Five Reasons To Upgrade Your ownCloud

On our user mailing list users occasionally report problems with quite old ownCloud releases. Often community members like Chris suggest to upgrade to a newer major version and use official repositories rather than those provided by distributions like Debian. That is good advice. I'll share 5 reasons why an older version isn't more stable and talk about the issues with distribution packages in a follow-up blog.

Older Releases and Stability

The oldest ownCloud release supported, according to owncloud.org/security, is ownCloud 7.0.x, with x currently being at 12. That is, this release has had 12 updates fixing stability, performance and security issues. One could thus argue that this release is more stable than newer releases like 8.0.10, 8.1.5 and our latest stable, 8.2.2.

There are five reasons why that is not really true.

openCloudMesh brings ownCloud to research

1. ownCloud Grows

The rule-of-thumb that an older release has had more use and thus issues have been shaken out is not really true with ownCloud.

The ownCloud user- and developer community is growing all the time. ownCloud 8.2 will have more users in its lifetime than 7.0 had, which had far more than, say, 5.0 ever did and so on. At some point after their release, these newer versions will already have had more users and thus more potential discovery of obscure problems than their older, still supported counterparts. If you're interested in quantifying this, we try and give an idea of our estimated user base in our time line of ownCloud history. There'll be an update early next year with our user estimate as of today, but count on at least double the number of last year.

2. Testing Continuously Improves

With the growth of ownCloud's user and developer community also come more tools and processes for testing. For example, during the 8.0, 8.1 and 8.2 development cycle we've increasingly introduced automated testing provided by the CERN-developed Smashbox tool, which is now routinely used to determine if there have been any regressions in complicated syncing and sharing scenario's. Besides Smashbox, other tools have been added to the roster and manual testing has been improved significantly as well. Older releases have simply not had the benefit of this testing and thus there is the chance of corner case issues still lingering.

3. Back Porting is Limited

Due to many users running recent ownCloud versions and the continuous improvements to testing, most bug are initially found and fixed in the latest or second-latest ownCloud release. From there they are back (or forward) ported to the others, that is, integrated in older releases. Due to the large changes in each ownCloud release, integrating fixes far back often makes little sense and generally speaking, we backport to the latest stable ownCloud version and the one before. Of course, security fixes and fixes for very severe or very simple issues are often brought all the way back to the oldest supported release.

4. Clients Take Advantage Of Server Features

The various ownCloud clients for desktop and mobile operating systems are developed alongside, though not in lock-step with the ownCloud server. Various features which improve reliability and performance of syncing require both client- and server side changes. Thus, running a newer ownCloud client with an older server means you miss out on features which could help protect your data or at least save you from getting some conflict files. For example, there's work going on to have checksums on files, a precursor to the much requested ability to sync file changes rather than the entire file. This deals with the rare but not impossible cases where files get mangled while in transit or on storage.

5. New Features Improve Reliability

The checksum feature coming with ownCloud 9.0 is not the only 'pro-active data defense' improvement to ownCloud. We will introduce features like detecting apps which break ownCloud and code integrity checking. Earlier we introduced file locking, experimental in ownCloud 8.1 and enabled by default in 8.2. This protects files from concurrent changes which in rare situations could result in errors or even data loss. Especially for large, enterprise installations, these situations might not be that rare due to large numbers of users simultaneously accessing the same data and thus the benefits of upgrading includes getting rid of an entire class of impossible to reproduce issues.

So What Version Should I Run?

Above, I gave five reasons why near outdated ownCloud releases do not tend to be any more reliable than newer ones. Rather, the opposite is true, as newer versions get more scrutiny and thus have more issues found and fixed and have received new features which benefit the reliability of both server, client and their interaction.

Home Users

For home users, I still recommend to run the stable or plain latest release channel. On the whole, the benefit of new features and performance improvements in an up to date release far outweigh the stability advantage of older versions, especially if ownCloud is ran in a typical (LAMP) setup. We release ownCloud versions only after extensive testing and the vast majority of issues found shortly after a release is related to either scalability for large instances or non-standard environments like enterprise databases, caching solutions and so on. Most testers and developers use ownCloud on a recent Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP setup and thus you can expect PHP 7 on a bleeding edge Apache to be surprisingly reliable, even when compared to a old Debian release. Note that you should test yourself if you really want to be sure that an upcoming release works smooth for you!

Enterprise

If you value stability above all else (that is, over features and performance improvements in newer versions), it is best to track ownCloud releases with a N-1 strategy: upgrade to one release before the latest about 1-2 months after a new version comes out. That is, it would be about time to upgrade to ownCloud 8.1 by now and when 9.0.2 is made available, now to be expected some time in May, 8.2 is your best bet. If you want to be sure the new ownCloud version runs great on your infrastructure and the upgrade goes smooth with your setup, I strongly suggest to get involved in testing ownCloud. It provides the best and only guarantee it works for you™

Of course, IF you value stability to this degree, you are most likely an enterprise user and you should seriously consider getting in contact with ownCloud, Inc. which can help you decide far better than a blog post what version is perfect for you. Besides advice, support and deployment tools, you get a heads-up on security, stability and performance related issues (and work around solutions) and of course have access to our enterprise features.

If you are still running ownCloud 7.0.x and it is running satisfactory, I can imagine you don't want to change. That is fine for about another 2 months (until 7.0.x is deprecated). However, if you experience any trouble, any advice other than 'upgrade' is probably unwise: I don't think it is worth the trouble of trying to fix issues with 7.0 when you will have to upgrade to 8.0 in a few months anyway.

