I’m supper happy to announce the release of ownCloud 6 today.
ownCloud 6 is a special release in several way. The community did an incredible job with improving ownCloud in several important areas.
- Quality. ownCloud is a very fast moving project so it is super important to balance innovative new features with rock solid stability. The ownCloud community introduced several important techniques to improve the quality. As a result we fixed a huge amount of bugs in this release. Also some very old and annoying issues are finally gone. I think this is very important for a lot of users. We will release a series of bugfix releases for in the next few month to iron out the last remaining issues. This is a big step forward.
- Performance. The performance of ownCloud 6 improved significantly over older versions. The overall file-handling is faster and more optimized. In some areas, like the mounting of SFTP, CIFS or Dropbox servers, the performance improved over 10x. This is great for people who run their ownCloud server on a small device like a Raspberry Pi or on a big cluster to serve hundred thousands of users.
- Innovation It was always to goal of ownCloud to deliver innovative features to our users and to be the innovation leader in our space. I don’t want to repeat my previous blog posts where I announced the great new features of version 6. Just look at my posts here. http://stage.karlitschek.de/2013/10/introducing-owncloud-6/ and http://stage.karlitschek.de/2013/10/welcome-owncloud-documents/
- But I have to say that I’m especially proud about what we did with ownCloud Documents. This is a feature that doesn’t exist anywhere else. Other collaborative editing solutions are 1.) proprietary or 2.) don’t run on your own hardware or 3.) don’t work on top of normal files that you can also sync and share or 4.) a combination of all of this. I belief that this features is super important for the future and the huge response we got from users clearly show that I’m not alone here. This is only the first version of this feature of course. We will keep on improving and polishing it in the future.
Please look at http://owncloud.org/six for more information about ownCloud 6.
ownCloud is more important now then every if you follow the latest surveillance and espionage revelations. A free and self hosted alternative to the big proprietary cloud services is essential for the future.
Thanks to the awesome ownCloud community who builds all this. Thanks a lot to everyone who contributed to this great release. And thanks to ownCloud Inc. who sponsors the development of free software.
ownCloud is built by a great community with a completely open development process. Everyone is welcome to join us and help to build software which can protect all of us from surveillance. Please join us at https://owncloud.org if you want to make the world a little bit better.
Frank