Month: August 2016

development

Seafile server core changes license to AGPLv3 and will be separated from client source code

From the beginning, the Seafile server and Seafile syncing client’s source code are managed in one repository (https://github.com/haiwen/seafile). We thought this was more convenient since the client and the server share some common data structures (like commits, fs and blocks). The common code can be reused by both components.

But this also introduces some confusion about Seafile’s copyrights. The syncing client uses Git’s index data structure source code, which is under GPLv2. The server code doesn’t rely on GPLv2 code so it doesn’t have to be released under GPLv2. We still release it under GPLv2 so that we could keep the client and the server code in the same repository.

Now as the Seafile project becomes more and more mature and popular, we reconsider our earlier decisions. As a cloud storage server software, we believe the most suitable license for the community server is AGPLv3 instead of the old GPLv2.

Today we announce a separate project for the Seafile server core on github. The code is released under AGPLv3. Future development of Seafile server will be continued on this repository. From version 6.0.1 on, the community server will be built from this repository.

The change of license for the community server doesn’t affect the license of Seafile Professional server. The Seafile servers are released in a dual license model. The community server is in GPL, while the Pro server is in proprietary license.

Product News

Seafile server 6.0.0 beta is ready for testing

We are proud to announce that Seafile 6.0 has been released. Version 6.0 introduces a full screen Web UI and several other improvements. The translations are not ready yet.

Because we have done a significant amount of code cleaning, some minor features may be broken though we have tested as much as we can.

You are welcome to test it and give us feedback.

You can download it from: https://bintray.com/artifact/download/seafile-org/seafile/seafile-server_6.0.0_x86-64.tar.gz

Here is an overview of changes in version 6.0:

Full screen Web UI

If you have a wide screen, the new full screen can take the advantage to show more content in a line. If you have a narrow screen, the new interface can also adapt to it.

Navigation

Change of navigation labels

The navigation label is changed according to feedbacks from users:

  • Mine -> My Libraries
  • Shared -> Shared with me
  • Organization -> Shared with all
  • Groups -> Shared with groups
  • Starred -> Favorites
  • Devices -> Linked Devices

Improve zip downloading by adding zip progress

In the old version, a problem with the zip download is that when the zip takes a lot of time, the web UI does not respond. If the zip task takes a few minutes, the user does not know what is happening.

In version 6.0, the zip task will be performed in the background and the Web UI will show the progress. This greatly improves usability.

Add file comment

In the Seafile old version, there was a function where you could comment on a file. It was actually starting a group discussion with the file as attachment. When we redesigned the group feature in version 5.1, this “group discussion with a file” was removed. But there were some requests and use cases for file comment, so in this version, we added a real file comment feature back.

Other Changes

  • [admin] Add group transfer function in admin panel
  • Remove number of synced libraries in devices page for simplify the interface and concept
  • Update help pages