How to boost the mastodon adoption

I think social networking is one of the very important pillars of an open and free IT world.

I’m personally fascinated by how social media is changing the world. I was involved in the creating creation of the biggest social network in Germany in the 90s. Later in the early 2000s I developed and ran the openDesktop.org network which had social networking features way before Facebook, Twitter and all the other current giants. In KDE I started the Social Desktop initiative to bring social features to desktop applications. In 2016 I was part of the Social Working Group of the W3C as an ‘invited expert’ during the time when we created the ActivityPub specification. And lately we at Nextcloud launched Nextcloud Social as an app to participate in the Fediverse. I always believed in the the ideas behind social networking. Making it possible for people from all over the world to connect and communicate. But it has to be done right.

The Nextcloud product strategy, goals and roadmap

All software needs to have clearly defined goal. Something it wants to achieve. A reason for its existence. For Nextcloud it is the following:

It’s clear that communicating and collaborating through the internet is the future. Some people realised this a long time ago. The rest have realised it now after COVID-19 forced all of us to work, study and learn from home. For Nextcloud this is nothing new. Nextcloud is built by a worldwide distributed community of volunteers who, of course, communicate and collaborate through the internet. Nextcloud GmbH has employees in 15 countries and we work together using Nextcloud.

Open Source is more than licenses

A few weeks ago I was honored to deliver the keynote of the Open Source Awards in Edinburgh. I decided to talk about a subject that I wanted to talk about for quite some time but never found the right opportunity for. There is no video recording of my talk but several people asked me for a summary. So I decided to use some spare time in a plane to summarize it in a blog post.

2018 and 2019

2018 is over and 2019 starts. This is a great opportunity to look back, reflect and to try to look into the future. I predict that 2019 will be a very good year for privacy, open source and decentralized cloud software. Maybe even the mainstream breakthrough of federated and decentralized internet services!

Let me explain why:

The mainstream opinion about centralized services started to change in 2018 and I think this trend will continue in 2019. More and more people see the issue with large, centralized data silos that control more and more of our private lives, democratic processes and society as a whole. Some examples from 2018 where bad news hit the press include:

Nextcloud 14 and Video Verification

Today the Nextcloud community released Nextcloud 14. This release comes with a ton of improvements in the areas of User Experience, Accessibility, Speed, GDPR compliance, 2 Factor Authentication, Collaboration, Security and many other things. You can find an overview here

But there is one feature I want to highlight because I find it especially noteworthy and interesting. Some people ask us why we are doing more than the classic file sync and share. Why do we care about Calendar, Contacts, Email, Notes, RSS Reader, Deck, Chat, Video and audio calls and so on.

Nextcloud Talk is here

Today is a big day. The Nextcloud community is launching a new product and solution called Nextcloud Talk. It’s a full audio/video/chat communication solution which is self hosted, open source and super easy to use and run. This is the result of over 1.5 years of planing and development.

For a long time it was clear to me that the next step for a file sync and share solution like Nextcloud is to have communication and collaboration features build into the same platform. You want to have a group chat with the people you have a group file share with. You want to have a video call with the people while you are collaborative editing a document. You want to call a person directly from within Nextcloud to collaborate and discuss a shared file, a calendar invite, an email or anything else. And you want to do this using the same login, the same contacts and the same server infrastructure and webinterface.

Nextcloud gets End to End Encryption

Today is a special day for Nextcloud and me because Nextcloud gets a cool and important new capability. This is end to end encryption for file sync and share. Nextcloud supports server side encryption for a long time and all file transfer over the internet is encrypted with

TLS/SSL of course. But there is still the need for full end to end encryption to make sure that the data is secure in all scenarios. One

Is doing nothing evil?

Last weekend I attended the openSUSE conference in Nürnberg. This is a really nice conference. Awesome location, great people, and an overall very relaxed atmosphere. I gave a talk about Nextcloud Security and what we plan to do in the future to make hosting a Nextcloud instance even easier and more secure.

I attended the Saturday keynote which triggered a reaction on my side that I wanted to share. This is only my personal opinion and I’m sure a lot of people think differently. But I can’t help my self.

The development of Global Scale

The architecture of Nextcloud is a classic Web Application architecture. I picked this architecture 7.5 years ago because it is very well known and is proven to be scaled relatively easily. This usually works with off the shelf technologies like http load balancers, clusters of Linux webservers and clustered databases.

But for many years users and customers asked for ways to distribute a single instance over several datacenters. A lot of users and customers run organizations that are not in one office or sometimes not even in one country or on one continent. So how can the service run distributed over different hosting centers on different continents?

