That's as dishonest as btsyncs statement, in it's own way.
Because it's closed source, we don't /know/ how secure btsync is. However, we do know that microsoft, google and dropbox will just hand your shit over if the US government asks.
Something is better than nothing. The only open source competitors in this space are owncloud, who /still/ won't let me upload to both a work and person cloud at the same time, and syncthing, which I have high hopes for but which currently has a workflow so bad I think I'd rather just use a thumb drive.
I've stuck with btsync 1.3.94, the version with the beautiful workflow, just before it went off the rails. It solves my need to avoid google/facebook etc. /Maybe/ it doesn't protect me from the US government, but that's still better than dropbox.
I think bleep's gonna struggle, because it requires me to get /other/ people to buy into my disquiet, which turns out to be really hard if my experiments with XMPP over skype tell me anything.
You know what I might actually pay for? A gateway to facebook/gtalk/skype. I'd be willing to pay $5 per month for a bleep-to-everything gateway, either from bittorrent or someone else. Half of bleeps value is simply in my not needing another account (e: I could say the same about btsync).
The problem is that there's no "something". All BitTorrent does is make a promise, and that is worth nothing. Thus, "something is better than nothing" doesn't apply.
Now if it were a verifiably half-assed solution, I'd agree with your statement.
They did let iSEC partners review their source code. So, it is not nothing.
But I agree that it would be far more trustable (and popular) if Bittorrent Sync were open source. And there is still a profit model with an open source BTSync: let people (who need it) get a tracker, relay server, and always-on (read-only encrypted) peer subscription.
Unfortunately, Syncthing only supports a subset of what Bittorrent Sync does:
- There is no tracker/relay server infrastructure. As a result, Syncthing doesn't work if two peers are behind a firewall/NAT without uPnP or manual port forwarding. The number of peers behind carrier-grade NAT is only growing (IPv6 migrations) and if you are often on the move (hotels, etc.) you have no control over the firewall.
- Syncthing does not support selective sync yet, let alone with the ease of BTSync where it is a Finder/Explorer extension.
- Syncthing does not support link-based sharing, which is handy if you quickly want to share something with family/colleagues.
- Syncthing is too hard to set up for most family/colleagues.
tl;dr Syncthing is great for synchronizing two machines on networks under your own control, but it is not a nearly-complete P2P replacement of Dropbox like Bittorrent Sync is.
