Wednesday: Release Party in Berlin!

On wednesday is our Nextcloud meetup and - Nextcloud 11 will be released, so let's make it a release party! Bring some snacks if you like, let's drink a beer or two, get our servers upgraded perhaps.

See and RSVP here:

https://www.meetup.com/nextcloud-berlin/events/235596178/

When: Wednesday, December 14, 2016 7:00 PM

Where: C-Base, Rungestraße 20, 10179 Berlin

We're in the main room. C-Base is at the river, all the way to the end from the street. You're there if you get geeky tingles from the murals :D

I look forward to seeing you there, everyone's invited! That includes KDE friends, by the way, would be fun to see the bunch of you! You can RSVP in the comments here or on meetup.com...

CU there!

3 alternative reasons why you should test Nextcloud 11 Beta

On the Nextcloud blog I just published about the beta for Nextcloud 11. The release will deliver many improvements and is worth checking out in itself, plus I put a nice clickbait-style title and gave three reasons to test it.

But I actually have some more reasons to test. You see, Nextcloud is one of the tools we need to keep our democracy working. As Frank notes on his home page:

"Privacy is the foundation of democracy"

And he is completely right. So, here are three different reasons why you should test (and help improve) Nextcloud:

1. The USA is making a massive swing towards even more spying

Obama has done nothing to curb the growth of the NSA and the scope of its operations. Secret laws spiked under his watch. Many of the folks about to be put in power by President-elect Trump favor more spying, including on US citizens, expansion of the NSA, a crackdown on whistleblowers and more. Trump's pick for CIA director calls for Snowden's execution. For what I can only guess must be giving proof of illegal government spying to dangerous terrorists like the Washington Post and the Guardian, who proceeded to win a Pulitzer prize by disclosing this information irresponsibly to the US public.

In general, as somebody who changes his stance on hugely important and complicated issues like torture in under an hour, it is impossible to predict what Trump will do with the most powerful spying agency in the world under his control, but his appreciation for dictatorial figures like Kim Jong Il and Putin gives plenty cause for concern.

2. Britain isn't doing much better

I wrote about the Snoopers' charter just some days ago - this piece of legislation goes further than any earlier piece of spying law. It allows not only passive spying but also actively hacking devices from citizens.

3. Nor is Europe

The UK is not alone. Since Snowden, Europe has complained a bit about the NSA but seems to simply follow suit, rather than doing anything about it. Germany is even introducing a bill that will allow spying on foreign journalists.

Help out!

So, how can you help? Well, test Nextcloud 11 Beta, obviously. Help others to use it, get them involved. But it goes beyond Nextcloud - promote the use of and help improve tools like Tor, Signal and others, or democracy is screwed.

Edit: updated the blog 

Brittain’s Snoopers charter threatens your privacy

pic from the ZDNet article

The United Kingdom this week passed the so called Snoopers Charter, a law which forces UK internet providers to store the browsing history of UK citizens for a full year. You, your family, visitors or any devices in your household which have been hacked (the government is now allowed to do that, by the way) better not visit anything bad as the government can get their hands on this data quite easily. What does this mean and what can you do?

An attack on privacy

There is a global siege on privacy. Governments all over the world have introduced legislation (sometimes secret) which forces email, internet or data storage providers to track what you do and make that data available to their governments. This, of course, also means third parties who gain access to the storage systems can see and abuse it. And because so many of us have put so much of our data at just a few providers, we're at great risk as events like last week's shutdown of hundreds of Google accounts did show.

While Google, Dropbox and others lure customers in with 'free' data storage and great online services, governments benefit from centralized data storages as it makes it easy for them to hack in or demand data from these companies.

Why this surveillance?

While governments usually claim they need access to this data to find terrorists or child pornography, experts point out that it will not be helpful at all. As multiple experts (even internally) put it, growing the haystack makes it harder to find the needle. Intelligence agencies are swamped with data and nearly every terrorist attack in western states over the last decade took place despite the agencies having all information they would have needed to prevent it. The Paris attackers, for example, coordinated their attack using plain SMS messages. The Guardian thus rightly points out that:

"Paris is being used to justify agendas that had nothing to do with the attack"

which has become a familiar refrain after nearly every terrorist attack.

Indeed, we all know the argument But you have nothing to hide, do you? and indeed, we probably don't. But some people do, so they'll try to avoid being seen. That being illegal won't change their behavior...

And as Phill Zimmermann, the inventor of the PGP encryption pointed out:

"When privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy"

So not terrorists. Then what?

Experts agree that the vast majority of these surveillance and anti-privacy laws have little or no effect on real criminals. The crime syndicates, corrupt politicians and large corporations evading taxes and anti-trust/health/environmental laws, they DO have something to hide, and thus they would use encryption or avoid surveilled communication methods even if it were outlawed.

However, ordinary citizens, including grass-roots local activists, charitable organizations, journalists and others, who DO have nothing to hide, would be surveilled closely. And with that information, the real criminals mentioned earlier - crime syndicates, corporations or corrupt politicians - would have weapons in hand to keep these citizens from bothering them. Whistle blowers can be found out and killed (like in Mexico), journalists can be harassed and charged for trivial transgressions (like was recently done at the US pipeline protest) and charities can be extorted.

What can we do?

Luckily, there are initiatives like the Stanford Law Schools' Crypto Policy Project which aim to train, for example, journalists in the use of encryption. Tools and initiatives like Signal, PGP email encryption, Let's Encrypt and Nextcloud provide the ability for users to protect themselves and their loved ones from surveillance. More importantly, these at the same time making it harder and more costly to conduct mass surveillance.

There is nothing wrong with governments targeting criminals with surveillance but just vacuuming up all data of all citizens that might, some day, be used is a massive risk for our democracy. We all have a responsibility to decentralize and use tools to protect our privacy so those who need it (press, activists and others) have a place to hide.

Get started with Nextcloud App development in 6 easy steps!

The brand new app scaffolding tool in our app store

Last night, Bernhard Posselt finished the app scaffold tool in the app store, making it easy to get up and running with app development. I was asked on twitter to blog about setting up a development environment, so... here goes.

What's simpler than downloading a zip file, extracting it and running a command in the resulting folder to get an Nextcloud server up on localhost for hacking?

Yes, it can be that simple, though it might require a few minor tweaks and you have to make sure to have all Nextcloud dependencies installed.

