SparkleShare – an open source alternative to Dropbox hits beta for Linux

Dropbox is an easy way to store, sync and share files online and supports Windows, Mac, Linux as well as mobile. But according to developers of Sparkleshare, Dropbox has downsides as well: you can’t host your own server; it’s not open source and has some freaky things in its license agreement.

Sparkleshare provides almost all the features of Dropbox and has other benefits like better Gnome integration, ability to set up on own server, more real-time features and less freaky things in license agreement. It will be available for Linux, Mac OS X as well as windows.

The first beta release of SparkleShare has been announced for Linux.  You can download the beta from here and find the release notes.The announcement about the beta release reads

Hylke: Aside from the usual bug fixes and behind the scenes work I mainly added 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.