Dropbox Blog

This is the part of the document that described the motivation:

> The Problem Statement

> Based on 177 like tech companies in Silicon Valley (market research and EOO-1 Diversity Statistics data), the percentage of diverse engineering talent is sparse. In short, 4.7% are latino, 2.1% are African American, and 19.2% are female. These candidates are being targeted with all of our top competitors with white gloves tactics, strategic outreach, and engagement strategies, while Dropbox has yet to systematically establish any of these practices to compete for this top talent and showcase our uniquely inclusive, dynamic, and thoughtful culture.

> Opportunity to market DBX [Dropbox] more broadly:

> Moreover, diverse engineers are the most sought after group of individuals on the market today. While the average response rate to engage is high (37%) the rate at which they are interested in moving forwards is quite low (11%). We interpret this in two ways:
> First, due to the small pool and scarcity of diverse talent, companies are motivated to keep their diverse talent happy, well-compensated, and engaged; prospects are rarely on the market, and when they are, it is a highly calculated and careful search based on existing relationships.
> Second, traditional sourcing engagement methods (email, LinkedIn) do not adequately showcase what makes Dropbox special, and because these candidates are so highly sought-after, it would serve us to highlight our culture early on, and to take a…

Having your PR rejected in a healthy environment means that your PR is radically far from the reviewer's expectation.

Having your PR rejected in a toxic environment can mean a lot of things, and a company sought after doesn't mean that it MUST be not toxic.

First, you have to make sure if both of YOU and YOU ENVIRONMENT is healthy. If both are healthy, proceed reading.

> The challenge here is to deliver good quality code, while maintaining a decent speed of delivery.

You made it sound like producing good quality code = slowness. FALSE. Seeming slow, good quality code boosts your team's velocity. BUT keep in mind: "quality" is "the standard of something as measured against other things of a similar kind; the degree of excellence of something". Your team has its standards, either is a derivative of other globally acknowledged standards such as https://blog.golang.org/go-fmt-your-code, https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/Coding-guidelines, https://twitter.com/dan_abramov, etc, or self-made standards. You go follow them, make them happy!

Coding and design skill has a different definition than code quality. It is what punches up to the sky: the overall velocity, the success of the team, the balance of growth and culture retainment of the company, the development experience, the users' thumbs ups, amazements, and "this app is life changing" comments, the number of milestone celebration in All You Can Eat restaurants each years, the number of people rising up from…

It is a cliche, but the plural of anecdote is not data. I never had any problems with Dropbox, but had Office on OneDrive corrupt files. OneNote has also rendered some notes unreadable.

The bottom line is that errors happen. You should prepare for that and make backups.

Also, Dropbox are still among the very best when it comes to syncing. Many useful synchronization features are implemented by Dropbox, but not the competition. E.g., features that most competitors do not have:

- Modifying a large file on Dropbox will only resync modified chunks.

- DropBox avoids re-uploads, both when uploading identical files and moving files around:

http://macography.net/2013/05/speed-test-dropbox-google-drive-box-skydrive-amazon-cloud-drive/

- Dropbox does LAN sync. If a machine has to download a large file and another machine on the network has the same file, chunks are provided peer to peer. This makes using large files on multiple machines or in a team much faster.

- Dropbox does streaming sync. A machine can already download chunks when another machine is still uploading:

https://blog.dropbox.com/2014/07/introducing-streaming-sync-supercharged-sync-for-large-files/

Sure, OneDrive and Google Drive do have many useful functions that Dropbox does not have, such as including complete office suites. But for the original task, file syncing, Dropbox is still pretty much unbeaten.

It's often good to look at how other companies do things to see if it's out of the ordinary. Turns out this line is extremely common. Google, for example:

You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in
Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.
By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a
perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive
license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly
perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit,
post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the
sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the
Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the
Additional.

http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS

Also, Drew and Arash just posted an update to the blog with clarified language: http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=846

Ubuntu One does have some extra features -- for one, more than twice the capacity on the free account (5GB), it can sync contacts, Tomboy notes, stream music (though as a paying option), and also comes as a default on an operating system (Ubuntu).

Actually the only downside for me recently was not being able to share a DVD iso image recently due to the size limit on the free account, and looks like they fixed that problem now too. Contacts sync was a bit of a pain to get working but it works fine now.

But to answer your question partially (from Wikipedia):

> As of April 2011[update], Dropbox has more than 25 million users. [20]

I would guess most are not Linux users.

Also for more serious backup options people should probably use something like tarsnap.

EDIT:

Just found on their blog from February, they claim 2% Linux users. So around 0.5M I guess ...

( http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=339 )

They actually say that they will hand over anything to the feds:

"New TOS:

Compliance with Laws and Law Enforcement Requests; Protection of Dropbox’s Rights. We may disclose to parties outside Dropbox files stored in your Dropbox and information about you that we collect when we have a good faith belief that disclosure is reasonably necessary to (a) comply with a law, regulation or compulsory legal request; (b) protect the safety of any person from death or serious bodily injury; (c) prevent fraud or abuse of Dropbox or its users; or (d) to protect Dropbox’s property rights. If we provide your Dropbox files to a law enforcement agency as set forth above, we will remove Dropbox’s encryption from the files before providing them to law enforcement. However, Dropbox will not be able to decrypt any files that you encrypted prior to storing them on Dropbox."

http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=735