SparkleShare is an impressive open source project that has an interesting twist of file synchronization.This tool was created when some designers at a GNOME Usability Hackfest came to the conclusion that the open source world was lacking proper collaboration tools for sharing designs. Tools like Dropbox are free and available for Linux, but are still linked to a proprietary service that doesn’t give you full control over your data.
So SparkleShare was born; and instead of basing it on a proprietary storage system and synchronization service, it was based entirely on Git. Git handles the data storage, and history, and two computers can be synchronized using simple Git commands. There are numerous free and paid Git hosts, and SparkleShare supports GitHub, BitBucket, and Gitorious out of the box.
This gives users a choice of where to host their code, and even otherwise hosting your own Git service is not difficult since it is open source and free. For synchronization services that have to be private, within a company for example, a privately hosted Git instance can be used.
The developers of SparkleShare have also simplified the process of setting up your own host for SparkleShare with a tool called Dazzle, which is open source and available on GitHub.
SparkleShare also supports the creation of other backends than Git, so it is possible to write a Mercurial backend, or even a backend based on something like Dropbox.
You can find out more about SparkleShare, and download it from their website sparkleshare.org. It is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OSX. If you are looking for the code, it can be found on GitHub.
