his MacBook, and it completely flattened the company's entire drive directory structure.
renewiltord 5y ago
There’s a pretty good FUSE driver and the web app is fine. Never felt the need for a Linux client for this service. Two decades of Linux use and the thing that has changed everything has been the arrival of electron which has made practically everything cross-platform.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  If something uses electron, I'll look for a native alternative. Ripcord doesn't have the best UI and I can't open Teams calls or even links that are too long (Slack broke their API at some point) but at least it's not wasting my ram and it's responds quickly. The rare times I have to open Slack on the web I sigh and wait 2 minutes for the app to load. I automated Prituln VPN via bash just not to have to deal with another Electron client for a damn popup on my tray bar.
  - aembleton 5y ago
    If it takes two minutes to open slack in your Web browser then your Web connection might be the problem. Or is your computer from the 90s?
ggambetta 5y ago
I've been using Insync for a few years now, works flawlessly.
lovelearning 5y ago
What's it supposed to do? Aren't "rclone mount" and the OS file manager sufficient?
- ncphil 5y ago
  ... exactly what I was thinking. Discovering rclone mount finally let me abandon the file sync paradigm and return to my workflows of yesteryear when NFS was still the dominant file sharing system on Unix.
Buxato 5y ago
Thanks Insync I could survive without their support.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kornhole 5y ago
I connected my Linux systems to my Nextcloud server, and then I connected my Gdrive as external storage in Nextcloud. When I turned on server side encryption in Nextcloud it also encrypted my connected storage of Gdrive. So I accomplished both Gdrive integration as well as file encryption at the same time.
- politelemon 5y ago
  > I connected my Gdrive as external storage in Nextcloud. This bit sounds interesting, could you explain it a little more, how you managed it?
  - kornhole 5y ago
    I have since just moved everything into my Nextcloud server since it does everything I need and keeps my data totally private. It is on a Raspberry PI running Yunohost, and I can add additional drives as needed. I don't remember all I did when I setup the Gdrive, but I recommend checking the official documentation at https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/configuration_files/encryption_configuration.html?highlight=google%20drive https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/config...
- paisawalla 5y ago
  Does this mean you're storing a backup of your NextCloud as a large encrypted blob in your gdrive?
- hedora 5y ago
  Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but nextcloud constantly somehow manages to corrupt data it is storing locally. Its only user is an android backup agent. Is there something that's, say, 1% as complicated as nextcloud that can sync multiple devices without giving a cloud provider access to cleartext (while also keeping an encrypted backup in the cloud)?
  - r-w 5y ago
    Syncthing?
stephbu 5y ago
It feels like Google’s attention span, leadership longevity, and product development patience is roughly 3 years. Any product that survives longer than that probably has transcended beyond being a “pet project/toy” into a PR-problem or revenue-stream significant enough that it takes on a life of it’s own. As management turns over, that lease on life is renewed… https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ While this fosters new ideas and opportunities, that conversion into long-term direction and execution can be pretty rough.
- sbrother 5y ago
  3 years is roughly the average time it takes to get promoted at Google.
  - enduroman 5y ago
    Or the time someone leaves and goes to another job.
    - formerkrogemp 5y ago
      Or the time for a product to die.
      - justinjlynn 5y ago
        Funny how they all seem to be correlated. /s
- fswd 5y ago
  You nailed it. Every 3 years google renames and rebadges their chat system. I don't even know what to call it anymore.
  - easrng 5y ago
    There's Google Chat, which is really made for companies but available on normal accounts too, and Google Messages, their SMS/MMS/RCS app for Android, which requires that you have an Android phone and a phone plan.
meibo 5y ago
If there was one, people wouldn't use it. It's so well supported by open source software like rclone and insync, I feel like it actually works better than it does on my windows machine.
- Flimm 5y ago
  Insync is not open source.
midislack 5y ago
Over ten years ago it was already obvious that Google wasn't a reliable or useful company. You're gonna be waiting a LOOOONG time.
thecrumb 5y ago
Meh. Google. Google really hasn't come out with anything innovative in quite awhile, while killing once innovative projects.
titzer 5y ago
Just give us a web filesystem already. Stop with these shitty infantilized GUIs with no hierarchical organization and an overreliance on search to find things. I have literally hundreds of thousands to millions of files on my local machines and have no trouble remembering where I put things. Drive can't seem to scale past a few dozen before it's confusing, useless, and apparently lossy. Remember when web servers would serve up the contents of a directory as a list with hyperlinks on the file names? That actually worked ffs. I cannot understand how we could be moving backwards so quickly.
- CoastalCoder 5y ago
  - mplewis 5y ago
    Because one would presume that a company building online file storage as a product would want it to work?
    - CoastalCoder 5y ago
      - thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
        Because it's a paid service. But explaining the emotions you've projected upon OP isn't useful discussion.
        CoastalCoder 5y ago
        From the OP: > Just give us a web filesystem already. Stop with these shitty infantilized GUIs ... That actually worked ffs. ... I responded by saying: > Your level of angst makes me think ... I suppose I could be wrong about the OP expressing angst, but I think it's reasonable inference. Also, you wrote: > Because it's a paid service. I see two problems here: (1) I was asking the OP (@titzer) what their reasons were, not yours. (2) Only some people pay for Google Drive. One reason that I wrote: > Your level of angst makes me think you believe someone out there is obligated to do this for you. > > If you believe that, I'm curious why. was that if the @titzer was paying for Google Drive, I could see him having a stronger reason for expecting Google to make the product useful to him. But I didn't want to assume, which is why I asked.
AeroNotix 5y ago
GCS works. For my own use it is just much simpler to use GCS
- beastman82 5y ago