I know, upgrading can be a pain, it is work and all that. But so are problems in old versions of software you're running and even more so is security. We're working on a new upgrade process for 9.0.

And realize you don't do your users a favor by keeping software 'the same'. "Big Bang" releases steepen the learning curve by making users swallow too many new features, and increase the likelihood of compatibility issues with other systems in the environment. Much of the web and apps (especially on mobile) is moving to faster release cycles for this reason.

In all cases, use ownCloud from the official, ownCloud-provided repositories you can find on owncloud.org/release-channels. I blogged about how to install ownCloud (packages, VM, zip files etc) here.

Western Digital Labs and ownCloud

We published a blog post about a collaboration between WDLabs and ownCloud. WDLabs is, in their words, "a division of Western Digital focused on accelerating new solutions". I'd take that as "they look for more ways to sell hard drives" and they have been playing with some interesting stuff. One such thing is their PiDrive Kit. This kit includes a connector cable which powers both the harddrive and the Pi from one power supply, simplifying the setup. We're now working with WD Labs to build something from this starting point.

WD Labs, meet ownCloud

When they approached us a few weeks ago, they told us they had been toying with a more complete kit with bundled operating system based on berry boot. This lets you choose an OS on first boot and they had put together an image with ownCloud as one of the options. They thought it was really cool and asked if we felt the same and had any ideas of what we could do with it. Well, sure, I wrote not too long ago about What's holding ownCloud back and being able to offer potential users a plug-and-play device with ownCloud on it is something we'd love.

So did they. We quickly received a prototype of a kit with Berryboot and ownCloud on it as well as a case and a Pi included. After some more discussions, we developed a plan with which we hope to get some community help to make this happen.

We need your help

You have to know - this is not something ownCloud, Inc. is very much involved with. It simply is not a commercial endeavor - Inc. works for enterprise customers and we haven't found any of them yet running ownCloud on a Pi. So, while WD Labs will take care of the hardware and has committed themselves to doing a serious number of ownCloud branded devices complete with pre installed OS in the first quarter of next year, it will depend on our free time and community help to develop the OS.

And there's serious work to be done. Berryboot can be configured to boot a headless ownCloud but right now, to even boot, you have to connect a keyboard and monitor. And booting isn't even the issue - finding and configuring an IP and then connecting to the Pi is. And once you've done that, the system has to be configured to be accessible from outside so you can use the ownCloud clients on your mobile phone and laptop to always find and connect to your ownCloud and give you the ability to share with friends and family.

There are folks in our community who have experience with this, building our community VM for example (hi Daniel!) and we'd like to solicit their help. We have 10 prototypes to send out to people who want to help build this ready-to-go ownCloud, the blog has more details on how to get one. And if there is a lot of interest, we'll get more prototypes put together, though I think it'll be tight to get them out before Christmas.

Note that it is totally cool, even advantageous, to send in a proposal ad a team. Together you can get more done!!!

Of course - without this kit there is still a LOT you can do to help out and there is no reason to wait for us sending out anything! Help get a discussion started about what this should look like, how to get there and who does what. Subscribe to the developer mailing list and get started!

Future

Now we know the Raspberry Pi 2 isn't the very best device to run ownCloud on, in terms of performance. It won't run with 100 users, indeed, though it isn't too bad for a few users at home. But, aside from the fact that there is a lot of room for tuning (PHP 7, for one, should help a lot, see some stats here), we're not married to the Raspberry with a single hard drive. It is a popular device and thus a great place to start but WD Labs has already shown us prototypes using a Rasberry Pi Compute device and 2 hard drives and we could work with devices like the Banana Pi or more powerful boards, too. That won't happen immediately, it simply depends on how well the first version turns out and the interest from users.

That means it matters a lot now: can we make this work? I'll sure put a portion of my free time in this as I'm quite excited about it. You too?

Why open source works

Trying to explain why open source works, you can of course point to the Cathedral and the Bazaar by Erik. But the kernel development process shows it happening 'in real time', every day, and that's a major reason why I so enjoy reading the weekly LWN.

Competition FTW

A recent article explained how two patch sets are developed, impacting the Huge TLB feature. One is about improving reference counting in the handling of huge pages to allow a huge page to be mapped in both 'huge page mode' and in 'normal page mode' by different processes. This is a first step towards being able to use transparent huge pages with the page cache, giving it access to the performance benefits of huge pages. This has been in the works for a while as it is a very complex change. But an alternative has recently surfaced, adding transparent huge page support to the tmpfs filesystem. This also has pieces needed to support huge pages in the page cache, but in a very different way.

Why on earth would you want developers to spend so much time on two competing solutions for a problem? Isn't there One to Rule Them All?

Finding that perfect solution

I am sure that there is a Perfect Solution. I would simply suggest that nobody knows it! Like in economics, where an equilibrium exists but no single person can define it, software development has become complicated enough that competition of ideas often leads to the best (or at least better) solutions.

Companies, building their own cathedral in-house, would put product managers and developers in a room. Let them come up with the Perfect Solution. But they won't, because of Joy's law:

"No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else"

Impressive results

This is the key to why open source works and works so well. No single development project in the world even approaches the size of the Linux kernel project - no less than 1400 people contributed in under six weeks. With millions of lines of code developed by tens of thousands of people over 20 years time and with an extremist attitude towards backwards compatibility, you wouldn't expect the trend to be "go faster". It is.