Nextcloud is about collaboration

Today the Nextcloud community released the Nextcloud 12 beta. The final release will be out later this month. This is a major new step forward. And it is also an interesting release because we are entering a new area for the product.
At the beginning, 7 years ago the focus was clearly file sync and share. Of course this term did not exist at the time or at least I didn’ know it. The task was to syncronize file between all your devices and share it with others.
This is obviously still the core of Nextcloud and Nextcloud 12 comes with all the usual iterative improvements. For example additional security hardening and improved two factor authentication, significant performance improvements especially for big installations, a ton of bugfixes and more powerful sharing features to make sharing easier and more powerful.

Interesting times

I usually don’t write political blog posts, especially if it relates to a country of which I’m not a citizen off nor live in. While I definitely have very clear opinions and views, I want to stay neutral in this blog and only talk about the technology side of things.

It seems that the new US administration is in the process of shaking-up a lot of traditions and regulations, while also redefining the relations between the USA and the rest of the world. Even though a lot of these changes are very relevant to a lot of people on this planet, I want to focus on three topics that directly affect the IT, the free software world and especially my work at Nextcloud.

6 months of Nextcloud

Last Friday was the 6 month anniversary of Nextcloud, a good opportunity to look back and reflect on what we have achieved since we started. I also have some interesting news to share, including that Nextcloud GmbH is a profitable company already!

Half a year ago a most of the ownCloud engineering team including myself started the Nextcloud project. Our goal was to take lessons from the past and create a next generation open source project with a better, more stable company behind it. Those were very ambitious goals but I’m happy to report that things have worked out better then what I was hoping for!

A vision for Nextcloud

In the past few weeks I talked a lot about thing we want to improve in Nextcloud. Fair community involvement, transparency, no CLA and no closed source apps, a better business model, working closer with customers and partners and more. But today I want to talk where I see the future of Nextcloud as a product.

The challenge
Nowadays we are storing more and more of our information in the cloud. And with cloud I mean on a machine that is located somewhere on the internet instead of the local disk. And with we I mean individuals, companies and universities.
We do this because it makes it easier to sync and access all our date to all devices we have. And we use the cloud for sharing of data, social interaction, voice and video communication, email, chat/instant messaging and more.

Nextcloud

This is a big one!

As announced 5 weeks ago I left ownCloud, Inc., The company that I co-founded. Not because I abandoned ownCloud or the idea behind it. Actually the opposite. I don’t want to go into details but there are a lot of things that could have been better at ownCloud Inc.

Usually this is something that could just be ignored. You leave your job and work somewhere else. But ownCloud Inc. is not just a normal company for me. ownCloud own one of the biggest and most important open source projects. This is a critical component of the open source space and super important for the privacy and security of millions of people. And it is also used by a ton of institutions like CERN, Sciebo DB and lots of other bigger companies and organizations.

1000 contributors!

On the ownCloud blog, Jos shared today that the ownCloud community has hit an impressive milestone!

The project I started 6 years ago just got a contribution from the 1000th volunteer who considered ownCloud worth the time and effort to contribute code to! Only a year ago, we were so proud having hit over 550 contributors at our 5 year anniversary. It is stunning how fast ownCloud has continued to grow.

big changes: I am leaving ownCloud, Inc. today

Recently I had to make one of my hardest decisions so far. Because this has an impact beyond myself I want to share this here: I am leaving ownCloud, Inc. today. But, the journey of ownCloud and Frank is not over!

6 years ago until now
I founded the ownCloud project a little over 6 years ago with the goal to enable home users, companies, universities and big enterprises to host their own cloud services and files. In a world with growing threats around security, surveillance and espionage, this idea is becoming more important every day.

9.0 is the biggest ownCloud release so far

I’m super happy to report that ownCloud 9.0 is released today. This is the biggest and most important ownCloud release so far with a ton of performance improvements, bug fixes, cleanup but also new features.

Especially exiting is that fact that more people have contributed to this release then ever before. We also collaborated more with partners then ever. Examples are CERN and AARNET. This is possible because of the open and community oriented development process of ownCloud.