  Right. Don't they have a fuse file system that they actively maintain?
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    There is some guy there that maintains an ocaml based fuse google-drive client. It works okay. I'm not sure if he volunteers to maintain or is paid. I have moved on to the isync product but the ocaml opensource project is still there and maintained last I checked.
ISL 5y ago
As the decision seems to be deliberate, I'm interested why Google has chosen not to implement such a feature. I'm a paying GSuite customer. I'd love to be able to NFS-mount portions of my home directory into Google Drive for access across platforms and sharing/collaboration with others. There's got to be a reason that Google Drive isn't interested in implementing linux mounts -- I'd be surprised if it is market share alone. The reason may be interesting/unexpected.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  It's market share, but I suspect Google's numbers may be skewed here by their measurement system. They almost certainly have hard numbers on the percent of users accessing the UI via various platform configs, and the Linux numbers are low. Question is if that's because they haven't cracked into the market because they aren't offering desktop integration. The other interesting question is: what are Linux users using instead? Because that's Google's competition for this software, which implies how much they could make competing.
  - blagie 5y ago
    My experience is that data-driven companies get into self-reinforcing circles: - Data shows not a lot of customers use Linux - Which leads to poor Linux support - Which leads to not a lot of customers using Linux That's not specific to this either. I've seen companies discount continents of people due to lack of customers on those continents, which was often due to inanely easy-to-solve problems. But if you only have 0.1% of your market in China, why bother with servers which are inside the Great Firewall? If 0.1% of your population is Spanish-speaking, why bother with i18n? Data driven companies have an inherent bias towards /current/ customers, and away from /potential/ customers....
    - r-w 5y ago
      Isn’t there some saying about analysts and how they often tell you what’s already the case, but almost never tell you what’s possible? I feel like that applies here.
  - 5y ago
kkfx 5y ago
GNU/Linux users are mostly a bit tech-savvy users, big of IT like dumb users, they are easy to profit from, very moderately tech-savvy ones are just needed to pull more people in so offering a bit of services with a good enough quality and something to make the experience nice enough for a tech-savvy user (like YT or Google Search with a certain set of extensions to cut ads etc) is enough to have thous users recommend those services to their less tech savvy friends and the world of mouth do the magic. More than that might be even counter-productive if show a real tangible far lower quality to the aforementioned users like most single-company show software are: crappy and outdated. Alphabet do want data from the masses, not much from a small cohort of smart users. Invest for them is not interesting.
seanwilson 5y ago
Do Google use Google Drive on Linux internally? Isn't Linux used a lot there?
- pedro2 5y ago
  They can mount GDriveFS internally as NFS, I think
- saalweachter 5y ago
  To be honest I like, forgot this -- attaching/syncing Drive and the local disk -- was a thing people did. I just like, upload and download files as needed to Drive? I don't really have a huge "need to sync files to the cloud" quadrant in my personal or professional life.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  Not really. I mean, drive stuff is used here and there to share some docs/attachments, etc. but not via a mounted filesystem, just from web browser. There's a Google-wide shared file system that is mounted on all gLinux workstations, but it has nothing to do with Google Drive.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Insync works well but it is pay to play
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
shadowgovt 5y ago
The Drive API is pretty stable. So given that we're talking about Linux, the immediate question that comes to my mind is "why hasn't somebody written it themselves?" Perhaps Google sees no benefit in building a service in a space where users can self serve making it.
fulafel 5y ago
Would the ChromeOS implementation work if they packaged it, and if not, why not?
robertlagrant 5y ago
Don't worry - Google Drive does support Linux. Just only on for the server, not the client :D
jeffbee 5y ago
Google Drive does support Linux with the completely open source DriveFS and supporting userspace services like Seneschal in the ChromiumOS project. People who claim otherwise don't believe in actual open source software development, they just want a convenient quasi-commercial software package that doesn't cost them anything.
- lawl 5y ago
  > they just want a convenient quasi-commercial software package that doesn't cost them anything. Wouldn't I be paying for gdrive and thus expect to get working software? The free tier isn't enough for me and I would have paid if they had a linux client. Its okay if they don't think linux is worth it, but your argument that i should pay for the software again seems really weird to me.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    Again: Google writes, maintains, distributes, and supports a working Drive client for Linux, called DriveFS.
    - hedora 5y ago
      This? https://github.com/thejinx0r/DriveFS https://github.com/thejinx0r/DriveFS It is the top hit for "google drivefs source code" on google. "google drivefs" just returns hits about clearing a cache on macos or something. The duck duck go results are arguably more relevant, though one is a link to DriveFS.exe, which I don't plan to download.
password4321 5y ago
No mention of https://rclone.org/drive https://rclone.org/drive yet in case anyone is unaware. I don't see how 1st party could do any better than the handful of 3rd party options.
ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
Google is a me too company now. Innovation left the company a long time ago. That is why I tell startups I invest in, not to worry at all if Google enters their space.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  - hedora 5y ago
    Are you trying to compare them to Google Plus?
    - encryptluks2 5y ago
      No, you brought that up. What is your point?
  - kube-system 5y ago
    The person you are replying to is not talking about politics. They meant "me too" as in "copycat", not "me too" as in the social/political movement.
dehrmann 5y ago
Wasn't that around the time Sean Hannity volunteered to get waterboarded?
jrochkind1 5y ago
The OP no longer seems to succesfuly link to any communication from Google saying to "hang tight".