Bringing over almost 12,000 different people from 1,200 different companies together in the last decade, the kernel competes with Wikipedia for the title of humanity's largest collaborative effort. Oh, and I'm sure the masses building the pyramids were big, too, they just didn't integrate the experience of all their collaborators into its architecture as well as the kernel and Wikipedia do ;-)

Cookie licking

Many other projects struggle to learn from the kernel's success. Success which has many aspects, one of which exemplified here, a rule Frank sometimes talks about: no cookie licking!

In short, cookie liking is preventing others from working on something by claiming you are (but not really making progress). Extending it a bit, I would say that, while collaboration is good, if you feel you can do better -- or just want to sample a different approach:

"never be deterred to build an alternative solution to a problem"

Because it's space for competition within projects that makes open source work better.

LAX, SCALE, KDE, SUSE, GNOME and ownCloud

Lobby of the venue

Back home. Tired and jetlaggy, but satisfied: SCALE rocked!

SCALE loves ownCloud

The 13th South California Linux Expo was awesome! It is the biggest LinuxFest in the USA. While decidedly different in nature from Europe's biggest Linux event that that took place just three weeks prior (FOSDEM), we met similarly enthusiastic existing and future users. Conversations were also similar: about half the visitors already knew ownCloud, often using it or planning on deploying it; and the other half was more than a little delighted to hear about it, often exclaiming they had been looking for 'something like that' for a while. Negativity was extremely rare: I don't recall a single negative comment at SCALE (merely a few people who liked ownCloud but had no use for it personally), FOSDEM had one conversation starting unpleasantly but quickly turning around - even though one feature of ownCloud wasn't up to snuff, the user was happy with the experience as a whole.

Before the action started!

For most users, ownCloud was simply a wonderful product and they used it at home, deployed it for customers or managed it in their company. Some asked what features were coming or just arrived in ownCloud 8, or asked about the state of specific features and in more than one occasion they very enthusiastically told me how excited they were about ownCloud, how they loved it and how they were telling everybody to use it!

ownCloud to-go

Those who didn't know ownCloud were almost invariably surprised and excited. I can't count the times I heard "wow, why did I never hear about this before" and "dude, I've been looking for something like this for ever!". Often, people wondered how long ownCloud had been around (we just turned five), if it was open source (yes, with love), how many people contributed to it (719 and counting) and how many users it has (we guestimate over 2 million, with 500,000 in this single deployment alone). Oh, and, does it scale? The deployment linked above and a mention of users like CERN can put most concerns to rest. Yes, ownCloud scales from Raspberry Pi to Atom Smashing size.

What came up a few times as barriers to their future usage of ownCloud was pretty much what I discussed before. Running a server at home is not easy and I walked by the EFF booth to ask about progress on Let's Encrypt to ask about the progress of solving one aspect of that problem: more easily getting SSL certificates. I was told the project is on track for the 2nd half of this year.

Frank and Bryan Lunduke

It is wonderful to have such energizing, positive, enthusiastic users - and to have such an enthusiastic booth crew to talk to them as well. At the booth we had Frank, Matt, Ron, Camila and myself. Awesome it was and we had great fun! Below a timelapse video of Saturday morning. It was still rather quiet but it is nice to see us jump around!

Stuff and talk

Just like at FOSDEM, we brought ownCloud stickers, hand outs explaining ownCloud to users and developers as well as some posters for the booth and pins to give out. This was all very much appreciated - I estimate we gave out about 400 hand outs and 500 or so stickers as well as about 50-100 pins.

Sunday at 3PM, I gave a talk about Privacy and ownCloud, with Frank finishing off with a section about his talk at MIT where he discussed ownCloud's Federated Cloud sharing feature and where it is going. The talk was well received; I think the angle I took to privacy (inspired by my background in psychology) spoke to the audience and Frank's description of federation and how it's done in ownCloud was very interesting. owncloud.org and owncloud.com will feature blogs with some more information about this soon.

Friends

Big, big booth!

I also walked by the booths of 'old friends' - the openSUSE/GNOME/KDE crew in particular, it was awesome to meet them. Some I hadn't seen in years, others I met for the first time. They did an amazing job and richly deserve the reward they earned for most Stunningly Amazing Booth Crew (don't know the real name of the booth award but that's what it should be). If you think that 'just' GNOME an KDE being incorporated in the openSUSE booth isn't enough - Master Planner of the Booths Drew aims to bring in Enlightenment and XFCE as well next year. Supposedly a Trello board has been set up already. I bet it won't be long before it has grown to the point where the SCALE organization needs to give the 'openSUSE booth & friends' a separate hall at SCALE...

I have to note that it was thanks to our green friends that I could hang up the ownCloud flyers - they lend me some (green!) tape to do that.

The KDE booth had a bunch of terribly cool stickers (I only now realize I forgot to get one for myself!) as well as the "frameworks 5" flyers. I could only bring, like, 5 t-shirts and a dozen old 'join-the-game' flyers so I'm glad Bert Yerke and his wife, who formed the awesome local KDE team, had created the other materials. We already discussed 2016, as they have plenty of ideas on how to improve the booth!

Awesome stickers...

If you, dear reader, want to help out at the KDE or ownCloud booth next year - let me know, either in the comments or by mail. I can promise you: it is awesomely fun and by far not as scary as you might think! Bert and Matt and everybody who has ever been at a KDE, openSUSE, ownCloud or other FOSS booth can attest to that: it is a great way of getting involved and making a big difference!