The privacy endgame

It seems that our generation will be known as the generation who decides if people will still have privacy in the future or not. Will people still have the tools to protect their digital lives in the same way their are able to protect their analog lives? Over the centuries people figured out ways to lock their home for strangers, protect their family life, their money transactions, keep their sexual orientation and health record private and protect everything else they didn’t want to share.
The end game about tools that allow us to protect our digital life in the same way has just begun and we all decide how it will end.
The first battle is between the FBI and Apple.  Obviously Apple has a business interest to position itself as the privacy aware alternative to other big IT companies which are in the business of monetizing user data. But this doesn’t make Apples position less right or important. Unfortunately it seems that the public opinion in most of the western world has already  shifted towards a society with more surveillance and less privacy and freedom. This is thanks to the media and politicians who are talking about a possible and diffuse terrorist threads especially in the last 15 years.
Clowns like Donald Trump and John McAfee don’t help either to start a meaningful conversation about core values of our societies.
We need a big broad discussion about the values of our democracies and the free world. There can’t be a real democracy and a free society without privacy. The question is if we really want to give this up in exchange for potential better security through broad surveillance which doesn’t make our lives saver as shown by countless studies.
In addition we in the IT and computer community have to get our act together and deliver tools that are secure, safe and easy to use.
There should be open source and free software alternatives available to all the important use-cases around communication and data sharing and management.
These tools need to be build in a decentralized and federated way to avoid single point of failure or control by one central instance.
We have to stop advertising encryption and security tools that don’t deliver real security but are mainly snake oil.
We have to fix our processes to deliver security fixes and patches to everyone in no time. Android and Linux Distributions have some opportunities for improvements as shown here.
We need funding for key components like OpenSSL, Tor, GPG  and more to avoid the next heartbleed like disaster.

Screen-saver rant

I’m an old guy who is in IT for a long long time. The reason why I love computer and information technology is the constant change, improvements, new technologies, business models, companies, products, use cases appear, have their golden age and disappear again.
I love this reinvention and questioning of the past. This is what makes IT for me more exiting than a lot of other areas of our world.
But from time to time you see things in IT and computers and you wonder, why does this still exist?
One example that I picked for me rant today are screen-savers.
So what are screen-savers?
In the 70s and 80s people used text command line interfaces at the computers and mainly black and white or green CRT monitors. This CRT monitors had a problem. If they show the same interface for a long time like for example Wordstar or Visicalc then the interface is burned into the screen and the screen is basically damaged. This was not good.
Then operating systems introduced a new invention. Screen-savers. A feature so save the screens. They did this by showing animated graphics while the computer is not in use to prevent the burn in effect. This was clever and made some sense for a short period of time.
In the 90s this screen-savers became very popular. People downloaded new ones from the internet, or even paid money to get the very cool and fancy ones.
This is of course a bit idiotic because they only run when you are AWAY from you computer. So the cool animations are only shown when you are NOT looking at your screen. But hey, people loved them.
Then in the late 90s the computer industry invented something new. It was called APM (Advanced Power Management). It allowed the operating system to turn of the computer screen when the computer is not used. Make sense, right? But this is boring and who cares about saving electricity anyways so people still loved their screen-savers.

openDesktop.org. 15 years in review

I launched KDE-Look.org, the first website in the openDesktop.org network nearly 15 years ago. This is a long time and I announced today that I sold the network to Blue Systems. So I think it is time for a look back at how everything started and where we are today.

How it started
I became really interested in Desktop Linux around 1996 when a friend of mine showed me a beta of KDE 1.0 running on SUSE Linux. I was blown away by the fact that is looked as good and powerful as Windows 95. And that it was developed as free software with an open process by a community and not by a company. I started to read the mailinglist, scriped a small build script that compiled the latest repository checkout every night and got slowly more and more involved. On aspect that fascinated me was that it was so flexible. You can use a ton of different free software applications that could all be customized and tweaked in different ways. A big part of that was the themes and artwork that could be used. The leading website to get these themes and tweaks and small patches was themes.org. The problem was that it was constantly down and honestly not very good.

openDesktop.org changes

Today I have very exiting news to share. Effectively January 1 2016, my company hive01 GmbH has been bought by Blue Systems GmbH. hive01 GmbH runs the network of opendesktop.org sites like KDE-Look.org, KDE-Apps.org, GNOME-Look.org, Qt-apps.org and all the other 30 websites

As you might know I have founded the website network 15 years ago and was running it since then. Over the years the websites and the company grew significantly with the help of a great team and two VCs. Today they are one of the biggest and most important resources in the open source space with over 60 million page view a month, 350.000 registered users and over 150.000 uploaded apps and artwork.

My 2015 and looking at 2016

Today 2015 end and 2016 begins. So I want to use the opportunity to look back what happened in the ownCloud world in the last 12 month but also in my personal life.

I’m very thankful to work with so many skilled, friendly and dedicated people in the ownCloud community to push this idea and product forward. This is just amazing.

So what are the most awesome things to look back on?

Why Linux should thank Microsoft and why the future is dark

People in my generation are used to the fact that you can install a new operating system on any computer. But if you look back in the history of computing and look forward towards the future you realize that this is the exception and not the rule.

For a long time hardware and software, at least the operating system part, were sold and used together. The software is already installed on the hardware when you buy it from the manufacturers and can’t easily be replaced because it is tied very closely together. The only exception is the personal computer between the mid 80s until now. When you look at all other computing platforms you see that this is a very unusual exception. Hardware and software are tied very closely together in everything from embedded to mainframes to mobile devices like your iPhone or Android phone.