dijit 5y ago
Wait, doesn’t this work? I had a weird experience where pop_OS! automatically mapped my google drive to nautilus once I had logged in. I’m sure that it’s not native, but what features would I be missing? I was very pleasantly surprised when it just kinda worked.
- Kye 5y ago
  That support comes from Gnome Online Accounts. https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeOnlineAccounts/Providers https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeOnlineAccounts/Provider... Last time I tried it, that only supported the virtual drive thing, so no actual files locally.
henriquez 5y ago
layer8 5y ago
I’m glad that Dropbox provides a Linux client, although it is annoying that it is limited to x86 and ext4. At least the latter can be worked around with a loopback device.
- anuragsoni 5y ago
  Dropbox works on zfs, xfs and btrfs just fine. Source: https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/desktop/system-requirements https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/desktop/syste...
  - awill 5y ago
    Check https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20498454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20498454 Dropbox did drop support and bring it back. I use Linux with xfs, so I switched off Dropbox. Even though Dropbox went back on this decision, they did some damage, and probably lost people that haven't come back (like me).
  - layer8 5y ago
    Thanks, I hadn’t been aware that they relaxed the requirements. In my case it doesn’t help me though, as the VPS I’m using is still on ext3.
assbuttbuttass 5y ago
There's always the excellent unofficial google-drive-ocamlfuse which uses FUSE to mount Google drive to a local directory. https://github.com/astrada/google-drive-ocamlfuse https://github.com/astrada/google-drive-ocamlfuse
alfiedotwtf 5y ago
FUSE with S3 is awesome. I have a few local mounts, including using it as my Git upstream, and it Just Works(tm)
gumby 5y ago
I wish google drive worked on the Mac! At least once a day it decides it can’t work and tells my to unmount it.
Seattle3503 5y ago
We use Google drive at my corporate, and half the devs are on Linux. I wonder if this space was more competitive if Google would feel more urgency. A part of the issue is we use Google for calendar and email as well.
therealmarv 5y ago
https://www.insynchq.com/ https://www.insynchq.com/ solved that long time ago. I even use them as preferred client on my mac for years because Google's client is pretty bad in my opinion. And happy that there is software from Filipino developers and software out there!
0wx 5y ago
I use pop os and just by login with my google account it's show my drive in the file explorer
bachmeier 5y ago
I just want to collect the major options for Google Drive on Linux in a single comment, since a few options are scattered around: Insync works well, and it's 50% off for a couple more days: https://www.insynchq.com/ https://www.insynchq.com/ Not affiliated, but $15 is not a lot to pay, as opposed to waiting for something that probably won't happen. Rclone has support for Google Drive, and it's open source: https://rclone.org/ https://rclone.org/ There's a command line client that uses a push/pull workflow: https://github.com/odeke-em/drive https://github.com/odeke-em/drive It was written by a member of the Google Drive team. Gnome supports Google Drive, or at least used to, directly in Nautilus. I don't use Gnome, so I can't comment. There may be other options I've missed, but the point is that there is already good support in multiple forms. I'd be interested to know what support Google could provide that's not already available.
- jz_ 5y ago
  > Gnome supports Google Drive, or at least used to, directly in Nautilus. I don't use Gnome, so I can't comment. I'm using it right now. It is not particularly responsive (perform an operation and it looks like no operation is happening until the remote end responds) but works well enough for copying files in and out via nautilus if you don't expect instant feedback.
mc4ndr3 5y ago
Don't say "Google Drive" out loud or they'll cancel the whole thing.
maverick74 5y ago
Well... There's a lot of good alternatives so I - personally - don't miss it!!! But I understand the frustration and that some people do miss it...
asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
Does anyone know why Linux/OSS devs haven't built this themselves yet? I am looking at the api and it seems to have all the necessary bits for filesystem syncing but maybe there's something I'm missing. https://developers.google.com/drive/api/guides/manage-uploads https://developers.google.com/drive/api/guides/manage-upload...
aero-glide2 5y ago
In Ubuntu if you log in with your Gmail, you can mount the drive to your filesystem.
LoveGracePeace 5y ago
GPL should add a clause: "If you're a large enterprise making money off of Linux and provide services/products to Windows and Mac users but not the exact same to Linux users; your enterprise is no longer authorized to use or run Linux in any capacity.".
- notriddle 5y ago
  The FSF will almost certainly never do that, and even if they did, Linux isn't licensed under "GPLv2 or Later." It's just under GPLv2, probably forever. Linux could change it if every single copyright holder consented, but that's even less likely than the FSF adding a field of endeavor restriction to the GPL. Google owns partial copyright to Linux. Other copyright holders are gone, and nobody knows who the heir is.
  - mayankkaizen 5y ago
    I am clueless about these licensing matters. How does Google own partial copyright to Linux? I thought Linux is something independent.
    - my123 5y ago
      Each contributor to Linux retains the copyright to their contributions. Google is a pretty big Linux contributor.
pyuser583 5y ago
Dropbox support sucks.
HNHatesUsers 5y ago
baskethead 5y ago
You will never show impact for the purposes of a promotion with this feature, therefore no one will work on it. That's how anything is being driven at Google now. Look at Nest. Barely any useful new features at all in years. They could easily add more useful features like car detection, etc, but it hasn't changed in several years now. Google has become a graveyard where ideas go to die because no one cares there.
tssva 5y ago
Is there a similar site tracking how long it has been since Steve Jobs said Facetime would become an open standard?
srvmshr 5y ago
I have been using InSync for Google Drive for the past 4 years. Been pretty happy with the performance. There is only one catch with their personal license: you can only use it for the account you bought it for. Changing account implies buying another license. You can't sign on more than one Google account as your main account - although they have some child account configuration & you could use it on as many computers you want.

