I'd be interested in which `free` you are talking about. Beer or speech (or both)?

Because for me, the prime reason I refuse to use Dropbox[1] is that it's unfree software as per the speech definition. I am not running software on my computer that needs internet access and transmits files when I can not verify what this program does, in addition to my personal policy of reducing my usage of unfree software to an absolute, unavoidable minimum.

[1] I'm studying CS and it's really annoying how ubiquitous Dropbox has become among the student crowds. I stopped counting after about the first three dozen attempts of people trying to get me to use Dropbox.

Mostly as in beer. You have to cough up cash to get a respectable quota.

Personally, I think you're being rather paranoid on the whole free software (as in speech) thing, but hey, whatever works for you :)

18.2GB for free isn't enough?

I guess not when companies like box.net are giving out 50GB for free. =/

I've been looking for an alternative mostly because of #1. It's actually quite expensive for a small team. I have yet to find anything that works as well as DropBox.

I don't agree with #4. All your data is stored locally, it DropBox goes away the data just stops syncing. (You would lose version history, but it's only 30 days so not useful)

Unless you have pack-rat, in which case you have unlimited history: http://www.dropbox.com/help/113

1) You can get up to 18.2GB of storage for free

2) This is a problem with just about any service unless you use something based in another country, but then you play by that governments rules

3) That third party is Amazon S3/EBS/EC2 which, if used correctly, provides a solution thousands of times better than you can with the same budget (redundant datacenters, high availability, etc)

4) If they do disappear, you still have all your data on your computers with Dropbox installed.

I'm a dropbox user, although I like the GP's standpoint. For practical reasons I don't refuse to use it like he does.

Now, help me understand point 1) please.

I assume for now that you're talking about the 'get someone to sign up' bonus? Which would be very shady in my world and is probably part of the reason why the GP gets annoyed by people at his university, trying to sift through the masses and find those that didn't sign up yet and could offer them a slight bonus.

It's spamming your own network.

Or use a $100 AdWords coupon to run a campaign with your affiliate URL to the Dropbox signup page instead of spamming people.