Say hello to 8.2

Today the ownCloud community releases ownCloud 8.2. 8.2 sounds like a small improvement compared to 8.1 that was released in July. But 8.2 is major release with a ton of improvements which makes this release one of the most important so far. Main new features are:

Next generation Web UI

The web interface of ownCloud was improved in a lot of significant areas. The overall design is way more modern with a lighter font, lighter colors and less visual clutter. We also introduced new UI elements like a new right sidebar and a new actions menu. The sharing dialog, versioning, activities and details with bigger thumbnails are now available in the new sidebar. We also improved compatibility with IE and mobile browsers.

Refugees in Germany

Two weeks ago I visited 10 refugee camps in Germany and talked with a lot of fugitives. Most of them where happy to tell their stories and agreed to be photographed. Here is a photo series of 9 of them.

[envira-gallery id=”556″]
License of the photos is: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
Full photos can be found on 500px.com

User Data Manifesto 2.0 launched

In October 2012 I announced the first version of the User Data Manifesto during the Latinoware Keynote in Brazil. The idea was to define some basic right that all users should have in the digital age. This was still before the Snowden revelations. But it was already very clear that the privacy and security is at risk by cloud services and SaaS solutions that totally ignore the rights and interests of their users. So the idea was to try to define what this rights should be in the internet age.

Announcing the draft Federated Cloud Sharing API

Here you go: link

I believe that federation of cloud services is the next important step for truly secure and flexible file sync and share cloud software. Because of that we are working for a while on the needed technologies and now have the first draft of an open specification ready.
The goal of the Federated Cloud Sharing API is to be a common language for sharing files across different file sharing server implementations. That only works if a wide audience provides input, which is why we started the Open Cloud Mesh initiative and have already been working with and talking about earlier drafts to partners and other open source projects.

A huge step forward by doing 1000 small steps

Today the ownCloud community released ownCloud 8.1. You might think it sounds like a smaller release because we called this 8.1 instead of 9.0 but you’d be wrong. The contributor community hasn’t slowed down, quite the opposite. By the end of last year we decided to do smaller releases instead of huge ones. Because of that we will jump to a major version number only once a year and will increase the minor version number for the other releases. So this one is called 8.1 but it’s a major new version. So what is in 8.1?

Building a platform

From the very beginning ownCloud has had bigger ambitions then just being a file sync and share tool. This is apparent from the name ownCloud. Today, we have more than our documents and photos online. Our social networks and shared thoughts, our appointments and shopping lists, audio and video conversations all happen and are stored somehwere ‘in the cloud’, all connected. You can comment on a song you like for others to see or share an appointment with co workers. ownCloud means to give you a chance to bring all that back under your control!

Scaling

I’ve visited both FOSDEM and SCALE over the last weeks, where spoke with dozens of people and gave talks about ownCloud 8. We’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback on the work we’re doing in ownCloud (thanks!) and that has been very motivating.

Does it scale?

A question which comes up frequently is: “What hardware should I run ownCloud on?” This sounds like a simple questions but if you give it a second thought, it is actually not so easy to answer. I had a small cubox on the booth as a demonstration that this is a way to run ownCloud. But development boards like the Raspberry Pi and the cubox might give the impression ownCloud is only suitable for very small installations – while in reality, worlds’ largest on-premise sync and share deployment has brought ownCloud to 500,000 students! So, ownCloud scales, and that introduces the subject of this blog.

2014 and 2015

In just a few hours 2014 ends. This is a great opportunity to look back at what happened this year in the ownCloud world and in my personal life. This was an absolutely crazy 12-month so this blog post is now way longer that I planed. A huge thanks you to everyone in the ownCloud community. It´s a blast to work together with so many clever and friendly people from all over the world.

Ohio Linux Fest

This Friday the Ohio Linux Fest kicks off in downtown Columbus and I’ll be there! It is my first Linux Fest in the US so I greatly look forward to being introduced in this grand tradition. Of course, I’ll be talking about ownCloud on Saturday the 25, from 13:00 to 14:00 room D142-143.

The title of the talk is “crushing data silos with ownCloud”: helping people liberate their data from the centralized services they have stored it on. I don’t think that a world where most of the personal data of the world is stored on servers of a hand full companies is a good one. ownCloud is, right now, the best way of getting out of that world!
The talk will also cover a few interesting new ideas that we want to do in ownCloud to build a fully federated and distributed solution in the future.

A possible future for PHP

ownCloud is one of the biggest open source project written in PHP if you look into the latest statistics. It is used for the server part of ownCloudas most of you know. We use other technologies like C++ and Qt for the Desktop Clients, Java for the Android app and Objective-C for iOS, JavaScript for the web-interface and more. But the heart of ownCloud is the server component which is using PHP 5.3 or higher..

ownCloud 7 is out!