Bonus points for who finds a suitable meaning for the one item in the title which isn't yet an acrynym ;-)

Release party time!

KDE Plasma 5.1

Plasma 5.1 was released yesterday and it is looking real good. I have been running the 'next generation' Linux desktop on my laptop, courtesy of openSUSE packages made out of regular git snapshots. It was surprisingly stable so I have little worries about the stability of the final 5.1 release and I recommend to check it out ;-)

Of course, we should have a Plasma release party! We haven't had release parties in our place for a while (can't believe that the last one is over 2 years ago...), so it's time to do that again.

Check the release party page for details. The short of it:

• October 18, 19:00-22:00 or so
• EldenaerStrasse 28a, Berlin, Germany
• Bring Your Own Devices Drinks (there's a Spätie (24h convenience store) downstairs). Food is welcome, too.
• Don't forget to bring your good mood and friends

Further notes:

• I might do some demoing of what is new in Plasma 5.1, depending on interest.
• Anybody is welcome, as always, irrespective of color, sex, occupation, shape - heck, even species - you're all super welcome! That means you have to play nice with each other, do I have to say that?
• If you're afraid of dogs, Popcorn will teach you that you don't have to be. But really, if she freaks you out, we can put her in another room, don't say home out of fear for the hairy monster!
• Let me know if you're coming - so we have some idea of how crowded our apartment will be!

openSUSE

For the geekos among you: 13.2 is coming SOON and boy, is it chock-full of awesomeness! I'm talking to the Berlin LUG, we will probably do a release party. If possible we'll do it on November 8, so keep that date free for now!

Saving Face and the threats to privacy in our society

I'm not talking about the 2012 documentary, nor an actual face. I want to discuss the expression, as defined by wikitionary:

"To take an action or make a gesture intended to preserve one's reputation or honour"

I argue that this expression is under-used in this day and age of privacy violations.

Awesomeness from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal!

Privacy is not

Tech folk like me were surprised at the publicity around the leak of celebrity nudes a few weeks ago. With the continuous string of NSA scandals over the last years, we didn't expect anybody to still think their data was safe online. Apparently, we still have to make the argument for privacy...

For many people, privacy and the arguments against NSA style "collect it all" spying seem moot: "I have nothing to hide".

Now this argument has been solidly debunked in various articles, breaking down to these main reasons:

• You don't know what you have to hide
• You should have something to hide
• Privacy is a basic human need

On the first two, security researcher Moxie Marlinspike wrote for Wired Magazine.

You don't know what you have to hide

In the US, the federal government can't even count the number of laws one can break, and Moxie argues:

If the federal government had access to every email you’ve ever written and every phone call you’ve ever made, it’s almost certain that they could find something you’ve done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statues or 10,000 administrative regulations. You probably do have something to hide, you just don’t know it yet.

A society with perfect surveillance means anybody could be locked up at any time as everybody does things wrong all the time. Law enforcement becomes arbitrary (and consequently a great means for controlling people who do things the government doesn't like). Just one recent example: in Washington, being smelly is a crime.

Moxie does not even discuss changes in policy and politics. What is legal today can haunt you tomorrow! This is not a hypothetical situation: in World War II tens of thousands lost their lives because the Dutch government kept extensive records on every citizen.

You should have something to hide

The second point is that if laws were never broken, they would never be changed and progress of society would come to a stand-still. In a world of perfect law enforcement, slavery would still be with us, sodomy laws would be in effect and women wouldn't be allowed to run businesses or perhaps even drive cars. Probably nice for bureaucratic governments (things are simpler that way) but I don't think it is wise to limit the world our kids live in based on what we can deal with and understand today...

Despite their very real impact, these arguments, to many of us, seem mostly relevant around an oppressive regime. We're happy that the protests in Hong Kong are aided by techology but it doesn't make us use them.

Privacy is a basic human need

Then there is the argument that people need privacy. Not because they do illegal things, but just because. The often-heard explanation: when you go to the toilet, you close the door. Not because you do something illegal there, but just because you'd prefer doing it alone!

This might not feel like a strong argument, perhaps that is why Moxie doesn't mention it. But it goes far deeper than the other reasons for privacy, to something very central to us, human animals. Everybody feels a need to present themselves well to others! We use make-up, proper clothes, perfume and deodorant. We act and speak careful, ever mindful of the impression we leave on people. And privacy is central to control over how others see you.

Marying as WoW character

Saving face

Words like reputation and honour in the definition of "saving face" by wikitionary make it sound like a big, special thing, but it is true for everybody, every day: we all go through extraordinary length to control how others see us. It is why we carefully choose the clothes we wear and the car we drive. We even wear different faces around different people. Loving husband or wife, funny friend, hard working employee, trusted confidant, sensitive and dedicated son, powerful wizard.

We are careful to keep these separate. If one of your parents would suffer from cancer, you would share the pain with close friends, but not the poker friends at the bar. You'd share that you had to deal with a burn-out a few years ago with your husband, but not your colleagues. If you lose your job you keep up appearances to some friends, but share your feelings with others. You would tell at work about your kid puking over you at breakfast but not about your wife who suffers from depression.

The carefully build impressions others have of us are maintained at almost all costs, and we don't even realize it. It is more obvious in some situations, of course - when something bad happens to you but you don't want some group of people to know; or, typically, when dating or soliciting for a job, when you put up your best, cleanest face and present yourself as perfect as you can. Or when you get very upset when certain information (private pictures, habits or hobbies) become public. But you always care about your appearance.

