rhendershot,
Thanks for the comments. We have considered open sourcing. In fact our application is built on a lot of open source technology such as JXTA (jxta.org). As far as the closed source remainder, the problem is that most investors lack the understanding of how that works. In fact, paranoid, is probably an accurate descriptions. It is already VERY hard to raise investment and an open source model would make it even more difficult.
You correctly identified many of the concerns that resulted in LeanOnMe's unfortunate demise, but gave birth to BitVault. The surprising fact is people weren't willing to trust, not because their data was on other's computers, but rather that they could see other people online. I was personally floored by that.
We addressed this problem by building BitVault. BitVault offers many of the same features of LeanOnMe, but now there isn't a "global" network, but rather a private one. Each user, can create a private network of backup hosts and peer selection is now automated, but can be controlled if needed. This seems to have quelled many of the concerns.
You mentioned "they'd have to authenticate to a secure system", well we had that too with LeanOnMe using LDAP, but again people didn't seem to care.
-sm
Slashdot Mirror
Been done. LeanOnMe did that a long time ago. BitVault (www.312inc.com) still does it and it is platform independent and p2p.
rhendershot, Thanks for the comments. We have considered open sourcing. In fact our application is built on a lot of open source technology such as JXTA (jxta.org). As far as the closed source remainder, the problem is that most investors lack the understanding of how that works. In fact, paranoid, is probably an accurate descriptions. It is already VERY hard to raise investment and an open source model would make it even more difficult. You correctly identified many of the concerns that resulted in LeanOnMe's unfortunate demise, but gave birth to BitVault. The surprising fact is people weren't willing to trust, not because their data was on other's computers, but rather that they could see other people online. I was personally floored by that. We addressed this problem by building BitVault. BitVault offers many of the same features of LeanOnMe, but now there isn't a "global" network, but rather a private one. Each user, can create a private network of backup hosts and peer selection is now automated, but can be controlled if needed. This seems to have quelled many of the concerns. You mentioned "they'd have to authenticate to a secure system", well we had that too with LeanOnMe using LDAP, but again people didn't seem to care. -sm