We just published ownCloud 7!

This awesome release brings many new features. Among them, I’m most excited about the server to server sharing.

Server to server sharing is a first step in true federation of data with ownCloud: you can add a folder shared with you from another ownCloud instance into your own. Next step would of course be to also share things like user accounts and data like chat, contacts, calendar and more. These things come with their own challenges and we’re not there yet, but if you want to help work on it – join us for the ownCloud Contributor Conference in Berlin next month!

Free ownCloud mobile libraries released

ownCloud 6 is here

• 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.

Welcome “ownCloud Documents”

Introducing ownCloud 6

• Activity feed. See what is going on in your ownCloud
• Improved design. Less visual clutter and more space for better focus
• Performance. Improved performance across the board.
• Avatars. People can upload pictures of themselves that augment their interactions, so users are easily recognized by others.
• Previews. Thumbnails for filetypes are shown in the interface.
• Conflict handling. A new web conflict dialog if a file is uploaded that already exists.
• ownCloud App API. Easier development of 3rd party apps, easier access to core functions for app development.
• Share file notification. Send an email if sharing a file or folder.
• Example files for new users. Load new user’s with files, such as a tutorial on how to use ownCloud, which appears when they first log in.
• Sharing REST API. Control sharing from mobile apps and desktop clients
• App management. Improved management of 3rd party apps.
• Bug fixes. A ton of bugfixes went into this release
• Many smaller improvements

Introducing CONTRIBOOK

I wan’t to introduce a small side project of me today that we needed for ownCloud but could be useful for other too. It’s call CONTRIBOOK and I planed to do this for many years. Lately I was sitting in planes and trains a lot so I have some time to finally do the version 1.0 It’s a tool that can be used for community building and showing community activity as we wanted to do on ownCloud.org but it’s very generic and can be used by other open source projects tool.

Thoughts on privacy

There is currently a huge public discussion going on about privacy, what it means in the Internet age, is it important or an outdated concept? Are there exceptions allowed? Does the government have special rights to see private documents and communication of the people? Does the government have the right to keep information about what it is doing private or should the government be 100% transparent? Is security more important than privacy?

The new ownCloud 5 features!

Yesterday I blogged about the ownCloud 5 release in general and I promised to blog today about all the features that are new and improved in ownCloud 5

New design
In ownCloud 5, the main navigation was redesigned to clearly differentiate it from the in-app navigations. This also allows the app more room and thus a better focus on the content of your ownCloud directories. Settings and Log-out menus were combined into a user menu on the top right, which also shows the currently logged in user and makes it more intuitive to use. The settings are further simplified and app-specific settings are moved from personal settings into the relevant apps. To help people get their data synchronized, there is a new first run page linking the desktop & mobile apps as well as documentation how to sync contacts and calendars. This information is also displayed in the personal settings – and makes getting started with ownCloud much easier for a user.

ownCloud 5 released: a vision realized, a vision expanded

new years blog post

In a few hours 2012 ends and 2013 begins. So it is a good opportunity to recap and look back what happend in the past 12 month in the ownCloud world. I must say that is was an awesome year where a lot of things happened that are worth mentioning. A huge thank you to everybody in the ownCloud community and my coworkers at ownCloud Inc. which made all this possible.

The User Data Manifesto

This blog post is about an initiative that I just announced during the Latinoware 2012 keynote here in beautiful Brazil.
As you probably know I care a lot about user data, privacy, cloud and Internet services.

I initiated the open collaboration services standard to build a decentralized social network in 2008 way before it was hip to do it and before Diaspora or tent.io emerged. OCS is not federated as newer protocols but it is distributed, open and not centralized. OCS is used in several free software projects like KDE, MeeGo/Mer, Midgard and others.
In 2010 I started the Bretzn project that tries to build an App Store infrastructure for Linux Application that is not bound to a central server as the ones from Apple, Google, Microsoft or someone else. Everybody can run an own App Store node and contribute to the distributed ecosystem. The Appstream project does also use the Bretzn ideas and OCS to access decentralized data. Gratulations to the first release last week by the way. The idea is that the users don´t have a lock-in effect to one central App Store server.
And 2.5 years ago I started ownCloud that enables users to run an own cloud storage service comparable to Dropbox, Google Drive or Skydrive, but hosted on an own server.

Worldwide ownCloud Developer Meeting in October

New software day

Today we launched the ownCloud 4.0.4 bugfix release and the second version
of ownCloud Business and Enterprise. The ownCloud 4.0 community release a few
weeks ago  brought cool new features like versioning, external filesystems or
encryption but, frankly, was a little rougher than we expected. It seems that
we follow the KDE tradition here where KDE 4.0. was also not the most polished
release ever. 😉

The good news is that the releases today smooth those rough edges and we can
recommend ownCloud 4 now for full production use — bringing the ownCloud 4
features to our enterprise customers and service providers.

ownCloud 4 released

Today the ownCloud community released ownCloud 4. This is an important milestone for us as a community, for the product and for our code base.

