kardos

So how is this different than the send file feature that IRC/ICQ/MSN, etc, has had for .... decades?

Aww, I was eagerly anticipating a hypnotoad link.

Even when a software's code is provided, most users rely on the community to check for back doors and vulnerabilities. You basically trust the community. This method is obviously not perfect. That's why we have seen so many bugs in OpenSSL these last couple of years.

If your software becomes as polished as say, TrueCrypt, you may well see a proper audit done. That would solidify you as the gold standard for secure file transfers.

Without revenue, we cannot take rash decisions and open source everything since it could put us in a difficult situation in the future.

Well, that's going to sink you with privacy concerned early adopters who look at it and say "there is no way to know if this is more secure than dropbox", and immediately classify it as "yet another closed source file transfer thingy".

There are a lot of people rushing to build 'secure' privacy respecting versions of the known-backdoored things recently - spideroak.com, sync.com, are good examples of dropbox replacements. Both are promising "software to be open sourced in the future", yet it hasn't happened. So they offer essentially nothing over dropbox, so cannot rise from obscurity.

However, we are still a startup with no clear economic model.

Fair enough. It looks to me that your main asset is the easy-to-use client. Converting that into money will be a challenge. I wish you luck!

Cool, sounds like this will be robust. I appreciate the reply!

One of the biggest problems with peer to peer in the past (MSN, etc) is firewalls. Have you guys found a way to make it work when there are no open ports, that is, both clients "firewalled"?