Silicon Valley startups might not think it's a big deal, but being able to run entirely on a private network (either "behind a firewall", or an entirely disconnected network) is pretty huge. Without AeroFS, your choices today kind of suck, especially for 10-500 person companies (or bigger companies where your corporate option sucks or isn't available). Dropbox doesn't work if you care about security. You're left with various forms of SMB crap, more backend-type things like iSCSI, or either blasts from the past (nfs, afs) or science projects (zfs).
I don't know where you get the idea that there are not good choices for on-premise, file share and sync solutions. There are products like filecloud (http://www.getfilecloud.com) which have been solving this pain very nicely.
On iOS, even AeroFS kind of sucks, due to some horrible decisions Apple made. Basically every app has to adopt every storage provider's API, and right now, only Dropbox and maybe Box have any takeup. (and iCloud, of course, but iCloud sucks a lot, isn't self-hostable or even enterprise hostable, and is horrible.)
I've been struggling to find a good Dropbox alternative for on premise. Aerofs is missing the option to share a folder/file through a link to non-aerofs-users which is vital to our workflow.
This filecloud is interesting, thanks. Any other product that you are aware of? I thought I had found them all, but you never know :)
Filosync (my product) has share via link to non-users (users who don't have the client app installed). http://www.filosync.com
(I'm the guy who wrote Arq, the Mac backup app, too).
If you are willing to trust your privacy to strong crypto (something you probably would want to use even on a private network), ObjectiveFS (https://objectivefs.com) might be worth looking into.
You mean (for an AWS S3 backed system): trust your privacy to an application binary (or, potentially, source which might get audited periodically, and that the toolchain and binary correspond to that...), plus to any OS or application bugs at other layers...
Being able to work on a totally disconnected network is different. Maybe if you could support Eucalyptus's S3 or another backing store like that it would be equivalent (and that might be interesting).
I'm sure plenty of people are fine with an Internet-connected, AWS S3 backed system, though, especially with additional crypto.
Yeah. We do a lot of security work and have clients inside the Federal government. We run Github inside our firewall. Something like this would be pretty rad, I just emailed it to one of our infrastructure guys.
I'm also trying to get it looked at by some federal customers; if you run into any problems, let me know (I've gone through the DOD ATO process for a Linux-based appliance; civ agencies aren't usually as weird but...).