520 points by politelemon 5y ago

Google got fat and lazy. At least they should sponsor someone motivated to write a client for it.

Those were the quaint times when we still believed that Google was awesome and cool, and doing amazing things. Now, it's a "our project is already dead", automated banning hellscape, where the only assistance is from other yet-to-be-AI-killed fellow user attempt to barely help. Or gods forbid, find someone here for a "social media escalation". I used to care. I gave up caring WRT google ages ago. They are not worth the trouble.

munchler 5y ago

Link to the Google product forum on the target page is broken, so this is not informative at all.

politelemon 5y ago
Yeah, looks like they broke the groups page, which was 'migrated' from an original Plus page at https://plus.google.com/u/0/+ChadMcCullough/posts/SxDNKR7ehSL https://plus.google.com/u/0/+ChadMcCullough/posts/SxDNKR7ehS...
charcircuit 5y ago
Yeah, I'm confused why no one else is discussing this. Who even said to hang tight? Was it someone on a Drive team? Was it a trusted community member? Was it just a optimistic Linux fanatic? There is missing context.

throwaway787544 5y ago

Worth noting that it's not actually "Google" that said to "hang tight". An entire brand does not make a decision like whether to support Linux. It's a two-pizza team with a shitty budget and a remit to just keep the damn thing from going down and working out all the bugs with basic features like moving a file to a new folder in a weird drop-down. I'm sure the team would like to support Linux, if they had a bigger budget, if they could get out from all of their tech debt, if they had one or two specialized engineers added to their team. But the giant corporate behemoth isn't even remotely aware of those problems, nor will it care. There would have to be a clear case that adding a Linux client would create real business value. But considering how small Linux users probably are, and without an additional revenue stream to offset the cost of development, it's a non-starter.

anonymoushn 5y ago
Maybe they could ship a linux app instead of deprecating and replacing the mac app next time :)
stefan_ 5y ago
The thinking was probably more along the lines of "no one ever got promoted for filling out the basic feature set of a file share me too service" and that promotion is what's standing between them and an extra 9000 pizzas a year worth of salary. With a bonus hint of "nobody cares what somebody promised that left the team a year ago after a year of working on it".
abeppu 5y ago
I get what you're saying, but: - The specific actions of a company will _always_ come from a specific subset of people who are interacting with and sometimes constrained by the broader organization. Should this mean that we can never talk coherently about the actions or statements of a company? - Isn't the company overall responsible for creating the organizational constraints and obstacles? Why is that team that size? Why is that their remit, and how has it changed since _someone_ decided to say "hang tight"? Why do they have the staff they have?
karaterobot 5y ago
I get what you're saying, but ultimately it is an issue of priority. Google has the money, they just don't choose to spend it on supporting Google Drive on Linux, even after saying they would. So, supporting Linux is by definition a lower priority than anything that did pass the bar for resource allocation in the last ten years. You're right about the motivations: they must not view it as creating real business value, since that's how these decisions get made. My only point here is that it IS a choice someone in an office is making: it's not worth it to support Drive on Linux. They do know about it, because it was on their radar 10 years ago. Somebody took it off their radar.
jurschreuder 5y ago
Though Linux might be a small platform it's the only one that really matters.

dang 5y ago

Related How long since Google said a Google Drive Linux client is coming? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24183399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24183399 - Aug 2020 (109 comments) How long since Google said a Google Drive Linux client is coming? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9434643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9434643 - April 2015 (59 comments)

wzm 5y ago

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35904387 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35904387 ipv6 support in GCP is similar, it's at 9 years now.

dreen 5y ago
Websockets still not generally available, ticket opened in 2009 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35886348 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35886348
- dudus 5y ago
  There's really no reason to use AppEngine these days. I believe it still exists for legacy apps. You should be using Cloud run. Cloud run support WebSockets[1]. If you already have an AppEngine App you can always keep it and create a CloudRun app to handle the WebSocket part and they communicate well. [1]: https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/triggering/websockets https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/triggering/websockets

cloudking 5y ago

The market size is not big enough to justify the internal costs of building and maintaining it. For dev environments, you can workaround it using Windows + Drive filestream + WSL. https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/2999#issuecomment-913194149 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/2999#issuecomment-91...

