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What do you mean "reverse engineering"? Linux and Darwin/Mach are open source, and writing NT filter drivers is extremely well documented (especially for anything MSDN documentation) [1].

Either way, I doubt Dropbox even touches the OS kernel. You can implement all of Dropbox's functionality in userspace using things like Shell32 and file CRUD operations over system calls.

You can't possibly tell me I need to reverse engineer my OS to write a program that downloads and uploads files to the Interwebs? Maybe inotify is the one mystical ingredient...

2007 wasn't exactly the dark ages of computing technology that you make it sound like. BitTorrent was solving the "hard problem" equivalent of Dropbox in 2001, AND it was decentralized :o

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn...




They reverse engineered the Finder to get the DropBox icon onto the Dock with custom functionality:

http://allthingsd.com/20120815/inside-dropboxs-reverse-engin...


Do you have anything a little more technical? I'm curious.

When I messed with Finder, I could get it to do a surprising amount of things just by editing plist files.



I didn't realize they had a hard time getting the DropBox icon onto the Dock. I take it back about YC not funding 'hard tech'.


Sarcasm?


Yes.




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