So what are the new features?

• File Encryption
• File Versioning
• Mounting of external Filesystems (experimental)
• TODOs App
• Drag & Drop File Uploading
• Shared Calendars
• Calendar categories
• Hugely improved contacts app including groups
• Improved WebDAV, CalDAV, CardDAV compatibility
• Movable Apps
• Improved External App
• Improved Sharing of Files
• Overall Performance Improvements
• System/User Exporting/Importing
• User/Groups support via LDAP/AD
• Viewer for ODF Files
• Improved Photo Gallery
• Improved installation of 3rd Party Apps
• Logging via syslog
• New public API for App developers
• Lots of bug fixes, smaller enhancements and UX improvements.

Isn´t this impressive for only 4 month of development?

What a weekend

Just recovery from our weekend-long ownCloud development meeting — and what a meeting it was.

Held here in the Stuttgart ownCloud offices, myself and 18 ownCloud contributors from across Europe borrowing down on the next version of ownCloud (coming next month) — coding, brainstorming new features and functions and having fun.

We worked on a lot of different features:

Both Parts Win

We want you for ownCloud

• Very good PHP skills
• Good skills of HTML5/CSS/JS
• Good skills of SQL
• Experience with the internals of ownCloud
• Experience with Open Source development
• Located in Germany or the U.S.
• Experience with enterprise technologies like LDAP, SAML, Clustering is a plus.

ownCloud 3 released

Our labor of love is out today and I know you will share my excitement when you spend a little time with Version 3 of ownCloud.

What’s so exciting?

Well, let me start with the extensive polishing the community has done to
the look and feel – and the performance – of the calendar and contact
applications. Besides a completely new and more user-friendly web interface,
new features include repeating events and automatic time zone detection. The
interface of the contacts application is also improved with thumbnails of
contact photos, and the option to export address books or single contacts as
.vcf files. It is now possible to create, edit or delete multiple address
books in ownCloud.

ownCloud Inc. and the ownCloud community

The ownCloud project is 2 years old next month!! Today is an exciting day because today we announce a company as an addition to the open source project to push ownCloud forward. ownCloud Inc. will offer ownCloud services and support to enterprises in addition to to the normal open source version.

ownCloud Inc. will help us to spread ownCloud and free cloud services in general – way more than we could have done without.

ownCloud 2 is released

Today is a really happy and exiting day for me. After one and a half years of work the ownCloud community just released the shiny new version 2 of ownCloud.

ownCloud 2 has a great new userinterface, lot´s of exciting new features like calendar and addressbook syncing, sharing of files, OpenID consumer and provider, a great new mediaplayer with an ampache interface, support for more installable 3rd party applications, a key value storage for KDE applications, integration of desktop notifications and a lot more cool and useful features.
But the most awesome improvement we achieved is our fast growing, creative and friendly developer community. We have over 15 core developers now working on ownCloud and a lot more developer contributing translations, bugfixes, artwork or third party applications.

We have a “Qtest Mobile App Port Contest” winner!

Welcome to the cloud age, Apple

Open letter to german politicians about free software and cloud. (update)

ownCloud update

A lot of cool stuff is happening around ownCloud at the moment. François is working on a super cool new webinterface. It looks really nice.

Login: http://www.kubler.org/owncloud-mockups/login.html
Files : http://www.kubler.org/owncloud-mockups/
Logs : http://www.kubler.org/owncloud-mockups/logs.html
User settings : http://www.kubler.org/owncloud-mockups/user_settings.html

We have a cool new audioplayer so people have easy access to their media from all their devices. This works with Amarok or just your browser. Several people are working on a syncing client for KDE. Is important to have offlice access to your files. This is super cool. I´m totaly amazed by the speed we are moving forward.

Contest deadline extended

2 amazing meetings to change the world

Last week I attended two very interesting developer sprints at the SUSE office in Nürnberg.

More and more people in the Linux world realize that a nice application installer (Application Store) is needed to make the Linux platform more attractive for normal users and third party developers. The current package managers expose way to much complexity to the end users. The normal users doesn´t care about dependencies, libraries and other internals. But the user cares about things like screenshots, description texts, ratings. tags, comments, recommendation from friends and other features which current package managers don´t provide. So the idea grow to build a better tool for finding and installing applications which sits on top of the current package management.

The Qtest Mobile App Port Contest early bird winners are here

It´s amazing that we have already 33 applications ported and submitted for the contest. All the applications are available on Qt-Apps.org and soon on the Ovi store. The jury looked at all the submissions in the last 2 weeks and picked the 5 winners of the early bird contest.