jchw 5y ago
When I worked at Google, almost all developer workstations were running Linux. That alone really should be plenty of justification for having such a client. They did not.
- cloudking 5y ago
  Internally is a lot different than externally https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-share-of-windows-7/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...
  - jchw 5y ago
    You’re missing my point.
    - cloudking 5y ago
      Your point is a lot of internal developers use Linux so they should make a Linux drive client, my counterpoint is that dedicating engineering resources to building and maintaining such a project is not worth the cost. Management looks at the cost and ROI of developing and maintaining projects, in this case the ROI from having a Linux client that would likely need 5-10 SWEs to maintain is not worth it for them. They have to ensure the client is compatible with multiple flavors of Linux releases, monitor security issues etc it's a big ongoing cost. If more consumers and businesses used Linux, they could justify the cost. I'm not saying this is the right move, but I'm explaining why this project hasn't been funded.
      - 5y ago

jchw 5y ago

Times have changed in many more ways than one. These days I greatly prefer to own my data more directly, which I accomplish using a NAS. I don’t use Dropbox OR Google Drive, I use Syncthing, which can do stuff that neither of those could ever dream of in terms of syncing between machines. Not only do I not want Google Drive, I don’t even want anything like it. That said, I totally get why it’s still important. I do use Google Drive at work and for that type of use case I would not argue in favor of self-hosting. Syncthing is great for a single person or even a fairly large group of people, but not for a big organization. Not to mention you probably use Google Docs or Office 365 anyways, both of which are integrated with their respective company’s storage offerings. Syncthing won’t give you directory sync, docs integration, or granular ACLs. But that’s actually perfectly fine, because I don’t need any of those things. Hell, I flat out don’t really want them. You could probably get something similar with ownCloud which I did try running, and I’m not even particularly enticed. I’m sure Synology has a full suite as well, but it’s not what I want out of my NAS. Part of being happier with my technology was just as much realizing what I didn’t want as it was realizing what I wanted.

bpye 5y ago
I’m curious, what do you use to access files on your NAS? I’ve used Samba for forever but it’s always been kind of annoying to deal with permissions, and whilst running AD would probably solve that, I then have to deal with running AD. I’m tempted to try switching to NFS instead.
- jchw 5y ago
  Samba. I tried AD very briefly before realizing how absolutely terrible of an idea it was. It just makes life so complicated, and AD integration was not as good as I was hoping. I can see why this market constantly has all kinds of crazy offerings… As far as permissions go, I guess I am mostly ignoring granular permissions. I’m generally only concerned with permissions on a per-share basis. This way, file permissions mostly don’t matter and can be a one-and-done affair. Then, I can split files up into separate shares. NFS also seemed appealing, but honestly it does seem to bring a lot of complexity that SMB/CIFS does not, and everything supports the latter well enough for my use cases. Remote access is another issue, since you should probably not do SMB over the internet, but I guess that can be solved with Tailscale or ZeroTier.

pipeline_peak 5y ago

I don’t think average users even use the Google Drive desktop client.

emilsedgh 5y ago

https://community.kde.org/KIO_GDrive https://community.kde.org/KIO_GDrive

elkos 5y ago
I can't thank you enough!

Mikeb85 5y ago

The web app works fine. In fact, it works better than anything OneDrive related for example (which never seems to sync properly). Chrome and all of Google's services make being in Linux-land way easier...

sgtnoodle 5y ago
I suspect that there's a fundamental conflict in semantics somewhere between drive and posix filesystems. Any sort of filesystem wrapper on top of drive would immediately require making annoying compromises, and the trade-off is convenience vs. data safety. Targeting a locked down OS like Windows or Mac isn't too difficult, because those compromises can be carefully implemented in a way that avoids accidental data corruption but doesn't negatively impact user workflow too much. On a Linux system, there's hundreds if not thousands of configurations that folk would expect a filesystem to work in, and so it's a lot more difficult to strike that balance. Years ago, I remember a coworker dragged a directory around on his MacBook, and it completely flattened the company's entire drive directory structure.

renewiltord 5y ago

There’s a pretty good FUSE driver and the web app is fine. Never felt the need for a Linux client for this service. Two decades of Linux use and the thing that has changed everything has been the arrival of electron which has made practically everything cross-platform.

jokethrowaway 5y ago
If something uses electron, I'll look for a native alternative. Ripcord doesn't have the best UI and I can't open Teams calls or even links that are too long (Slack broke their API at some point) but at least it's not wasting my ram and it's responds quickly. The rare times I have to open Slack on the web I sigh and wait 2 minutes for the app to load. I automated Prituln VPN via bash just not to have to deal with another Electron client for a damn popup on my tray bar.
- aembleton 5y ago
  If it takes two minutes to open slack in your Web browser then your Web connection might be the problem. Or is your computer from the 90s?

ggambetta 5y ago

I've been using Insync for a few years now, works flawlessly.

lovelearning 5y ago

What's it supposed to do? Aren't "rclone mount" and the OS file manager sufficient?

ncphil 5y ago
... exactly what I was thinking. Discovering rclone mount finally let me abandon the file sync paradigm and return to my workflows of yesteryear when NFS was still the dominant file sharing system on Unix.