Losing control?

Modern social media are putting a bit of a wrench in this form of social engineering we all engage in. A date or potential employer can look us up on the internet, finding out things we'd rather not share. And if the data isn't available openly, they can probably just pay for it. Awareness of this is still rather low but, like the Silicon Valley folks keep their kids from using computers and even send them to analog schools, many tech people I know are far more careful with their online profile than the average consumer, who happily takes the free data storage for uploading their lives to servers in the cloud.

There is a time factor at work here. This technology arrived when my generation was (mostly) old and wise enough not to put too much embarrassing stuff online. But just think of everything you did before you turned 18 - I don't know about you, dear reader, but I sure don't want that online. Yet this is exactly what the current and future generations face! Why else are tools which promise to delete your data after a short time, like Snapchat and friends, so popular - and why else do people get so upset when the promises about deleting data are broken?

Because they are being broken, and will continue to be, either by the companies themselves (your data is worth more than you think!) and by governments, hackers and so on.

I think it is important to realize how a lack of privacy impact us, as humans. In the end, it might be the most important argument: in this digital age, we lose the abilities to control how we present ourselves to others. Time to take back our data and decentralize.

EDIT: some news that came out one day after my blog post prompted some further thoughts.

Why developers should not be testing

Short answer: because you should.

When somebody asks about their missing pet feature in KDE or ownCloud software, I always trow in a request for help in the answer. Software development is hard work and these features don't appear out of nowhere. There are only so many hours in a day to work on the a million things we all agree are important. There are many ways to help out and speed things up a little. In this blog I'd like to highlight testing because I see developers spend a lot of time testing their own software - and that is not as good as it sounds.

Developers also do testing!

You see, developers really want their software to be good. So when a Alpha or Release Candidate does not receive much testing from users, the developers take it on themselves to test it.

Developers testing software has two downsides:

• Developers tend to test the things they wrote the software to do. It might sound obvious, but usually the things that break are things the developer didn't think off: "you have 51,000 songs? Oh, I never tested the music app with more than 4,000" is what I heard just yesterday.
• And of course, it should be obvious: early and lots of testing speeds up development so you get those features you want!

Take two lessons from this:

• If you want things to work for you, YOU have to test it.
• If you want those other features, too, helping out is the name of the game.

It isn't hard

In the past I wrote an extensive article on how to test for KDE and ownCloud, too, has real nice testing documentation.

If you want to get on it now, Klaas Freitag just released ownCloud client 1.7 alpha 1 and openSUSE has moved factory to a rolling release process to make it easy to help test. KDE Applications 4.14 is at the third beta and the Release Candidate is around the corner.

Your testing doesn't just save time: it is inspiring and fun. For everybody involved. For added kicks, consider joining us at the ownCloud Contributor Conference in in two weeks in Berlin and KDE has Akademy coming just two weeks later!

Help make sure we can get our features done in time - help test and contribute your creativity and thoughts!


note: I'm not argueing here against testing by developers, rather that users should help out more! Of course, developers should make sure their code works and unit tests and automated testing are great tools for that. But I believe nothing can replace proper end-user testing in real-life environments and that can only really be properly done by end users.

It all comes together: no more Software Compilation but more KDE!

KDE 4.0 demo in Dresden, 2007 (short hair time, yes)

With the KDE 4.0 release we had the issue that everything was one big blob: the libraries, the desktop and the applications, all inter-dependent.

Back then, at the end of 2007, the libraries and many of the applications were in a very good shape. Especially the KDE Edu applications I remember: they were stable, pretty and awesome for many months already before the release and their developers were itching to get their code to users. I had made a blog post with cool video's of KDE edu apps in October 2007. Here is Kalzium at that point:



Unfortunately, the desktop, having undergone a HUGE rewrite, was not at that same level of quality. As I wrote later that Month:

"When I show people the state of Plasma, they're like "hmm, that's not good". So I then proceed to show the Edu and Games, cheers them right up."

But the last release of KDE had been in 2005 (!!) and after more than two years, we really wanted the new and improved apps to get out to users. The desktop was basically workable so we decided to release. Code that is not in users hands rots away...

We all know how that went - distributions shipped it as default and the internet erupted with hate.

Doing better now

So, for the 5 series, we split it all up: Frameworks 5.0 (the new name of our modularized libraries) was released last week, the desktop came out yesterday and the Applications still mostly have to start moving to Qt5/Frameworks 5... We weren't forced to release half-baked stuff but everything came 'when done'.

KDE is now People. And dragons.

Better separation: rebranding

That was possible because we rebranded 'KDE' to mean community in November of 2009. This created (over time...) separate brands  for 'Plasma', 'Applications' and 'Platform' (now 'Frameworks') which could release on their own. Could being the operative term here, as we kept releasing it together.

That created quite some branding confusion, also because we had not thought through all the issues we would bump into. So when we finally decoupled releases at the release of Plasma 4.11 (the latest release in the 4.x series) and the KDE Platform at 4.9 (although that got some serious updates since then and has kept increasing version number for packaging convenience), it was largely ignored.

Which in turn created some confusion when Frameworks 5.0 came out - several people asked 'where can I get KDE 5', expecting to run the desktop and applications already. Well, I'm quite OK with users saying 'I use KDE' as long as they mean Plasma and realize there is more to KDE than the desktop. Because when I say I use Microsoft, I am not lying. I've always been a huge fan... of their keyboards. Not joking, their operating system wasn't great last time I used it but I love the 'comfort curve' series of keyboards. They should stick to hardware, clearly their strongest point.