So here are the 5 lucky winners of the early bird competition and an N900 smartphone.

• Quang Pham for 2eat

• Flavio Castelli for rockmarble

  Continue Reading

Beta of the Qt Creator Buildservice Plugin released (Project Bretzn)

Qtest Mobile App Port Contest launched

The Open-PC starts not with one or two but with three models and partners

ownCloud 1.1 released

10 minutes ago I released ownCloud 1.1

I´m really happy with this release. Not only because we have a lot of new features and bugfixes but also because the ownCloud development team is growing and more and more people are contributing to ownCloud.
I gave several presentation about ownCloud in the last few month and I´m trilled by the positive reactions I get. People really seams to like to idea behind ownCloud.

ownCloud 1.0 is here

Linuxtag day one

ownCloud status

ownCloud – development started

www.kde.org shows our community

What´s going on at Camp KDE?

Small Cloud Survey

I will give a presentation at Camp KDE as some of you might know. The topic is KDE and cloud computing. The idea is to give an overview over the advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing compared with native Qt applications. I plan to give some ideas how we as a free software community could combine the best of both world and see what we have to do to create something which is better than Chrome OS combined with the traditional KDE Desktop and still have control over our own data.

openSUSE BuildService Integration, Security and 150000 registered contributors

Intern wanted

Hi,

Open Collaboration Services

I just released the Version 1.4 of the Open Collaboration Services Specification. As usual all the new features are already implemented on all the openDesktop.org sites.

The Social Desktop Winners

Today we are announcing the winners of the Social Desktop Contest. The Social Desktop Contest was launched in June with the goal to bring Web 2.0 ideas and our user and developer community closer to the desktop and foster community development and innovations around the OCS API.

There have been many new ideas and innovations coming from the community in the Social Desktop area and we received a large number of really good submissions. This made it obviously hard for the jury, as you can have only so many winners.

Bringing together APIs and people

Open-PC users choose KDE

The first Open-PC survey is now finished. Over 12,000 people participated in our survey with interesting results: 48% choose KDE as the Desktop. 42% choose GNOME and 9% choose Xfce. 52% chose Amarok as mediaplayer and 88% choose Firefox as default Browser.

You can find the complete survey results here: http://open-pc.com/static/open-pc/open-pc-survey1.php

The second survey started today. Please give us your feedback: http://open-pc.com/survey/

OCS 1.3 is done

10 minutes ago I released the open collaboration services API specification in version 1.3

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  Some api call like person search for example can be access without authentification now.
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  We limit the number of API call from specific IP address to prevent DOS attacks.
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  You can do 50 API call from one IP address every 15min. Or 200 API calls from one IP every 15min if you are a authenticated user. I hope this is enough for everybody.
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  Now users can use the &#8220;show users nearby&#8221; plasmoid without registering.
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  This is a feature request from the Kubuntu guys.
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  All data can optionaly be fetched in JSON if you dont like XML. Just add the format=json parameter. The default and recommended format ist still XML
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  I hope you like the features.
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  By the way. We already have great submissions for the Social Desktop Contest. And I´m sure we will have great social features in KDE 4.4
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  Cheers
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  Frank
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moving dates

Let´s make KDE default in openSUSE

GCDS part two: Social Desktop / Earning Money with freedesktop

So after 4 more days of interesting talks, great parties, BoF Session and inspiring conversations I like this conference even more than last weekend.

GCDS part one: Open-PC

Social Desktop Contest

Today we are launching the Social Desktop Contest. As you know the idea of the Social Desktop is to connect online webservices with desktop applications. We give away great prices to developers who help making this vision reality.

The Open Collaboration Services API got a lot of new features in the past few month and is now stable. The first features will ship with KDE 4.3 but this is only the beginning. Now that the infrastructure is in place we think that it is a good time to open up the development to more developers.

New Event Database

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      Every user is free to register new events e.g. a KDE conference in London, a developer meeting in Berlin or just a little barbecue in a backyard. Your event will be listed in the events database and other users can &#8220;join&#8221; the event.
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      New participants can be invited to take part in events, friends get automatically informed via the friend newsfeed that some of their friends go to an event. The date, a short description and a location is enough to start a new event. Locations get directly displayed via an OpenStreetMap applet provided by the free wiki world map on each event page.
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      The event database is going to be part of the Social Desktop therefore events nearby a user can also be displayed via the Social Desktop Plasmoid for the KDE desktop in the future.
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      Data can also be fetched using the Open Collaboration Services API. Furthermore an integration in Kontact/Kalendar and Evolution is being evaluated at the moment.
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      http://www.openDesktop.org/events/
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      We hope that you like the features.
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      What do you think?
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      Cheers
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      Frank
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openDesktop.org sponsoring project

Hi everyone,

today, we are launching our openDesktop.org sponsoring project.
Aim of this project is to help openDesktop.org, KDE-Look.org, KDE-Apps.org and the other sites to keep it as you know it today and to help us to investigate into further new features, improvements, hosting and projects for our community.