Note that this is useful if you want to develop an Nextcloud app. If you want to develop on the Nextcloud core, a git checkout is the way to go and you'll need some extra steps to get the dependencies in place, get started here. Feedback on this process is highly appreciated, especially if it comes with a pull request for our documentation of course ;-)

Step 1 and Two: Dependencies

• Install PHP and the modules mentioned here
  Your distro should make the installation easy. Try these:
  
  • openSUSE: zypper in php5 php5-ctype php5-curl php5-dom php5-fileinfo php5-gd php5-iconv php5-json php5-ldap php5-mbstring php5-openssl php5-pdo php5-pear php5-posix php5-sqlite php5-tokenizer php5-xmlreader php5-xmlwriter php5-zip php5-zlib
  • Debian: apt-get install php5 php5-json php5-gd php5-sqlite curl libcurl3 libcurl3-dev php5-curl php5-common php-xml-parser php5-ldap bzip2
• Make Nextcloud session management work under your own user account.
  Either change the path of php session files or chmod 777 the folder they are in, usually something like /var/lib/php (debian/SUSE) or /var/lib/php/session (Red Hat).

The Final Four Steps

• Download the latest Nextcloud zip file.
• Extract it in a folder where you want to get going.
• Enter the folder and execute: php -S localhost:5000
• Visit http://localhost:5000 in your browser

Nextcloud should present you with its installation steps! Give your username and password and you're up and running with SQLite.

Start with the app

Now you create a subfolder in the nextcloud/apps with the name of your app and put in a skeleton. You can generate an app skeleton really easy: use the scaffolding tool, part of our new app store for Nextcloud 11!

It's probably wise to now get going with the app development tutorial here. This isn't updated for the scaffolding tool yet, so you'll have a head start here. Be sure to check out the changelog, we try to make sure the latest changes are noted there so even if we didn't manage to fully update the tutorial, you can find out what will and won't work in the changelog. Also, be sure to update the links to get the latest dev doc - this all links to 11, once that is out it is probably better to directly target 12 and so on.

Help and feedback

Your input is very much welcome! If you run through these steps and get stuck somewhere, let me know and I'll update the documentation. Or, of course better still, do a pull request on the documentation right in github. You don't even have to do a full checkout, smaller fixes can easily be done in the web interface on github.

Last but not least, ask questions on our forums in the app dev channel or on IRC. Here is the Nextloud development IRC chat channel on freenode.net, also accessible via webchat.

Thanks, good luck, and have fun building Nextcloud apps!

Akonadi/KMail issues on Tumbleweed?

So if you, like me, have experienced how smoothly Akonadi deals with crashes and think it is still annoying, there's a solution. The problem is caused by Xapian which creates some nice backtraces but until it is fixed you are stuck with a crash every ~minute.

The solution is in this email from Christian Boltz:

I created a repo with the previous version of libxapian, and akonadi-* and baloo linkpac'd from Factory (so rebuilt against the old libxapian): https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/home:cboltz:branches:openSUSE:Factory

Packages at http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cboltz:/branches:/openSUSE:/Factory/standard/

Since I installed these packages (using zypper dup --from), I didn't see any akonadi crashes.

If someone wants to use the fixed packages _now_: I'll keep the repo as long as it's useful for me ;-) -> this is clearly caused by the libxapian update (libxapian22 -> libxapian30)

In other words, you fix it this way:

zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cboltz:/branches:/openSUSE:/Factory/standard akonadi-fix
zypper ref
zypper lr
Now find the number of the new repository (akonadi-fix) and:
zypper dup --from 4
(where 4 is the number of the repo in my case).

Then OK the result and done, the mail client which, despite all its issues, continues to be the only one I can stand working with is smooth sailing again ;-)

Oh, to fix the mess Xapian made of the database, you probably should stop akonadi and remove the search DB, it will get re-indexed:
akonadictl stop
rm -rf ~/.local/share/akonadi/search_db
rm ~/.config/.baloorc
akonadictl start


Greetings from #Akademy2016 by the way!

Kickstarting conversations with lightning talks.

A lot of people are coming to the Nextcloud conference to discuss ideas they have with others and I've been telling them to submit a lightning talk. As that is the idea of the lightning track on Saturday and Sunday: present yourself and the project you (want to) work on, inspire, share ideas. That way, others can then find you and talk to you afterward!

Last year I wrote a longer article about that on opensource.com, but this is the gist of it: it is a conversation kickstarter! Our event is very hands-on (bring your laptop, we say!) and the program is mostly there to facilitate the natural flow of ideas and code.

So we have three kinds of sessions:

• Keynote = inspiration. Everyone joints to listen to a fascinating story! Our keynote speakers are Karen and Jane.
• Lightning talks = sharing. Everyone in one room listens to what others are thinking about, working on or inspired by. Then, after, you look each other up and start talking and doing! Think 'unconference'.
• Workshops = learning and collaborating. They're coding, interactive, either teaching/learning or more "let's work on X for an hour together".

The event starts in two weeks at the TU Berlin: September 16-23 so it is time to book your trip. If you care about open source, privacy-protecting cloud services it is a great place to find like-minded folks!

What's coming?

Besides the keynotes by Karen Sandler (Managing DIrector at SFC) and Jane Silber (CEO of Canonical) We have some 30 sessions already submitted, just a selection:

• Nextcloud Security by Lukas Reschke
• Enterprise grade two factor authentication with Nextcloud by Cornelius Kölbel
• Upcoming features of Android Nextcloud by Tobias Kaminsky
• Nextcloud Scalability with a concept design for 10.000 users by Dennis Pennings (Friday program!)
• Installing NextCloud with SSL/TLS in less than 5 minutes on UBOS by Johannes Ernst
• MySQL Database Scalability by Oli Sennhauser (Friday program!)
• Next generation of federation by Björn Schießle (Friday program!)
• Theming your Nextcloud by Julius Haertl
• Collabora Online by Michael Meeks
• Performance Testing at Nextcloud by Morris Jobke

More still coming, I know Cornelius Schumacher wanted to talk about the importance of privacy-protecting cloud services (if his family can miss him for the weekend...) and I still have some other talks to approve in the queue.
The gist of it is that we'll have a lot of technical people, the folks who wrote Nextcloud as well as many others who contributed and have been using it, from home users to enterprise and educational or government agencies - all together to discuss and work on where our technology is going.

Oh, and we have a surprise on Friday afternoon. ;-)

Check it out and see you there!

Latest attacks on privacy...

With the EU (in this case France and Germany) gearing up for another attack on privacy I'm quite happy and proud to have been part of the release of Nextcloud 10!

Privacy

It is the usual story: we should disallow companies from using perfect end to end encryption and force them to insert backdoors against terrorists.