In hindsight, we probably better would have waited until there was a real need for the rebranding - like today, or in 2013, when Plasma stopped releasing. Then again, we did expect that to come soon - there already had been talks about disconnecting the releases, it just didn't happen. Well, hindsight is always 20-20, they say...

And as the title points out - there is no more need for the 'Software Compilation' term, which was invented to solve the confusion of 'KDE releases three separate things but all at once'. We no longer release the Applications, Desktop and Libraries at once...

Better communication

Another thing we changed is our communication. In the KDE 4 times, what we did was PROMO: being as positive as one could be ;-)

Since then, we've learned a little actual marketing. Perception management and fancy stuff like that. Including properly explaining what something is and is not ready for! That's why I wrote a known issues section for the Beta of Plasma including:

"With a substantial new toolkit stack below come exciting new crashes and problems that need time to be shaken out."

With a clear section on where we stand in the final release announcement on the dot (See Suitability and Updates on the bottom of the article) we have made clear what the state is - and that we don't think distributions should ship Plasma 5.0 as default. And distributions have picked up on this - at least neither Kubuntu nor openSUSE will ship their upcoming release based on Plasma 5.0.

Forward

Now, the future. Plasma 5.0 is out, and on a 3-month release cycle. Frameworks comes with a new version every month, the Applications are still at 4.13 with a beta of 4.14 out last week. After 4.14 is out, the work on a Frameworks 5/Qt 5 port will commence full-steam but some applications will be ready before others. How will we deal with that conundrum? I don't know yet. There might be two KDE Application releases for a while, as some applications will take longer to get ported than others.

But we're better positioned than ever to bring innovations to the Linux Desktop. So let's see what the future brings!

(Ok, I do have SOME thoughts on where KDE, is going, see Part 1 and Part 2)

Frameworks 5.0 is out!

It took us a while but here it is. And I think we did quite a decent job communicating this to the outside world with articles like

• An extensive overview of and background on Frameworks 5
• Tech Preview release article with lots of info
• How KDE contributed to Qt 5.2 to ready it as base for Frameworks 5
• The mini series of 'where KDE is going' discussed Frameworks and its importance pt 1, pt 2
• Article for Linux.com about why Frameworks is a big deal for Free Software

For the final release (this one, I mean) we had far less time than I had hoped - I wrote most of the announcement last Saturday (though we started a few days earlier and had our already-prepared communication plan) and we didn't really rally as much of our 'friends' to help promote the release as I had planned initially. And yesterday my internet broke down so in the end, Mario and Jonathan R had to put most of it live, half a day behind plan. But despite these issues, it did turn out quite well I think.

Now the communication is done and it is up to the code to prove itself in real life!

As I blogged before, I think this is a huge deal for Free Software on desktops AND mobile devices - it goes far beyond the KDE community. Qt is by far the largest Free Software ecosystem doing native (non-web, I mean) end-user software, but much of that is proprietary. Which makes sense - Digia and the other companies in and around Qt have to make money and don't have 'spreading Free Software' as their prime goal. Frameworks introduces a genuine FOSS touch to that, hopefully bringing many of these developers in touch with the KDE community and the Open Source development processes.

Oh, and just a few more days to go to support Randa 2014, and support it really needs. Remember, this is where Frameworks started! Let's see what KDE comes up with this year at Randa ;-)

Awesome people!

You might have seen that KDE has a new Konqi drawing. Like our previous mascot, you don't see Konqi very often. That is not just because we don't love Konqi (at least, I do) but also because we don't have that many pretty pictures of Konqi.

For articles I'm always in a pickle when it comes to adding some images. I've been a bit creative myself but it often leads to things like this:

It is probably creative (if you get it, that is) but it is not very good. For an article about bug hunting I cut out the Konqi on the right out of the group pic. Yeah, also - it kind of works, but barely.

Then it hit me. Why not ask the artist who made these Konqi's to... make some more! I emailed Tyson Tan and he simply replied asking what and when.

And now: some awesome Konqi's are coming to the dot! Today, we released the first in a hopefully long line of articles with Awesome Konqi's. Check out our Frameworks konqi below:


As sebas said:

I'm actually quite impressed how well it depicts something as deeply technical and abstract as Frameworks 5.

Indeed. This makes me happy!

Where KDE is going...

In my blog about conf.kde.in, I promised I would blogify my talk about KDE's future but failed to publish it until now. I thought the content might be a good fit for on paper. It took a while, but the upcoming Linux Voice should feature an extended version of these blog posts about where KDE is going, with quotes from a variety of KDE folk providing some background.

Meanwhile, on the dot I have published an updated version of the first blog post about the technical side of things: KDE software. It is mostly aimed at people not intimately familiar with KDE but curious about what is coming. Users, for example...

If you find a bug, report it to me or the dot editors! And: spread the article around for users and interested people to read...

ownCloud Conf coming... And REWE offers a cheap way to get there!

ownCloud is organizing an ownCloud conference/hackathon at the Technische Universität Berlin this August. And as Steffen Lindner shared on twitter, the German REWE supermarket is offering cheap tickets to go to Berlin from all over Germany during the event!

Getting and staying there

The REWE supermarket has a "Ganz Deutschland, ein Preis" action where you can get a retour ticket from anywhere in Germany to Berlin, including seat reservations, AND a €10 discount on a future trip for BahnCard holders - for €79. Not a bad deal (depending on where you live of course), but you'll have to grab it this week! The ticket is valid until the 31st of August, which fits perfectly as that is the last day of the ownCloud Contributor Conference!

