MediaFire, a popular cloud storage service, has launched its first open source toolkit for Linux. The toolkit includes support for Ubuntu, Debian and FreeBSD and includes a number of tools aimed at the Linux and open source communities. A FUSE module and a shell-like interface (similar to FTP) represent two of the tools that offer developers a simple but robust way to manage files online.

"As avid Linux users, we are huge fans of the open source community, and are excited to open up our award-winning cloud storage service to a new generation of developers," Brent Bucci, MediaFire's vice president of developers, told ProgrammableWeb.

As with many tools of this nature, the new toolkit was born out of a business need personal to MediaFire. In the blog announcement, Bryan Christ, vice president of software engineering, explained that the origin of the toolkit stemmed from his need to access his account without a browser. Since creating the tools for internal purposes, the MediaFire team has relied heavily on them. MediaFire is now anxious to share its resources with the open source community and looks forward to seeing what the developer community can build.

MediaFire says it conducted multiple successful tests on Debian, Ubuntu and FreeBSD systems. Although tests were limited to the three systems, the code should work on any POSIX system. While the toolkit remains in its first iteration, the team has already collected a sizable list of items and improvements for the new offering. The MediaFire team encourages feedback from the open source community and looks forward to engaging developers. The kit is available at GitHub.