Not that it would help - that's been discussed extensively already but in short:

• If you have nothing to hide, you'll use a backdoored app and you're vulnerable to foreign (and your own) governments, terrorists (!), criminals and others who can abuse your data in more ways than you can imagine.
• If you have something to hide, you can use 1000 different tools to do so and there is nothing government can do about that so you won't use a backdoored app.
• And note that government has failed to even use fully unencrypted information to stop terrorist attacks so perhaps we should first see if they can actually get their act together there.

Now yes, backdooring all commonly used encryption apps will help a BIT, essentially only with the low level, common crime. So you might catch the dude who broke into your house and bragged about it to his friends over Whatsapp. You won't catch the terrorists plotting with Al Qaida (or whatever the terrorist organization du-jour) to blow up a train because they can simply get one of the many solutions out there to protect themselves.

Nor will you catch corrupt politicians or big companies doing nasty stuff, though I am quite certain the laws will be written in such a way that you can use them to go after people who actually try to expose such politicians or companies.

And I'm also quite certain companies will use this as an excuse to not implement proper protection in their products so you can continue to stop pacemakers remotely or disable the brakes in cars over the internet.

Generally, laws targeting encryption and terrorism do more to harm whistleblowing than terrorism and are thus promoting corruption and bad, unsecure products.

These laws will literally cost lives. Not save any.

And it is exactly why Frank started ownCloud and why we continue to develop that vision at Nextcloud. And keep developing new features, like the File Access Control app which can provide an extra protective layer around your data. I for one certainly can use that app and exactly in the way described in that blog! So much for 'enterprise only features'.


Get it and migrate today. You and your data deserve it!

FrOSCon and the future of private clouds

This Saturday I'll talk at FrOSConabout the future of private clouds and how Nextcloud is pushing that.

Frank won't make it, sadly, as he's in Denmark speaking at another event. Or somewhere else, his travel is a bit crazy lately ;-)

Future of private clouds

Frank blogged last week about a vision for Nextcloud and we've been thinking and discussing this at our hackweek with about 30 community members as well. It was quite amazing to bring so many people together and discuss these things!

Afterwards we've brought most of the topics to our forums or github, including our ambitious Nextcloud 11 roadmap. I'll certainly talk about some of those things this weekend at FrOSCon:

• Communication integration
• New app store
• New updater
• Federation

And more. Today or tomorrow we'll release a RC of Nextcloud 10 and I'll discuss what we've done there as well, what is new and improved, small and big.

If you like to get involved in the 'future', join us at our conference!

Migrating to Nextcloud 9

Now that Nextcloud 9 is out, many users are already interested in migration so I'd like to address the why and how in this blog post.

Edit: Nextcloud 10 is out with loads of unique features. We now also have a client! You can find out about client account migration here.

Why migrate

Let's start with the why. First, you don't have to migrate yet. This release as well as at least the upcoming releases of own- and Nextcloud will be compatible so you'll be able to migrate between them in the future. We don't want to break compatibility if we can avoid it!

Of course, right now Nextcloud 9 has some extra features and fixes and future releases will introduce other capabilities. With regards to security, we have Lukas Reschke working for us. However, we promise that for the foreseeable future we will continue to report all security issues we find to upstream in advance of any release we do. That means well ahead of our usual public disclosure policy, so security doesn't have to be a reason for people to move.

Edit: Nextcloud 10 comes with far more features on top of this. For Nextcloud 11 we have a ambitious road map already but we'll still enable migration from ownCloud 9.1 to Nextcloud 11 so you can migrate at your leisure!

Migration overview

If you've decided to migrate there are a number of steps to go through:

• Make sure you have everything set up properly and do a backup
• Move the old ownCloud install, preserving data and config
• Extract Nextcloud, correct permissions and put back data and config
• Switch data and config
• Trigger the update via command line or the web UI

Note that we don't offer packages. This has been just too problematic in the past and while we might offer some for enterprise distributions, we hope to work together with distributions to create packages for Nextcloud 9 and newer releases. Once that is done we will of course link to those on our installation page.

There are other great resources besides this blog, especially this awesome post on our forums which gives a great and even more detailed overview of a migration with an Ubuntu/NGINX/PHP7/MariaDB setup.

Edit: With regard to packages, there are now packages for CentOS and Fedora and other distributions will likely follow soon. See our packages repository if you want to help!

Preparation

First, let's check if you're set up properly. Make sure:

• You are on ownCloud 8.2.3 or later
• Make sure you have all dependencies
• Your favorite apps are compatible (with ownCloud 9), you can check this by visiting the app store at apps.owncloud.com
• You made a backup

Once that's all done, time to move to the next step: cleaning out the old files.

Removing old files

In this step, we'll move the existing installation preserving the data and configuration.

• Put your server in maintenance mode. Go to the folder ownCloud is installed in and execute sudo -u www-data php occ maintenance:mode --on (www-data has to be your HTTP user). You can also edit your config.php file and changing 'maintenance' => false, to 'maintenance' => true,.
• Now move the data and config folder out of the way. Best to go to your webserver folder (something like /var/www/htdocs/ and do a mv owncloud owncloud-backup

Deploying Nextcloud

Now, we will put Nextcloud in place.

• Grab Nextcloud from our download page or use wget: wget https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/nextcloud-9.0.50.zip
• Optional: you can verify if the download went correct using our MD5 code, see this page. Run md5sum nextcloud-9.0.50.zip. The output has to match this value: 5ae47c800d1f9889bd5f0075b6dbb3ba
• Now extract Nextcloud: unzip nextcloud-9.0.50.zip or tar -xvf nextcloud-9.0.50.tar.bz2
• Put the config.php file in the right spot: cp owncloud-backup/config/config.php nextcloud/config/config.php
• Now change the ownership of the files to that of your webserver, for example chown wwwrun:www * -R or chown www-data *
• If you keep your data/ directory in your owncloud/ directory, copy it to your new nextcloud/ [*]. If you keep it outside of owncloud/ then you don't need to do anything as its location is in config.php.

* Note that if you have been upgrading your server from before ownCloud 6.0 there is a risk that moving the data directory causes issues. It is best to keep the folder with Nextcloud named 'owncloud'. This also avoids having to change all kinds of settings on the server, so it might be a wise choice in any case: rename the nextcloud folder to owncloud.

Now upgrade!

Next up is restarting the webserver and upgrading.