Buxato 5y ago

Thanks Insync I could survive without their support.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

kornhole 5y ago

I connected my Linux systems to my Nextcloud server, and then I connected my Gdrive as external storage in Nextcloud. When I turned on server side encryption in Nextcloud it also encrypted my connected storage of Gdrive. So I accomplished both Gdrive integration as well as file encryption at the same time.

politelemon 5y ago
> I connected my Gdrive as external storage in Nextcloud. This bit sounds interesting, could you explain it a little more, how you managed it?
- kornhole 5y ago
  I have since just moved everything into my Nextcloud server since it does everything I need and keeps my data totally private. It is on a Raspberry PI running Yunohost, and I can add additional drives as needed. I don't remember all I did when I setup the Gdrive, but I recommend checking the official documentation at https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/configuration_files/encryption_configuration.html?highlight=google%20drive https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/config...
paisawalla 5y ago
Does this mean you're storing a backup of your NextCloud as a large encrypted blob in your gdrive?
hedora 5y ago
Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but nextcloud constantly somehow manages to corrupt data it is storing locally. Its only user is an android backup agent. Is there something that's, say, 1% as complicated as nextcloud that can sync multiple devices without giving a cloud provider access to cleartext (while also keeping an encrypted backup in the cloud)?
- r-w 5y ago
  Syncthing?

stephbu 5y ago

It feels like Google’s attention span, leadership longevity, and product development patience is roughly 3 years. Any product that survives longer than that probably has transcended beyond being a “pet project/toy” into a PR-problem or revenue-stream significant enough that it takes on a life of it’s own. As management turns over, that lease on life is renewed… https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ While this fosters new ideas and opportunities, that conversion into long-term direction and execution can be pretty rough.

sbrother 5y ago
3 years is roughly the average time it takes to get promoted at Google.
- enduroman 5y ago
  Or the time someone leaves and goes to another job.
  - formerkrogemp 5y ago
    Or the time for a product to die.
    - justinjlynn 5y ago
      Funny how they all seem to be correlated. /s
fswd 5y ago
You nailed it. Every 3 years google renames and rebadges their chat system. I don't even know what to call it anymore.
- easrng 5y ago
  There's Google Chat, which is really made for companies but available on normal accounts too, and Google Messages, their SMS/MMS/RCS app for Android, which requires that you have an Android phone and a phone plan.

meibo 5y ago

If there was one, people wouldn't use it. It's so well supported by open source software like rclone and insync, I feel like it actually works better than it does on my windows machine.

Flimm 5y ago
Insync is not open source.

midislack 5y ago

Over ten years ago it was already obvious that Google wasn't a reliable or useful company. You're gonna be waiting a LOOOONG time.

thecrumb 5y ago

Meh. Google. Google really hasn't come out with anything innovative in quite awhile, while killing once innovative projects.

titzer 5y ago

Just give us a web filesystem already. Stop with these shitty infantilized GUIs with no hierarchical organization and an overreliance on search to find things. I have literally hundreds of thousands to millions of files on my local machines and have no trouble remembering where I put things. Drive can't seem to scale past a few dozen before it's confusing, useless, and apparently lossy. Remember when web servers would serve up the contents of a directory as a list with hyperlinks on the file names? That actually worked ffs. I cannot understand how we could be moving backwards so quickly.

CoastalCoder 5y ago
- mplewis 5y ago
  Because one would presume that a company building online file storage as a product would want it to work?
  - CoastalCoder 5y ago
    - thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
      Because it's a paid service. But explaining the emotions you've projected upon OP isn't useful discussion.
      - CoastalCoder 5y ago
        From the OP: > Just give us a web filesystem already. Stop with these shitty infantilized GUIs ... That actually worked ffs. ... I responded by saying: > Your level of angst makes me think ... I suppose I could be wrong about the OP expressing angst, but I think it's reasonable inference. Also, you wrote: > Because it's a paid service. I see two problems here: (1) I was asking the OP (@titzer) what their reasons were, not yours. (2) Only some people pay for Google Drive. One reason that I wrote: > Your level of angst makes me think you believe someone out there is obligated to do this for you. > > If you believe that, I'm curious why. was that if the @titzer was paying for Google Drive, I could see him having a stronger reason for expecting Google to make the product useful to him. But I didn't want to assume, which is why I asked.

AeroNotix 5y ago

GCS works. For my own use it is just much simpler to use GCS

beastman82 5y ago
Right. Don't they have a fuse file system that they actively maintain?
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  There is some guy there that maintains an ocaml based fuse google-drive client. It works okay. I'm not sure if he volunteers to maintain or is paid. I have moved on to the isync product but the ocaml opensource project is still there and maintained last I checked.