I have also just put up some hotel options on our website. I'd recommend to try to book the three star Novum hotel Gates, for just €34 per night it is a nice deal. If you prefer something a little more up, try the four-star Novotel am tiergarten, for about €75/night.

So, that means: you can now book travel and hotel. Don't forget to register on this page. Note that you have to first create an account and then actually register for the event!

About oCC

The goal of the ownCloud Contributor Conference is to Get Stuff Done™, but we also want to offer people interested in coding on onwCloud a chance to learn a thing or two. So, while we simply have a doors-open hackathon from 26-31 of August, on Saturday the 30th we feature techtalks and workshops where people can learn to write ownCloud apps, using the ownCloud share and syncing API in their application and more.

PS there's a nice article over at Linux.com about why Frank started ownCloud. And we have also released the first Alpha of ownCloud 7!

LinuxTag 2014 Fun

Thursday, Friday and Saturday last week, LinuxTag took place in Berlin. A few months ago, in a moment of temporary insanity, I had proposed to three projects to organize their booths: KDE, openSUSE and ownCloud. As that wasn't challenge enough, I wanted to experiment with doing workshops at the booth, specifically aimed at attracting and training potential new contributors.

How it came to be

Music outside!

I proceeded to register a booth, promising the LinuxTag exhibition manager (Elke Moritz), the KDE e.V. board, the openSUSE Board and my brand new boss at ownCloud that we would set up a great show. As I wouldn't be able to separate ownCloud (PHP) or KDE (C++, QML) code from text in a openSUSE .spec file nor can staff three booths at once, you can imagine I promised more than I could ever deliver on my own. But that's where friends come in, right?

And they came through - the result was great.

Re:Publica area

The new LinuxTag

First, a short introduction. LinuxTag is one of the oldest European Linux events, operating under the credo: "bringing .org and .com together". That is, they feature both commercial and community booths and a big selection of talks.

LinuxTag has been taking place at the Messe in Berlin in the last years, and this has not been a hugely successful location. But this year, there was change: a co-location with the immensely popular Re:Publica event as well as collaboration with DroidCon was meant to bring a lot of new energy. The new location, Station Berlin, gives a more fitting Linux feeling: much more raw. If you ask me, it worked out, LinuxTag was a much better event than it has ever been in the Messe.

What did we do

openSUSE, ownCloud and KDE

As I noted, our plan was two-fold. We, that is KDE, openSUSE and ownCloud, would have a combined booth. We would use the combined space not for a traditional table+swag, instead set up an area for workshops. In short, 1 hour slots, visitors would learn the basics of working within each of the three communities. For example:

• writing ownCloud apps
• developing KDE applications
• packaging for openSUSE.

We wouldn't plan for a big audience: the workshops would go deep and be personal.

Daniel giving a workshop

So, we got together speakers and defined a program (see my blog). I received the ownCloud and openSUSE booth materials home and the day before LinuxTag, drove it all to the venue, picking up KDE stuff from Lydia Pintscher at the wikimedia office later in the evening. Due to some snafu's with the booth area preparations we had to set up the booth in the morning - which happened even before Danimo and myself arrived with some more materials (thanks booth team!).

The booths

Our booth area (all the way to the left!)

We planned for little space (essentially one combined booth) but the LT team had given us so much space, we had to set up three big booths! openSUSE got the big table, ownCloud took two round ones and a third round table was covered in the KDE tablecloth, with a huge KDE flag hung up next to it. Behind it all 12 chairs and a table with a projector. All this was quite a bit more than we planned, so the initial idea (we'd only need 1-2 people at a time to do 'booth duty' for the 3-in-1 booth) didn't work out very well: all three booths had to be staffed most of the time. We did have some overlap at quiet times, but full house during especially the breaks.

I had printed posters with the schedule, one for each day as we had slight schedule changes every day. We hung them up all over the place, after which we put down openSUSE, ownCloud and KDE flyers wherever there was space. The openSUSE Beer coasters did particularly well - we had put them on the tables in the eating/drinking area and we had to 'refill' several times a day.

Us vs them?

The posters and most of the flyers I had created for ownCloud pointed people to the booth (I stole the concept of the 'consume vs create' poster from the openSUSE Conference in Dubrovnik, btw!). We should have asked people how they found out about the workshops, from posters, blog, workshop or being told at our booth. I have no idea how effective each of those is...

Let me now point to this blog by Danimo about the owncloud presence, the KDE blog by Sebastian is out too. And I expect the openSUSE team to publish their blog(s) very soon.

Booth fun

Give some balloons to Frank, and...

For me, there was some fun synergy: meeting KDE-on-openSUSE users interested in installing ownCloud. Or, after starting a conversation with somebody about one of these projects, continuing the conversation about one of the others. Several times, I got users interested in all three at once: Server Linux (openSUSE/ownCloud) and Desktop Linux (openSUSE/KDE).

I also noticed that many visitors already knew ownCloud, or had at least heard of it. At some point, I was talking to a visitor, explaining ownCloud, while a second visitor joined the conversation. He already knew about ownCloud and took over, while I talked to a third visitor, answering some questions. Then a fourth showed up, who begun answering their questions while I turned to a fifth, explaining ownCloud... Great to get in conversations like that!

During a quiet moment, a visitor came to me, complaining he had been 'in line' to talk to me several times, but it was so busy, he didn't get a chance before! Indeed, we had busy times, especially Thursday. But that's awesome, right?