• Restart your webserver. How depends on your distribution. For example, rcapache2 restart on openSUSE, service restart apache2 on Ubuntu.
• You can now trigger the update either via OCC or via web. Command line is the most reliable solution. Run it as sudo -u apache php occ upgrade from the nextcloud folder. This has to run as the user of your webserver and thus can also be www-data or www for example.
• Then, finally, turn of maintenance mode: sudo -u www-data php occ maintenance:mode --off
  

That's it!

At this point, you'll see the fresh blue of a Nextcloud server! If you encounter any issues with upgrading, discuss them on our forums.

On Open Source, forking and collaboration: Nextcloud 9 is here!

The nature of Open Source is, in a sense, dualistic. It encourages collaboration through the threat of not collaborating--a fork. When I was approached by Struktur AG to join them to work on ownCloud and Spreed, I loved the idea. I always wanted an ecosystem around ownCloud, which is why I pushed things forward like our collaboration with Western Digital Labs and Collabora, matters of no business interest to the company I worked for. I believe a stronger ecosystem benefits everybody.

Ecosystems and confidence

A major point which makes open source so beneficial for businesses is that it puts pressure on suppliers to offer great service and support. If they don't, another can enter the market and out-service them. Tight control over the community tough things like CLA and trademark makes it hard to grow such an ecosystem and negates some of the benefits of open source for customers.

Luckily, in the end, the AGPL license protects the future of a project, even if its steward clings to power. From conversations with Niels early on, it was clear to me that he has a very different and very confident view on his ability to run a real open source company. His history at Red Hat results in frequent comparisons. And indeed, Red Hat runs things the right way, even supporting a project like CentOS which many other companies would consider an existential threat to their business model. Just as their investment in opensource.com shows: they aim to grow the pie, not grab a bigger slice.

former 'enterprise feature' done right (and open)

I'm super proud and happy that we could announce today, with our first release, that Nextcloud will not be doing proprietary code. No closed apps means no inherent conflict between sales and community management/developers within the company, but a full alignment in one simple direction: servicing the customer.

And if you wonder about the collaboration with Collabora/LibreOffice Online and with Western Digital: yes, of course, we'll go full steam ahead and will facilitate where we can! No, we're not afraid that either would 'compete' with us: both will complement and strengthen the ecosystem. So we will work together.

Why? Because the core contributors and founder shared an ambitious goal for Nextcloud: be THE solution for privacy and security.

BBQ and forking

Last night we had our first Nextcloud BBQ! Despite some rain it's a good start of something that should be a tradition. ;-)

It was great to have conversations with the contributors who visited us as well as some downtime with the team. It's been a busy time since we announced our new endeavor. And it continues to be awesome to get so many supportive comments and feedback on what we're up to! People are excited about our open strategy and appreciate the fact that there is a solid company behind it. The flood of incoming requests for information and support from customers presents a good problem. So let me point out, again, that we're hiring!

Nextcloud hackweek and open BBQ!

Yesterday we kicked off a meeting in Stuttgart to discuss Nextcloud and get work done. A first result is the establishment of the new Server repository on Github (and more repositories!) and we'll share other things on the forums and in Github issues the coming days. The real important news however is that we decided to organize a BBQ!

If you're in the area, we'd love to see you show up Wednesday at Egilolfstraße 31, Plieningen/Hohenheim close to Stuttgart Airport. Nearest public transport would be either U3 Plieningen or S2/3 Flughafen/Messe. Join us starting 6PM for the good times!


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We'll have some alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, meat, fruits, veggie stuff and of course a BBQ. Give us a shout if you're coming on the forums!

You are Nextcloud, too - what we will do for contributors

Cool stuff we want to do more with!

Based on feedback collected from many contributor members we've defined some plans and already made changes to how Nextcloud will be developed. Improved transparency and governance, focus on stability and architectural improvements and other improvements are covered in this blog. Much more is coming, you can join the conversation right now on our forums!

Community Input

January 2015, I ran a contributor survey to see what the ownCloud community thought about the processes, development focus and our work at the company. I shared the results by the end of April and pushed internally for the feedback to be taken serious. Some of the changes were implemented but many others were left for a future project to push forward. And Nextcloud will.

feedback and changes

Nextcloud aims to build a sustainable business, not limited by short-term, next-quarter thinking. The relationship with our community of contributors and users is central to our plans.

To quote Frank on this:

The company shouldn't be involving the community more in decision making; that's the wrong way of looking at it. There shouldn't be a fundamental separation to begin with!

And that's what we want. Saying "we're more open" just means being a more friendly ruler - Nextcloud aims to be a participant, not a king, benevolent or not! That is not to say that there should not be any direction but it shouldn't be dictated by a company anymore. Of course, people can decide what they work on, and the company gets to decide what it pays its employees to do. Now there are changes in how we manage our employees too, with far less micromanagement and more freedom. But that's for another blog.

Let's go over the specific pieces of feedback mentioned in the email and received from contributors in other ways and note how Nextcloud intends to address them.

Development

ownCloud is fun and relatively easy to contribute to, with a mostly well running review process and release cycle. There were some practical requests and suggestions as well as concerns about the strain the growth of our project has put on the core developers.

Dealing with Pull Requests

A major issue as detailed in many comments was that it often takes too long for pull requests to be merged. That is, contributions are not handled fast or at all. The result is that, with Core moving fast, contributions get out of sync, no longer apply and are effectively lost. As the graphs below show, the number of pull requests taking longer than 6 months to be merged is rising rapidly while the company is contributing less to development relative to volunteers. Don't get me wrong, it's great to have a growing community! But the support for development from the company needs to keep up with the pace.

Respecting contributions by being responsive and getting them merged will be our number one development priority at Nextcloud. As research by Mozilla has shown, reacting swiftly to contributions is crucial for growing community and we intend to grow and nurture our contributor base, recognizing outside input as a key driver of growth and success.

More stability

A general point made was that it'd be good to focus more on stability and performance. Some of that has been implemented with the 8.x series and automated testing improvements done over the last year. An especially sore point in terms of stability is the upgrade process, as was very visible with the 9.0 release that is still not available for users of the built in updater app. We will soon blog about the Nextcloud plans with regard to the updater.

Architectural improvements

It was mentioned that some parts of ownCloud are in need of serious architectural love and refactoring. ownCloud has been traditionally rather restrained in this regard and people worried that this "impairs competent developers". While being conservative is important with regards to building a platform (stability and compatibility!) many improvements made their way into the 8 and 9 releases. To preserve a healthy balance, we want to introduce an Architecture team to make decisions that have a big impact on the code base. More details will follow.

Another area of improvement would be to communicate more about architectural changes. Frank has already done a series of blogs about Federation in the past and more will follow.

