We evaluated WebDAV on a hosted system and various open-source solutions (like hosted Alfresco) as alternatives to a company-wide Dropbox license. The fact is that if you want to have anything more sophisticated than a simple fileserver (e.g. different folder permissions, multiple file versions, somewhat sane conflict resolution), there is no good free alternative at this point if you have remote people --if you've heard of one, I'd love a pointer.

For a local LAN, I'd stick with Alfresco on a decent box, but Alfresco falls apart on remote connections, and plain WebDAV is too slow / buggy.

In the end we went with Egnyte. It's not without its faults (buggy iOS client for one, and the Windows clients need some optimization), but it does more than Dropbox/Box.net/Sugarsync/Syncplicity, works great for SOHOs and it's actually cheaper than a VPS that can handle Alfresco and the like.

Why not? isn't a programming language a big library of sorts anyway? should you keep supporting every bad design decision for ever and ever?

Python has been extremely conservative about both introducing and deprecating features (the __future__ import is genius). Python 3 had to stay within the rational side of the Perl-6 line, and I believe they pulled it off.

If you're gonna go back to that era, someone needs to mention the great shareware FTP archives of the pre-Web internet: wustl.edu, garbo.uwasa.fi, simpnet (? it's been too long).

Am I the only one who kept checking the READMEs for new pointers by the maintainers? I probably downloaded way too many games on the recommendation of obscure Finnish professors :-)

More like a 3rd of that, unless you assume that every man, woman and child regardless of age, owns and operates a PC.

Desktop Linux a marginal market niche of enthusiasts who will continue to consume it regardless of competitive advantage (i.e. either because of politics or because they need a commodity Unix-like OS on their desktops). That means that as a commercial alternative Linux is dead, unless your target market is that same enthusiast market --after all people still sell software for the Amiga.

The larger question that I don't see debated anywhere is: is for-profit open-source software development dead? Exclude the service providers (like RedHat) and 1-2 politically motivated success stories (Firefox; more of an ad service than a software vendor anyway), and who are the software vendors who are making money off of open source?

They explicitly states that they looked at Twisted and chose to write something more user-friendly. Having looked at Twisted (3-4 years ago though) and at Tornado's samples and benchmarks I think they succeeded. Twisted seems to be going the way of Zope: an interesting platform that did everything its own way and shut itself out from the rest of the Python universe, eventually losing relevancy.

I think a Tornado/Django mashup (Tornado infrastructure, Django front-end/application bootstrapping) would be realllly interesting....

Your setup sounds very interesting and close to what I've been looking for for ages. Is that something you setup yourself? are there services out there that will set something like that up for a small business? links or pointers?

The whitespace issue is a red-herring: most people get used to it quickly and it's not as strict as it sounds (you can mix-and-match tabs and spaces, as long as you are consistent for each *block*; not even an entire .py file). There's two real-world problems with it: copy-and-paste and generating Python code. Both are much less common than looking at badly-formatted code that it takes a bit to mentally parse which brace-delineated languages have.