Moving forward with the iFolder fork!

I have made contact with a group of open source enthusiasts that live Texas and in Europe.  The project now called NoFolder, started as a blog and forum to help individuals setup iFolder on various Linux distributions most notably SUSE.  The goal of the project now is to get the current version working on RHEL 6 and CentOS 6 so it isn’t just a project that has packages for one Linux distro.

This is really exciting.  I just built all the required mono packages for both RHEL and CentOS.  The next step is to get iFolder RPM’s built for RHEL.  It looks like I would be able to just rewrite the SPEC file so I can build the packages in RHEL, nothing else should need to be rewritten thankfully.

If anyone wants to help please get in contact with me!

iFolder 3 – Should be forked and developed by the community

When I worked at Novell the best application they deployed was iFolder, especially since I had both a desktop and a laptop computer.  I setup iFolder to sync my entire documents directory so if I was on my desktop at the office or on my laptop on the road I had everything I needed right there.  Sounds like new consumer services like dropbox or sugarsync right?  This was in 2005 well before dropbox and sugarsync.  Not only would it sync my entire documents directory I could create a shared iFolder and share documents with colleagues and have version control over the documents.  It was a great enterprise solution much better then a shared NFS export or CIFS share.

I personally have an iFolder server that I’m running out of my home office and I have hacked together the ability to access my files using webdav on my iPad.  It isn’t elegant but it works.

It is too bad that no one has taken the iFolder project and made it better.  Novell doesn’t seem to be doing anything with the project (www.ifolder.com).  It hasn’t been updated in years.  It is GPL and it is truly an awesome project, it just needs to get out of the hands of Novell.

If I was more then a hobbyist developer I would take up the challenge to make iFolder an awesome project.  A good chunk of it is written in C# so it needs an overhaul to another language like C++.  It is a project that I hope will be revived in the hands of someone or a company that actually truly cares about their open source projects.