Apps: support for Calendar, Contacts and Spreed

Many pointed out that apps are extremely important for ownCloud and we should work more on that. Frank has always emphasized the importance of building a platform and for Nextcloud this will be a central goal.

Nextcloud will officially support the Calendar and Contacts apps and supercharge their development. The Spreed.ME app will bring fully supported audio and video chat to ownCloud. We'll also invest in growing and improving our API for these and other applications.

Process

Some smallish process improvements were requested. More logical labels and tags, for example, which have been pretty much cleaned up since then. Another thing was that big pull requests are often a pain in the ass to get merged and we should tell contributors to cut their work in smaller pieces. This was added to the documentation.

Decision making

Most people were positive about the technical direction of ownCloud - test-driven, stability, architectural work, those were great improvements. Decision making processes in the technical area were not considered very transparent. Comments were even more harsh about the project-wide decision making process.

People feel decisions are often done behind closeddoors. Nextcloud will address this, in part by a new architecture team and in another part by getting rid of most 'hidden' communication channels like internal IRC and mailing lists. We also plan on talking more about our goals and plans in blogs and such.

Longer term planning is a major sticking point: there is little of it public. We need to discuss, together, how to do longer term planning. This doesn't fit too well with github. Thoughts welcome!

Communication channels

Several people have noted that we've got too many, confusing and overlapping communication channels. We've already eliminated one: mailing lists. We still have a newsletter for those who want to follow us and the blog roll on nextcloud.com/news. For technical discussions we keep using github (which now links commits to pull requests so you can find the discussion behind code) and we'll discuss more general subjects on the forum. Speaking of which, it's now on discourse - a massive improvement I'd say. And email fans can use email to communicate with people on the forum!

Governance

It was already mentioned here and there but there are two other big changes. First, we want the Nextcloud trademarks to be owned by the community, like the ownCloud one should have been. So we will set up a foundation soon which will control the trademark (not have it sub-licensed!) and more in the future.

Second, we will get rid of the Contributor License Agreement. You don't need to sign anything to contribute to Nextcloud.

Third, without CLA there are no proprietary apps part of Nextcloud. We won't be artificially crippling Nextcloud just to get some checkmark on a feature list on the enterprise side. At the same time, of course much functionality is needed for companies, stuff that they need (and home users don't). We will provide that for sure, including migration path, but this time as stand-alone tools. No more exclusivity for a single company, allowing it to do things others can't for legal reason. Our power is in employing the people who write the code, so we can give the best support and develop the best features. If another comes and tops us, well, we should've done better.

Users

There will be improvements for users, too. Already mentioned were our plans to support the Calendar and Contacts apps, Mail too, perhaps more. And of course with Spreed.ME we will integrate open source, WebRTC based video conferencing. There is more coming - for a future blog!

That's all? Nope.

Now I know this is a long blog with lots of details. No surprise, it is based on things we've wanted to improve for many years but could not. Now we can and we will. This is not the end of it, other suggestions and thoughts are more than welcome. Get involved!

Nextcloud is the future of open source file sync and share

So today is the day: we announce that we're forking ownCloud at some point the coming weeks. We includes project founder Frank and the core ownCloud contributors who publicly quit ownCloud, Inc. over the last weeks - Lukas, Arthur, Morris, Bjoern, Jan-Christoph and quite a few others as well who can't talk about that yet. As of now, most of the top contributors to ownCloud core are joining and of course, we're very busy hiring and aim to leave no (wo)man behind.

'why' is the question everybody has and I hope you understand I don't want to talk too much about that. Instead, let me talk about what we are going to do.

A healthy Nextcloud

Open source projects work best when they have a company behind them which aims to build a sustainable business around a symbiotic relationship with the community they are a part off. Make no mistake, I think it's great if people (investors, founders) can cash out big. They take a risk, put in blood, sweat and tears. But venture capital often leads to short term thinking and chasing of quarterly numbers resulting in bad decisions. Money, time and effort is wasted and growth isn't what it could be - and that's pretty much a best case scenario.

The good news is that we're starting a new company, Nextcloud, which will do things right: build a sustainable, durable business. We've got support from Niels Mache, long time open source entrepreneur and owner of the spreed video conferencing business. Nextcloud will integrate with spreed's successor, the open source, webRTC based spreed.me video conferencing software, kickstarting as a healthy, growing business with loads of customers while the integration provides a real valuable new feature to users.

What we will offer

This reboot of ownCloud is meant to be good for users, customers and contributors alike. So we'll be providing a drop-in replacement for users next month, which will bring them the stability and security updates they need as well as full spreed.ME video conferencing integration.

For customers, the drop-in replacement will be accompanied with a Enterprise Subscription which gives them all the support and features they are used to. Better, even: we will honor all contracts so nobody has to pay twice or get in trouble. On top of that we plan to support some of the most popular apps like Calendar and Contacts both for home users and enterprises. Our goal here is to ensure nobody is left without the support they need to be happy, successful own/Nextcloud users.

We're setting up infrastructure now for the wider contributor community to join us. We've got some improvements in store, including new forums (discourse based), no more Contributor License Agreement and a foundation that will hold trademarks (not have them sub-licensed; nor be under company control!). January last year we did a survey of what community contributors would like to see improved and, finally, we can implement many of those requests. I will blog more about that later today!

Future

I know that this is a surprise to everybody and it isn't that you should be joining RIGHT NOW or I'll hate you forever, on the contrary. ownCloud is a very important project and a rash decision makes no sense. We are in it for the long haul, our goal is a smooth transition and that means we will take some time to prepare things on our end. We've always been in close contact with our contributors and this new thing can only be open and public from now on so let's take our time to do this right. Over the coming days we'll blog about our plans and you can provide input and help us make the right decisions!

This endeavor will take some time and effort, but successful examples like LibreOffice and MariaDB have shown that, in the end, the community will find a way to get it right. I'm confident that we will be able to deliver even better solutions for our users and customers thanks to a redefined, more open community and company relationship!

Check out our announcement blog, our website and ping me or ask your questions in our Live Nextcloud Q&A Hangout with Frank and myself, moderated by Bryan Lunduke, today at 19:00 PM Berlin/Amsterdam/Paris time, 10:00 AM Pacific time.

And yes, if you want to join us, send an email, we're hiring!

Moving on from ownCloud

A few days ago, I published my last blogpost as ’ownCloud’ on our blog roll about the ownCloud community having grown by 80% in the last year. Talk about leaving on a high note!