ISL 5y ago

As the decision seems to be deliberate, I'm interested why Google has chosen not to implement such a feature. I'm a paying GSuite customer. I'd love to be able to NFS-mount portions of my home directory into Google Drive for access across platforms and sharing/collaboration with others. There's got to be a reason that Google Drive isn't interested in implementing linux mounts -- I'd be surprised if it is market share alone. The reason may be interesting/unexpected.

shadowgovt 5y ago
It's market share, but I suspect Google's numbers may be skewed here by their measurement system. They almost certainly have hard numbers on the percent of users accessing the UI via various platform configs, and the Linux numbers are low. Question is if that's because they haven't cracked into the market because they aren't offering desktop integration. The other interesting question is: what are Linux users using instead? Because that's Google's competition for this software, which implies how much they could make competing.
- blagie 5y ago
  My experience is that data-driven companies get into self-reinforcing circles: - Data shows not a lot of customers use Linux - Which leads to poor Linux support - Which leads to not a lot of customers using Linux That's not specific to this either. I've seen companies discount continents of people due to lack of customers on those continents, which was often due to inanely easy-to-solve problems. But if you only have 0.1% of your market in China, why bother with servers which are inside the Great Firewall? If 0.1% of your population is Spanish-speaking, why bother with i18n? Data driven companies have an inherent bias towards /current/ customers, and away from /potential/ customers....
  - r-w 5y ago
    Isn’t there some saying about analysts and how they often tell you what’s already the case, but almost never tell you what’s possible? I feel like that applies here.
- 5y ago

kkfx 5y ago

GNU/Linux users are mostly a bit tech-savvy users, big of IT like dumb users, they are easy to profit from, very moderately tech-savvy ones are just needed to pull more people in so offering a bit of services with a good enough quality and something to make the experience nice enough for a tech-savvy user (like YT or Google Search with a certain set of extensions to cut ads etc) is enough to have thous users recommend those services to their less tech savvy friends and the world of mouth do the magic. More than that might be even counter-productive if show a real tangible far lower quality to the aforementioned users like most single-company show software are: crappy and outdated. Alphabet do want data from the masses, not much from a small cohort of smart users. Invest for them is not interesting.

seanwilson 5y ago

Do Google use Google Drive on Linux internally? Isn't Linux used a lot there?

pedro2 5y ago
They can mount GDriveFS internally as NFS, I think
saalweachter 5y ago
To be honest I like, forgot this -- attaching/syncing Drive and the local disk -- was a thing people did. I just like, upload and download files as needed to Drive? I don't really have a huge "need to sync files to the cloud" quadrant in my personal or professional life.
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
Not really. I mean, drive stuff is used here and there to share some docs/attachments, etc. but not via a mounted filesystem, just from web browser. There's a Google-wide shared file system that is mounted on all gLinux workstations, but it has nothing to do with Google Drive.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Insync works well but it is pay to play

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

shadowgovt 5y ago

The Drive API is pretty stable. So given that we're talking about Linux, the immediate question that comes to my mind is "why hasn't somebody written it themselves?" Perhaps Google sees no benefit in building a service in a space where users can self serve making it.

fulafel 5y ago

Would the ChromeOS implementation work if they packaged it, and if not, why not?

robertlagrant 5y ago

Don't worry - Google Drive does support Linux. Just only on for the server, not the client :D

jeffbee 5y ago

Google Drive does support Linux with the completely open source DriveFS and supporting userspace services like Seneschal in the ChromiumOS project. People who claim otherwise don't believe in actual open source software development, they just want a convenient quasi-commercial software package that doesn't cost them anything.

lawl 5y ago
> they just want a convenient quasi-commercial software package that doesn't cost them anything. Wouldn't I be paying for gdrive and thus expect to get working software? The free tier isn't enough for me and I would have paid if they had a linux client. Its okay if they don't think linux is worth it, but your argument that i should pay for the software again seems really weird to me.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Again: Google writes, maintains, distributes, and supports a working Drive client for Linux, called DriveFS.
  - hedora 5y ago
    This? https://github.com/thejinx0r/DriveFS https://github.com/thejinx0r/DriveFS It is the top hit for "google drivefs source code" on google. "google drivefs" just returns hits about clearing a cache on macos or something. The duck duck go results are arguably more relevant, though one is a link to DriveFS.exe, which I don't plan to download.

password4321 5y ago

No mention of https://rclone.org/drive https://rclone.org/drive yet in case anyone is unaware. I don't see how 1st party could do any better than the handful of 3rd party options.

ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago

Google is a me too company now. Innovation left the company a long time ago. That is why I tell startups I invest in, not to worry at all if Google enters their space.

encryptluks2 5y ago
- hedora 5y ago
  Are you trying to compare them to Google Plus?
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    No, you brought that up. What is your point?
- kube-system 5y ago
  The person you are replying to is not talking about politics. They meant "me too" as in "copycat", not "me too" as in the social/political movement.

dehrmann 5y ago

Wasn't that around the time Sean Hannity volunteered to get waterboarded?

jrochkind1 5y ago

The OP no longer seems to succesfuly link to any communication from Google saying to "hang tight".

dijit 5y ago

Wait, doesn’t this work? I had a weird experience where pop_OS! automatically mapped my google drive to nautilus once I had logged in. I’m sure that it’s not native, but what features would I be missing? I was very pleasantly surprised when it just kinda worked.

