Seafile is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

, cross-platform file-hosting software system. Files are stored on a central server and can be synchronized with personal computers and mobile devices through apps. Files on the Seafile server can also be accessed directly via the server's web interface. Seafile's functionality is similar to other popular file hosting services such as Dropbox and Google Drive. The primary difference between Seafile and Dropbox/Google Drive is that Seafile is a self-hosted file sharing solution for private cloud applications. In private clouds, storage space and client connection limits are determined exclusively by the users' own infrastructure and settings rather than the terms and conditions of a cloud service provider. Additionally, organizations, whose data privacy policies bar them from using public cloud services can draw on Seafile to build a file sharing system of their own.

History

In 2009, Daniel Pan and other former students of

Tsinghua University Tsinghua University (; abbr. THU) is a national public research university in Beijing, China. The university is funded by the Ministry of Education. The university is a member of the C9 League, Double First Class University Plan, Project ...

, Beijing embarked on a project aiming at building a

peer-to-peer file sharing Peer-to-peer file sharing is the distribution and sharing of digital media using peer-to-peer (P2P) networking technology. P2P file sharing allows users to access media files such as books, music, movies, and games using a P2P software program tha ...

software, hence a system that does not rely on a centralized server. Seafile was the name chosen for their software project. The development team decided in 2010 to abandon this initial goal and refocussed on building a file syncing software with a more traditional client-server architecture – the architecture also used by Dropbox and other file hosting service providers. In 2012, Daniel Pan, Jonathan Xu and other key developers of the project established Seafile Ltd. with the objective to develop and distribute the file hosting software. At the beginning of 2015, the distribution company Seafile GmbH was founded by Silja and Alexander Jackson to promote Seafile in Germany. Seafile Ltd., which did not take an equity stake in Seafile GmbH, granted usage rights for the Seafile brand and provided funding in the form of an interest free loan to the new company. The partnership was abruptly terminated in July 2016 due to disagreements between the two companies over, among other things, product development and intellectual property rights. An amicable resolution to the dispute was reached in March 2017. The Mainz-based company datamate GmbH & Co. KG has since taken over distribution and support in Europe.

Editions and versions

Seafile has two editions: a free community edition and a professional edition with additional features for enterprise environments. The community edition is released under the terms of the

GNU Affero General Public License The GNU Affero General Public License (GNU AGPL) is a free, copyleft license published by the Free Software Foundation in November 2007, and based on the GNU General Public License, version 3 and the Affero General Public License. The Free Sof ...

v3. The professional edition is released under a proprietary license. Most Seafile installations – community as well as enterprise – are private cloud installations and service a clearly defined user group, i.e., the members of an organisation. There are also some public file hosting services based on Seafile.

Features

The feature set of the community and professional edition vary. Both editions share these features: * Multi-platform file synchronisation * Public link sharing (upload and download) *

Client-side encryption Client-side encryption is the cryptographic technique of encrypting data on the sender's side, before it is transmitted to a server such as a cloud storage service. Client-side encryption features an encryption key that is not available to the servi ...

* Per-folder

access control In the fields of physical security and information security, access control (AC) is the selective restriction of access to a place or other resource, while access management describes the process. The act of ''accessing'' may mean consuming ...

Version control In software engineering, version control (also known as revision control, source control, or source code management) is a class of systems responsible for managing changes to computer programs, documents, large web sites, or other collections o ...

Two-factor authentication Multi-factor authentication (MFA; encompassing two-factor authentication, or 2FA, along with similar terms) is an electronic authentication method in which a user is granted access to a website or application only after successfully presenting ...

The additional features of the professional edition include: *

File locking File locking is a mechanism that restricts access to a computer file, or to a region of a file, by allowing only one user or process to modify or delete it at a specific time and to prevent reading of the file while it's being modified or deleted ...

Full text search In text retrieval, full-text search refers to techniques for searching a single computer-stored document or a collection in a full-text database. Full-text search is distinguished from searches based on metadata or on parts of the original texts ...

* MS Office document preview and office web app integration * Activity logging * Distributed storage * Antivirus integration

Platforms

Seafile Server Community Edition can be installed on various Linux platforms. Seafile Ltd. maintains installation packages for Debian,

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All the ...

CentOS CentOS (, from Community Enterprise Operating System; also known as CentOS Linux) is a Linux distribution that provides a free and open-source community-supported computing platform, functionally compatible with its upstream source, Red Hat En ...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial open-source Linux distribution developed by Red Hat for the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop vers ...

. Additionally, the developer provides a Docker container. A Seafile Server for Windows has been discontinued with version 6.0.7, though it is still available for download on the developer's download site. Users interested in installing Seafile on a Windows computer are referred to Docker. FreeBSD and Raspbian are two more supported platforms. Their install packages are community maintained. Seafile Server Professional Edition is available for Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS and RHEL. A Docker image is available too. For Seafile Professional's proprietary nature, they are all maintained by Seafile Ltd. Both servers offers a choice of MySQL/

MariaDB MariaDB is a community-developed, commercially supported fork of the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), intended to remain free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. Development is led by some of the ori ...

or SQLite for database and supports file system or distributed storage as data storage. Desktop clients are available for personal computers running on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Mobile clients are available for

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...

Windows Phone 8 Windows Phone 8 is the second generation of the Windows Phone mobile operating system from Microsoft. It was released on October 29, 2012, and, like its predecessor, it features a flat user interface based on the Metro design language. It was s ...

and Android. Files can also be viewed, downloaded from and uploaded to the Seafile Server without the client via Seafile's web interface.

Disputes

Seafile Ltd and Seafile GmbH

In July 2016 a dispute came to light between Seafile Ltd. (the original company, from China) and Seafile GmbH (a German company established from JacksonIT by Silja Jackson and Alexander Jackson in 2015). Seafile Ltd. had funded Seafile GmbH to be a European partner. They then agreed to merge the main operations and license the cloud provision to a new company, but an agreement could not be reached on the number of shares to be allocated. Seafile Ltd. alleges that Seafile GmbH and its predecessors had attempted to register its trademark in the US and had taken steps to present itself in place of Seafile Ltd. Seafile Ltd. also alleges that Seafile GmbH had abused the sourcecode and were committing copyright infringements. Seafile GmbH stated it would fork based upon the most recent professional version and continue developing the file sharing software independently under the brand name Seafile, for which the company claims it hold the intellectual property rights in Europe and North America. Seafile GmbH has not released a new Seafile server version since the announcement. In March 2017, it was announced that an amicable resolution to the dispute between Seafile Ltd. and Seafile GmbH had been reached. All Seafile trademarks held by Seafile GmbH and the domain “seafile.de” will be transferred to Seafile Ltd.. Seafile GmbH will continue to do business and change its name to Syncwerk GmbH. Syncwerk GmbH will continue to provide software updates and support, as well as SaaS services to their existing customers, based on Seafile Professional Edition 5.1.8. New customers who are interested in purchasing Seafile Professional Edition need to contact Seafile Ltd.. Seafile GmbH / Syncwerk GmbH will no longer offer the Seafile Professional Edition (or software derived from it) to new customers who first contacted them after March, 10th 2017.

PayPal

In June 2016 Seafile GmbH had its payment services from PayPal removed. PayPal had accused Seafile of facilitating the illegal sharing of files and demanded that they monitor file transfers and provide statistical information to PayPal, which Seafile refused to do. Some days later, PayPal reverted its decision and apologised to Seafile, but Seafile said they would drop PayPal in favour of other payment options.

References

External links

* {{Cloud computing Free software for cloud computing Free software programmed in C Free software programmed in Python Free and open-source Android software