Yes, I’ll be leaving ownCloud, Inc. - but not the community. As the numbers from my last post make clear, the ownCloud community is doing awesome. It is growing at an exponential rate and while that in itself poses challenges, the community is healthy and doing great.

I joined in 2014, when ownCloud, Inc. had about 36 employees. The community grew that year, according to our history page, from 1 million users to 2.2 while the number of average coders per month went from 62 to 76. For me, the coolest thing that year was the ownCloud Contributor Conference, that brought together 100 contributors for a week of hacking at the university of Berlin. A stressful, but awesome week. Though, my first meeting most of my colleagues was some months earlier at the Stuttgart meetup and my first release was ownCloud 7 not long before the event.

2015 was more of that - our history page has a great overview and I’m darn proud of having been a part of all those things. 2016 brought ownCloud 9, a major release, which was accompanied by an overhaul of owncloud.org, I hope you like our new website!

Not everything is finished, of course. We’re still smack in the middle of awesome work with Collabora and Spreed as well as the WDLabs PiDrive project - I just finished and published this page about it. All great stuff which has great momentum and will certainly move forward.

Myself, I’ll stay around in the community. I’ll talk about the awesome stuff that is coming next early June but until then, don’t hesitate to contact me if you’ve got any questions about ownCloud or anything else. You can still catch me on jos@opensuse.org ;-)

A tip for dealing with the first GSOC weeks.

No matter if you're GSoC student in openSUSE, KDE, ownCloud or anywhere else, you're community bonding period has started. This is not an easy time because starting something new is always hard and this is, in a sense, a new job.

And many students are still busy with exams and other things. You are ambitious, of course, so you make promises to your mentor and then--you might not be able to follow through on that. You're too busy studying or this family-and-friends thing gets in the way. Now what?

It is fine to make mistakes or miss a deadline...

Please understand that we get this! It is not a surprise and you're not alone. The key here is to communicate with your mentors. That way, they know why you're busy and when you will be back.

Not having time for something, even if you promised - really, that is OK. When you have a job in the future it will happen all the time that more urgent things come up and you can't meet a deadline. Key is that you TALK about it. Make sure people know.

Let me give you a short anecdote - something that didn't even happen that early in my career...

At some point early in my job at a new company, I was on on a business trip and I missed my train. It was quite stupid: I got out in the wrong station. The result was that I had to buy a new ticket, spending over USD 180. I was quite upset about it and afraid to tell my manager about my blunder. I did the easiest thing: just avoid talking to my boss at all. As he was in the US and I was in Europe, that was not hard at all... But, after three weeks of finding all kinds of excuses to get out of our regular calls, he gave me a direct call and said: "what the heck is going on?". I admitted the whole thing and, of course, he was quite upset. But not at the USD 180. That is nothing on the budget of his or any team in any company. The costs of me not talking to him, now that he was serious about and I had to promise to never do that, ever, again.

... if you communicate about it

So what can you learn from my mistake? The rule, especially in the beginning of your career, is to over-communicate. Especially when it comes to new employees, many managers are anxious and worried about what is going on. Telling them often, even every day, how things are going and what you're doing is something they will never complain about.

You can practice during GSOC: sending a daily ping about the state to your mentor, even if it is "hey, I had no time yesterday, and won't have any today". And a weekly, bigger report on what you worked on is also a very good thing to get going.

Understand that it is not unprofessional to miss a deadline or make a mistake, but it IS unprofessional if it comes as a surprise to others when they find out later on!

Especially if there's some kind of issue or you got stuck: you don't have to ask for help right away, though you should not wait to long--topic for another blog. But it is important that management knows. It makes them feel in control and believe me, the nightmare of every manager is to not be in control! If you do these things when you start working I promise you: it will score you points with your boss and help your career.

Thursday: ownCloud at Open Tech Summit!

Coming Thursday I'll be talking and workshopping at the Open Tech Summit about getting your ownCloud up and running, either on a laptop, desktop or server or on a Pi(like) device like a Raspberry or Banana Pi. I will bring a few devices to play with, it will be fun!

If you'd like to join, there's a number of free tickets available. Go to this website to register and use the code WELOVEOWNCLOUD.

See you there!

Connect to your server in your LAN via your WAN url: an openWRT solution.

So, I run my own ownCloud. Figures, right?

Can't reach the server from the LAN

Of course, I sync files on my desktop between my laptop and phone. The desktop client is setup with the IP address of the server in my living room. But my phone and laptop, configured to connect to my public, DynDNS URL (so they work when I'm traveling), can't connect from the home network. Triple-uncool. I like my photos from my phone to by auto-uploaded when I connect to wifi at home; and more importantly my laptop should sync when I get home from travel!

Danimo blamed my router - a Cisco (Linksys) E4200. That was (once upon a time) an expensive, high-end router. Sadly, having been abandoned by its manufacturer, it has become an expensive, high-end liability. I can't even log into the administration interface, browsers tell me that the connection is insecure. There are more issues, like the slow WLAN-LAN transfer speeds I experienced and I'm not even talking about security here. Linus once eloquently expressed his feelings towards NVIDIA, a resentment I now feel towards CISCO.

openWRT to the rescue

I learned my lesson. No router not able to run an open source firmware will get in my house. While I don't feel any need whatsoever to fiddle with things that do their job, Linksys screwed up here: they left me on broken software long before I had any need for new hardware.

After some digging, I learned that TP-Link has been (mostly inadvertently) a decent citizen for OpenWRT fans. So, even if they'd abandon their router like Linksys/Cisco did, there was a future. I bought a TP-Link Archer C7. Affordable and it can run OpenWRT.

After setting it up initially, things worked. For a day. After that, no amount of fiddling could make it work again. Magic. Today I gave up on the original firmware and installed OpenWRT. It was easy - as easy as upgrading to a new TP-Link firmware: download the openWRT firmware, go to the upgrade interface, select it, hit start. A while later you ca visit the web interface. Which is a tad more complicated, but not much - and noticeably more capable. It didn't take me any longer than on the original firmware to set up my wifi and guest networks.

How to make it work

But it didn't solve the problem. I had to resort to a web search and found a neat trick, which I'm happy to share (assuming 192.168.1.11 is your server on your LAN):

• Log into your router over ssh
• Add to your /etc/dnsmasq.conf file the following: address=/example.com/192.168.1.11
• Add to your /etc/hosts file: 192.168.1.111 example.com

A few minutes later, things will work.

Essentially, the DNS provider in OpenWRT will provide your local server address to local clients... It thus breaks when you use another DNS than the one provided by the router via DHCP.