Kye 5y ago
That support comes from Gnome Online Accounts. https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeOnlineAccounts/Providers https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeOnlineAccounts/Provider... Last time I tried it, that only supported the virtual drive thing, so no actual files locally.

henriquez 5y ago

layer8 5y ago

I’m glad that Dropbox provides a Linux client, although it is annoying that it is limited to x86 and ext4. At least the latter can be worked around with a loopback device.

anuragsoni 5y ago
Dropbox works on zfs, xfs and btrfs just fine. Source: https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/desktop/system-requirements https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/desktop/syste...
- awill 5y ago
  Check https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20498454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20498454 Dropbox did drop support and bring it back. I use Linux with xfs, so I switched off Dropbox. Even though Dropbox went back on this decision, they did some damage, and probably lost people that haven't come back (like me).
- layer8 5y ago
  Thanks, I hadn’t been aware that they relaxed the requirements. In my case it doesn’t help me though, as the VPS I’m using is still on ext3.

assbuttbuttass 5y ago

There's always the excellent unofficial google-drive-ocamlfuse which uses FUSE to mount Google drive to a local directory. https://github.com/astrada/google-drive-ocamlfuse https://github.com/astrada/google-drive-ocamlfuse

alfiedotwtf 5y ago

FUSE with S3 is awesome. I have a few local mounts, including using it as my Git upstream, and it Just Works(tm)

gumby 5y ago

I wish google drive worked on the Mac! At least once a day it decides it can’t work and tells my to unmount it.

Seattle3503 5y ago

We use Google drive at my corporate, and half the devs are on Linux. I wonder if this space was more competitive if Google would feel more urgency. A part of the issue is we use Google for calendar and email as well.

therealmarv 5y ago

https://www.insynchq.com/ https://www.insynchq.com/ solved that long time ago. I even use them as preferred client on my mac for years because Google's client is pretty bad in my opinion. And happy that there is software from Filipino developers and software out there!

0wx 5y ago

I use pop os and just by login with my google account it's show my drive in the file explorer

bachmeier 5y ago

I just want to collect the major options for Google Drive on Linux in a single comment, since a few options are scattered around: Insync works well, and it's 50% off for a couple more days: https://www.insynchq.com/ https://www.insynchq.com/ Not affiliated, but $15 is not a lot to pay, as opposed to waiting for something that probably won't happen. Rclone has support for Google Drive, and it's open source: https://rclone.org/ https://rclone.org/ There's a command line client that uses a push/pull workflow: https://github.com/odeke-em/drive https://github.com/odeke-em/drive It was written by a member of the Google Drive team. Gnome supports Google Drive, or at least used to, directly in Nautilus. I don't use Gnome, so I can't comment. There may be other options I've missed, but the point is that there is already good support in multiple forms. I'd be interested to know what support Google could provide that's not already available.

jz_ 5y ago
> Gnome supports Google Drive, or at least used to, directly in Nautilus. I don't use Gnome, so I can't comment. I'm using it right now. It is not particularly responsive (perform an operation and it looks like no operation is happening until the remote end responds) but works well enough for copying files in and out via nautilus if you don't expect instant feedback.

mc4ndr3 5y ago

Don't say "Google Drive" out loud or they'll cancel the whole thing.

maverick74 5y ago

Well... There's a lot of good alternatives so I - personally - don't miss it!!! But I understand the frustration and that some people do miss it...

asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago

Does anyone know why Linux/OSS devs haven't built this themselves yet? I am looking at the api and it seems to have all the necessary bits for filesystem syncing but maybe there's something I'm missing. https://developers.google.com/drive/api/guides/manage-uploads https://developers.google.com/drive/api/guides/manage-upload...

aero-glide2 5y ago

In Ubuntu if you log in with your Gmail, you can mount the drive to your filesystem.

LoveGracePeace 5y ago

GPL should add a clause: "If you're a large enterprise making money off of Linux and provide services/products to Windows and Mac users but not the exact same to Linux users; your enterprise is no longer authorized to use or run Linux in any capacity.".

notriddle 5y ago
The FSF will almost certainly never do that, and even if they did, Linux isn't licensed under "GPLv2 or Later." It's just under GPLv2, probably forever. Linux could change it if every single copyright holder consented, but that's even less likely than the FSF adding a field of endeavor restriction to the GPL. Google owns partial copyright to Linux. Other copyright holders are gone, and nobody knows who the heir is.
- mayankkaizen 5y ago
  I am clueless about these licensing matters. How does Google own partial copyright to Linux? I thought Linux is something independent.
  - my123 5y ago
    Each contributor to Linux retains the copyright to their contributions. Google is a pretty big Linux contributor.

pyuser583 5y ago

Dropbox support sucks.

HNHatesUsers 5y ago

baskethead 5y ago

You will never show impact for the purposes of a promotion with this feature, therefore no one will work on it. That's how anything is being driven at Google now. Look at Nest. Barely any useful new features at all in years. They could easily add more useful features like car detection, etc, but it hasn't changed in several years now. Google has become a graveyard where ideas go to die because no one cares there.

tssva 5y ago

Is there a similar site tracking how long it has been since Steve Jobs said Facetime would become an open standard?

srvmshr 5y ago

I have been using InSync for Google Drive for the past 4 years. Been pretty happy with the performance. There is only one catch with their personal license: you can only use it for the account you bought it for. Changing account implies buying another license. You can't sign on more than one Google account as your main account - although they have some child account configuration & you could use it on as many computers you want.