So what exactly is the openDesktop.org sponsoring you may ask. Well, the openDesktop.org sponsoring is a platform for companies and enterprises which want to prominent present their products, services and job offers on the openDesktop.org sites to a large audience of Open source and IT experts. Advantages as a sponsor are free premium job offers, ad banners, mentionings in blogs, news and many more.
At the moment we have over 90 million page views and 2.6 million unique visitors per month.

Knowledge base feature

Hi everyone,
we’ve noticed that there are just few people who are using our knowledge base/help feature. Many don’t even know that we have implemented this feature. A short reminder: every application on openDesktop.org network e.g. kde-apps.org or KDE-look.org can have its own small user generated FAQ. If you have a question or a problem with an application you can post your question together with a description and up to three screenshots. Other can help you with the problem via comments or share tips. And if you found the solutions you can add the answer to your question and mark the problem as solved. The owner of the application has full edit and delete right to the FAQ entries for his application.

Premium job board and Server-Apps.org

Last year we announced the launch of our new job board for Linux and IT Experts. www.openskillz.com. and www.opendesktop.org/jobs

The idea is to help Linux experts and open source companies to come together. The job offers and candidates are accessible and integrated in all websites of the openDesktop.org network. For example KDE-Look.org, Qt-apps.org or GNOME-Look.org.
Everybody can publish job offers or their own CV for free. The job board is not only for useful for companies and job seekers. Free software projects can also post open tasks and jobs for free. For example if a free software developer or projects needs some artwork or somebody to test the app or write documentation you can post an open job on the board. The job board can also be used to find freelancers or interns.

Oporto and other stuff

I´m back from the Tokamak II in Oporto. It was a very interesting, productive and fun meeting. I find it very motivating to work in such a group of clever people on real innovation. By the way 14 developers from 8 countries.

OpenID:
From today on we support login via OpenID on the openDesktop.org network. So KDE-Look.org, KDE-Apps.org, openDesktop.org and the other sites are now officially OpenID consumers. You can associate one or more OpenIDs with your useraccount. Please go to the Settings page to configure your OpenIDs.

openDesktop.org experiments with marketplace

We started an interesting experiment. From today applications, artwork or document templates can be uploaded to openDesktop.org, KDE-Look.org and KDE-Apps.org for free downloading as before. But starting today, you may also select to sell them to users on the Marketplace of openDesktop.org. We try to do this in a way which is in line with the free software spirit

The Marketplace/App Store on OpenDesktop.org does not take a commission on sales. So 100% goes directly to the developer. It also doesn’t dictate which applications, artwork and documents may be listed. Instead, all applications and artwork are welcomed, including binaries of free software, icon designs, wallpapers and document templates. This is new for the free software world.

200.000 download per day

Last week we at the openDesktop.org network broke through the 200,000 downloads per day barrier. So over 200,000 applications, themes and wallpapers are downloaded per day. We have over 80 million page impressions per month at the moment and are still growing strong.

My Perfect Desktop (part 1 – documents)

Over the last few month I though a lot about the future of desktop operating systems and how a perfect desktop operating should look like in my opinion.

After discussing this stuff with friends I decided to blog about the ideas. Please post your comments and ideas.

This is strictly from a user point of view. So this is not about technologies but about user experience.

Lots of this stuff is already possible in recent linux distributions. But it is not enabled by default, requires a lot of technical understanding or even custom scripting. I think all this functionality should be available and enabled by default so that an average user can use this without much learning. No difficult system administration should be needed.

free job board, redesign and open collaboration services.

draft 3 is finished

I just finished the draft 3 of the open collaboration services specifications.  I got a lot of input from developers and users so the new version is more RESTfull, better documented and has more features. At the moment the services PERSON, FRIEND, MESSAGE, ACTIVITY and CONTENT are specified.

Akademy rocks

Like every year Akademy is really fun. It´s great to meet old and new friends and discuss KDE, new ideas and technologies.

server migration done

The migration to a new server is finally done. everything should be a lot faster and more stable now.

Servers Servers

As you noticed the openDesktop.org websites are very slow at the moment. We even had a complete server crash yesterday. I´m very sorry for the problems.

Starting to Blog

A lot of people asked me to start blogging. It seams many people are interested in news about the openDesktop.org network and the other community sites like KDE-Look.org, KDE-Apps.org, GNOME-Look.org or Xfce-Look.org.