I haven't actually tried SparkleShare yet, but I've personally lost hours and hours and hours to fussing with git and I've never needed to do anything with it beyond committing my work. Switching from my current setup (saving everything in a "Projects" folder) to a setup where the folder I save everything to is shared and synced and versioned is an improvement in every way, if the projects are meant to be shared and aren't already part of another VCS infrastructure.
I personally feel that longevity is a quality a service can have independent of being "third-party" or open-source, and that it can be measured on its own. Simply being open-source doesn't give a project traction, and in my experience is not a meaningful factor on its own unless there is also a decent (both in size and behaviour) community committed to it.
I also feel that it needs to be balanced against the cost of switching. For instance, if Dropbox goes down, I'll just switch to another commodity service like SpiderOak; if Pulse goes down or puts ads everywhere, I'll go back to Google Reader. Conversely, I won't even look at Facebook because of how much it would cost to extricate myself, and I'm keeping an eye out for an Evernote alternative because I'm tired of switching notetaking solutions, even though Evernote is delightful and convenient and seems to have a good business model. I've tried SimpleNote and Tomboy, but both are unavailable or inconvenient to use across all my devices, even if they use more portable formats and / or are open-source.
The name "gitdocs" turns me off to the project as soon as I see it, for roughly the same reason seeing a GUI app prefixed with "X" does. It's a cultural marker that tells me it was made by and for people with very different needs and wants and abilities than me, for whom git is a beloved tool rather than an endless source of frustration. I'm open to being proven wrong, but I've had a lot of bad experiences with the free software community and its insular culture, and I strongly prefer using tools that were designed to be accessible to a wider audience than just them.
I don't have any particular desire to run my own instance of git, and if I wanted to roll my own backup solution I'd use OwnCloud. I don't personally feel confident in my ability to install outside PHP scripts aside from WordPress, though, because the few times I've tried it's gone horribly.
I feel that WordPress strikes a good balance between ease-of-use and customization, in that it's customizable to an amazing degree but designed to be simple to use for its core functions. I don't feel it's good to burden people with cognitive overhead in the name of "customizability," when most of them don't want to worry about how the thing they want to do happens.
no subject
I personally feel that longevity is a quality a service can have independent of being "third-party" or open-source, and that it can be measured on its own. Simply being open-source doesn't give a project traction, and in my experience is not a meaningful factor on its own unless there is also a decent (both in size and behaviour) community committed to it.
I also feel that it needs to be balanced against the cost of switching. For instance, if Dropbox goes down, I'll just switch to another commodity service like SpiderOak; if Pulse goes down or puts ads everywhere, I'll go back to Google Reader. Conversely, I won't even look at Facebook because of how much it would cost to extricate myself, and I'm keeping an eye out for an Evernote alternative because I'm tired of switching notetaking solutions, even though Evernote is delightful and convenient and seems to have a good business model. I've tried SimpleNote and Tomboy, but both are unavailable or inconvenient to use across all my devices, even if they use more portable formats and / or are open-source.
The name "gitdocs" turns me off to the project as soon as I see it, for roughly the same reason seeing a GUI app prefixed with "X" does. It's a cultural marker that tells me it was made by and for people with very different needs and wants and abilities than me, for whom git is a beloved tool rather than an endless source of frustration. I'm open to being proven wrong, but I've had a lot of bad experiences with the free software community and its insular culture, and I strongly prefer using tools that were designed to be accessible to a wider audience than just them.
I don't have any particular desire to run my own instance of git, and if I wanted to roll my own backup solution I'd use OwnCloud. I don't personally feel confident in my ability to install outside PHP scripts aside from WordPress, though, because the few times I've tried it's gone horribly.
I feel that WordPress strikes a good balance between ease-of-use and customization, in that it's customizable to an amazing degree but designed to be simple to use for its core functions. I don't feel it's good to burden people with cognitive overhead in the name of "customizability," when most of them don't want to worry about how the thing they want to do happens.