I'd be happy to hear from other and/or better solutions. Heck, this might only work for a day or might be horrible or maybe I changed something else which made it work. What do I know...

New ownCloud Events

I've just added some events to the ownCloud events page:

• Chemnitz
• NLUUG Spring Conference
• Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey
• DevOps Pro in Lithuania (eventbrite)

I myself will be in Chemnitz this Saturday and Sunday and in Lithuania as well, both cases I'll give a talk and in Chemnitz we'll run a booth. If you are at any of these events or were thinking about going - come say hi to the ownCloud Flag (or t-shirt) bearer!

We can use your help!

There are other events where an ownCloud presence would be awesome. For example, LinuxWochen Wien ("Linuxweeks Vienna") has no ownCloud appearance yet and the CfP closes in three days!!! If you live close there and would be up for talking about ownCloud, that would rock, please, reach out to me...

The same is true for the SouthEast LinuxFest which has it's call for papers still open. If you live in the South East of the US or were already thinking about going there, can I convince you to talk about ownCloud and perhaps help run a booth?

How to give a talk

I know, just out of the blue giving a talk about ownCloud might not be the most attractive thought you can come up with. But I've got stuff to make it easy... First of all, slides complete with notes can be found in a public github repo here. On top of that, we've got quite some information on our website about promoting ownCloud at an event, including speaking tips and tricks. And I'd be happy to give you some support in person. If you need any materials for a show you're presenting ownCloud at, we have materials available, too!

And do you know any other events ownCloud should be at?

FOSDEM 2016 and ownCloud, Kolab, KDE and more

Devices at our booth

After rocking SCALE, FOSDEM was next and a great event. Killing, too - two days with about 8000 people, it was insane. Lots of positive people again, loads of stuff we handed out so we ran out on Sunday morning - and cool devices at the ownCloud booth.

Team

When we still had stickers and Jan still liked me

We had quite a team at the booth, with Frank Karlitschek, Philippe Hemmel, Jan-C Borghardt, Lukas Reschke and myself. Lukas visited his first FOSDEM and even though he started to complain a bit on Sunday about having had to many social interactions, he enjoyed it. Philippe was at his first ownCloud booth but has helped out at booths before so that went entirely smooth and Jan - well, he's so popular, people were nice to me a few times thinking I was Jan. I had to disappoint them, Jan was often to be found in the Design devroom where he gave a talk about how we do design at ownCloud (see also our earlier blog about 6 ownCloud User Interaction Design Principles).

Lukas and cameras don't go together well

My experience was the usual FOSDEM rush with so many people already there at 9:30 on Saturday (even though it is supposed to start at 10:00) that you barely have time to think, eat & drink or walk around and talk to old friends. I already had a long day on Friday as I went to a community statistics workshop by Bitergia but I'd even be tired after FOSDEM if I had a week to sleep in before...

Stuff

Frank pushes press away ;-)

We had lots of stuff at the booth. Our usual stickers, flyers and some posters as well as my laptop where people could see ownCloud and sign up to our newsletter (80 new readers, yay). We also had some very cool devices, 2 prototypes from our friends at Western Digital and a spreed.me box, stay tuned as we have some cool news coming from there soon ;-)

Unfortunately, I hadn't brought enough stickers and flyers, we ran out in the morning of Sunday already, as Jan couldn't help but tell me over and over again. Yes, I brought over twice as much as last year but I guess I didn't factor in the growth in popularity of ownCloud... I'll double up again next year. Maybe triple.

It was great to talk to people about ownCloud, the devices, give them stickers and, in rare cases, explain what ownCloud is. Most people who walked by the booth already used ownCloud (yeah, techie crowd!) or are planning to, just one out of 10 has not heard of it. In general, my biggest regret at FOSDEM is that there are still people walking by whom we didn't manage to talk to. Perhaps more of those don't know the awesome that is ownCloud and are put off by the busyness at our booth - at many times, there was a row of 3-4 people thick in front of the booth and three of us were each talking to several people at once. Did I mention it was insanely busy?

Other booths

I did have some time to walk around and meet people at other booths, like the KDE, openSUSE and Kolab booths close by, as well as the FSFE stand. And I will promise myself, again, that I'll walk past all booths next year. Next year... Looking forward to it already!

FSFE let you send postcards to your favorite projects! A really nice initiative.

KDE showing their 'convergence'. The had Plasma Desktop running on an oDroid C1, quite smooth, and a mobile phone running Plasma Mobile! And very nice name stickers, too.

Happy Kolab team

Selfie with Markus Feilner - now at openSUSE. Their booth was close to ours, good to see so many old friends there again, including a strong Greek delegation!

Give me a shout if you want to help out at the ownCloud booth at FOSDEM or other events as we can always use more helping hands...

Why use ZIP instead of TAR?

I've been asked recently why ownCloud zipps its files instead of tarring them. .tar preserves file permissions, for one, and with tar.gz or tar.bz2 you have compression too.

Good question. Let me start by noting that we actually have both: zip and tar.bz2. But why zip?

A long time ago and far, far away

In the beginning, we used tar.bz2. As ownCloud gained Windows Server support, we added zip. Once we dropped Windows support, we could have killed the zip files. But we had reasons not to: tar is, sadly, not perfect.

Issues with Tar

You see, tar isn't a single format or a 'real' standard. If you have a platform other than plain, modern Linux, think BSD or Solaris, or the weird things you can find on NAS devices, tar files can get you in trouble. Unlike zip, tar files also can have issues with character format support or deep folders. We've had situations where upgrades went wrong and during debugging we found that moving to zip solved the problem miraculously... And, as ownCloud, we're squarely focused on the practical user experience so we keep zip, alongside tar.bz2.

See also the GNU tar manual if you want to know more about the various tar formats and limitations.

Sadly, sometimes it is impossible to find one thing that works for everyone and in every situation.

Tarred turtle pic from wikimedia, Creative Commons license. Yes, that's a different tar, I know. But - save the turtles!

ownCloud, openSUSE and KDE in Brazil?

Hi ownCloud, KDE and openSUSE peeps!

We will soon be traveling to Brasil to visit family in various places (from Amazonia to Rio Grande do Sul). We'll land in Sao Paulo and stay there between February 9 and 11 - if you're a KDE, ownCloud or openSUSE contributor in that area and want me to try and bring some swag like flyers, stickers and posters for events, we could meet! Perhaps there's time for a lunch or dinner at some point.

Ping me, either here below in the comments or by sending me an email.

Videos from our last trips to Brasil:

SCALE14x - and 8 million users for ownCloud!

After covering openSUSE and KDE booths at SCALE in my previous blog, let's talk ownCloud. Note that, despite the awesomeness of this blog post, our biggest news right now is probably the announcement that ownCloud has an estimated 8 million users!

Our booth

So SCALE14x had an ownCloud booth staffed by the Dynamic Duo Matt McGraw and yours truly. We had the usual flyers, posters and stickers but Matt had also brought a big monitor and Mountain Dew. In case you don't know the drink, it is important to know that it is by far not as natural as the name suggests.

The Story of the Mountain Dew

The plan with the drinks was to hand them out to people who would mention Chris' hair (the Linux Action Show host) - Matt had told people to come by our booth and ask about it to get a drink. Sadly, nobody did show, either due to fear of Mountain Dew (my bet) or there were few or no Linux Action Show viewers at SCALE14x... The idea is brilliant, though, and I think we should try again next year. Perhaps with a drink that isn't fluorescent green, or make sure Chris mentions it in the Linux Action Show itself?

Latest prototype of the ownCloud WD Pi Drive

(and seriously, I had a few Moutain Dew's, nothing wrong with carbonated sugar drinks if you ask me)

Western Digital Pi Drive Kits

The monitor had another purpose: demo ownCloud, of course. That turned out real cool: upon arrival at my hotel, I had received a package with the latest prototypes of our Pi Drive kits send by Western Digital! The casings have a cool ownCloud logo on them and there was a custom, 3d-printed cover to close the thing off on the top, looking real slick with ownCloud logo cut-out.

Anyhow, we assembled one Pi kit, put ownCloud on it (duh) and ran it from the screen so we could demo ownCloud. The other kit we kept in half-assembled state for people to check out. We had a *lot* of people who were interested, we certainly sold many of the existing Pi Drive kits (you can already get them, without ownCloud though, from the WD store) while many others will wait for us to release the PiDrive with ownCloud. Maybe I'm very optimistic here but the excitement was so great I have the feeling we'll sell those 500 in no time.

On a related note, the Western Digital team working on the Pi Drive/ownCloud project came by the booth for a chat, too. It was great to meet them and shake hands in real life!

Matt explains what this 'ownCloud' thing is

Booth visitors

So we talked to people at the booth. I must've talked to about 50.000 people, my throat is soar (and you all know I have plenty experience talking as I usually can't stop - so this is saying something). Some highlights from me (I'm hoping Matt will share some of his):

• talked to Ubuntu people about the Pi project, they love it and want to work with us on that and other things.
• Cory Doctorow came to our booth to tell us how much he loves what we do. I asked if I could quote him but forgot to ask him for a picture.
• A photography-loving couple came by our booth and they were super duper excited to hear about ownCloud. For them, a better way of sharing pictures, esp large amounts (dropbox ain't so good with the tens of gigabytes) was really interesting. The girl claimed that if you could see emoticons IRL she'd have hearts flying out of her head. Yeah, disturbingly geeky, but fun!
• somebody noted that it'd be good to have had 'a marketing person' at our booth, as no 'marketing person' would've forgotten to ask Corey for a picture. I thought about new job opportunities.
• Talked to Intel people about Minnowboard - intel Pi like board. Might be interesting for our Pi Drive project - at least it has USB 3, Sata, room for a MSATA card (!) and loads of ram. Of course, there is price but - let's see.
• Talked to the community manager from Digital Ocean, we'll do some promo together. He also asked if we could give feedback on their ownCloud setup/one- click-install image. I've asked for a free login to check it out, I'll then ask around soon if anybody is interested in checking out what they have and giving them tips on improving it. I'll also ask how many users they approximately have, would be interesting to know!
• Corey came by the booth again, as he wanted to tell us about XO-ware and their tech to get through firewalls. I first made him hold our poster and took a pic for on twitter.
  

  #ownCloud is now an @doctorow approved project! #SCALE14x pic.twitter.com/uJt0HZpPW0

  — ownCloud community (@ownClouders) January 22, 2016

• Talked to CEO of XO-ware. They found a way through the firewall of routers which involves an external server but no proxy-ing. They plan on open-sourcing their stuff next month, we should look into it for ownCloud Proxy and the Pi-Drive project. Oh, and it is interesting tech in general, of course! Check it out.
• In the plane back home I sat next to a movie music composer (you can hear him in the latest X-men, for better or worse) who was completely happy once told about ownCloud - he's now shuffling gigabytes of music files with Dropbox but not too happy with it. ownCloud might become big in Hollywood ;-)

Talked to many, many more interesting, nice, sweet, peculiar people from all over but there's one last special thing I must share: I did not hear A SINGLE COMPLAINT. None. Nada. Zilch. Sure, people were happy to hear we're working on stuff like the upgrade process, but none of them complained. Maybe it was the sunny weather but I just think you're all doing a GREAT job, because that is what people told me!!!

So a big THANK YOU relayed from SCALE14x. Hugs all around: *you all rock!*

Talks

I gave two talks, one about ownCloud scalability and Raspberry Pi. That is a weird combination indeed, it was inspired by Joas' cool BananaPi Cluster project. I couldn't use that, though, as it is a bit stuck and I myself didn't have time to experiment much either. Thus, instead, I talked about scalability, different Pi devices and the Western Digital project (again, lots of people excited about that). Find it here.

The second talk was a longer version of the lightning talk I did at the ownCloud Contributor Conference. Clearly, that was compressed too much, this one worked out far better and people said they liked it a lot. Well, hey, if I insult you and yet you come ask for more, either I do something right or you do something wrong, correct? The talk starts at about the 8th minute, enjoy.

more

I did also talk to some press people, spend sleepless nights due to jetlag and found decent Blueberry Pancakes. I miss good bread whenever I visit the US (and UK) but pancakes, oh boy, THAT they do right like nobody... Hmmmm.

Of course I had fun dancing the security theater at the airports I went through, with some special fun at Gatwick. Going through a very comprehensive security check right after stepping off your plane from Los Angelos seems... beyond useless. And all those comprehensive checks didn't notice there's a typo in my name on the tickets. Ahum. I'd probably be stuck half the way if they really read my email AND had the resources to actually do something with it - but we all know that they rather throw more hay on the stack than spend time finding the needle so I felt quite safe emailing a report including this note to the ownCloud mailing list from London Gatwick!


Swapnil 'praying' for his food ;-)

Well, that's it, if you read through all of it to this point I tip my hat to you for your commendable stamina enduring my writing. If you want that hat tip on camera, look me up on FOSDEM and we'll take a pic with me tipping my hat to you.