I also gave two talks - one at the evening program of LinuxTag about where the Linux Desktop is going (it didn't go very well, I'm afraid) and one about Community Governance at the first European Community Leadership Summit, that did go quite well. Shame I couldn't stay too long for the CLS as we had friends over and I had to go home...

All in all, for me, it was a great event.

Re:Publica Hippies

The team

Let me also not forget to introduce the team at LinuxTag to you:

• Daniel Molkentin (ownCloud)
• Arthur Schiwon (ownCloud)
• Georg Ehrke (ownCloud)
• Frank Karlitschek (ownCloud)
• Sebastian Gottfried (KDE)
• Christian Boltz (openSUSE & PostfixAdmin)
• Bernhard Wiedemann (openSUSE)
• Marcel Külhorn (openSUSE)

We had several people come by and help out a bit, as well as three others giving booth workshops:

• Maik Aussendorf (Bareos)
• Gratien D'haese (REAR)
• Jörg Schilling (fraunhofer, cdrecord)

Sebastian's KDE workshop

The workshops

During the booth work, we had the workshops going on. It had a bit of a slow start on Thursday morning, but quickly, the workshops started to attract some more people. At one point did I see Sebastian surrounded by six visitors interested in KDE development... I think, on average, the workshops attracted about 3-6 visitors each. Which is quite good, considering they were primarily aimed at introducing people to contributing to our projects.

Despite the amount of work preparing the booth workshops, I'd do it again. Imagine if only a third of the visitors decides to join the respective communities!

openSUSE booth team in action

Feedback

If you visited one of these booth workshops or our booth at LinuxTag, I'd love your feedback! Knowing how we did, if we were friendly, fun, interesting, or what was missing and what you'd like to see next time - it all helps us improve in the future!

In any case, everybody who contributed to the booths and presentations as well as everybody who visited us: thank you very much!

Of course very special hugs to the booth- and presentation team.

Get-involved workshops at the KDE/ownCloud/openSUSE booth at LinuxTag

Tomorrow, 9:45, LinuxTag and DroidCon open the doors in Berlin. The even presents a staggering number of sessions (see LinuxTag on Thursday alone featuring 57 talks). This is in part due to the addition of evening sessions, which are open for the public (no ticket needed). My own talk about the relevance of the Linux Desktop is one of these evening sessions. This is in parallel with LinuxNacht so we'll have to see how many people will choose talks over beer...

Workshops

At the combined openSUSE/ownCloud/KDE booth I've organized short workshops, given by contributors to these projects, designed to help you get involved with these (and other!) Free Software projects. There is only room for about 10-12 people per workshop so you will get some real attention from the developer doing the workshop. It also means you should make sure to be there on time to secure a spot!

We try to give the workshops tree times so if one is full, you can come back the next day (due to availability of people this didn't work for all workshops).

The program

Thursday

10:00	Testing Linux with openQA (Bernhard Wiedemann)
11:00	Introduction to hacking ownCloud file synchronization (Daniel Molkentin)
12:00	AppArmor Crash Course (Christian Boltz)
13:00
14:00	Build your first ownCloud App (Arthur Schiwon)
15:00	Writing your first KDE application (Sebastian Gottfried)
16:00	Packaging with the Open Build Service (Marcel Kühlhorn)
17:00	Internal security mechanisms used by the German eID card (Joerg Schilling)

Friday

10:00	Testing Linux with openQA (Bernhard Wiedemann)
11:00	Introduction to hacking ownCloud file synchronization (Daniel Molkentin)
12:00	Hacking PostfixAdmin (Christian Boltz)
13:00	Bareos Backup - Rear Disaster Recovery workshop (Maik Außendorf and Gratien D'haese)
14:00	Build your first ownCloud App (Georg Erhke)
15:00	Writing your first KDE application (Sebastian Gottfried)
16:00	Packaging with the Open Build Service (Marcel Kühlhorn)
17:00	Internal security mechanisms used by the German eID card (Joerg Schilling)

Saturday

10:00	Testing Linux with openQA (Bernhard Wiedemann)
11:00	Introduction to hacking ownCloud file synchronization (Daniel Molkentin)
12:00	AppArmor Crash Course (Christian Boltz)
13:00	Bareos Backup - Rear Disaster Recovery workshop (Maik Außendorf)
14:00	Build your first ownCloud App (Georg Erhke)
15:00	Writing your first KDE application (Sebastian Gottfried)
16:00	Packaging with the Open Build Service (Marcel Kühlhorn)
17:00	Internal security mechanisms used by the German eID card (Joerg Schilling)

Participants to the workshops get a Club Mate to keep them awake and quench their thirst.

Our booth space is in Hall 6, Number D11 - next to the LinuxTag info stand. See you there tomorrow!

oSC14 and LinuxTag coming!

It's becoming conference season again... Tomorrow morning I'll fly to Dubrovnik for the openSUSE Conference. I give no less than 5 talks and one workshop. Don't worry, I'm not DDOSing the event, the talks are restricted to 30 minutes (even though I have about 1 hour of content for each, let's see how that goes). My sessions:

• Social skills for geeks
• Presenting awesome (workshop about giving presentations)
• How to run a booth and present your project
• Where KDE is and where it is going
• Cloudy experiences at home (about ownCloud!)
• Community building in 10 steps

That's quite a bunch, I know, but it'll be fun! I look forward to Dubrovnik, although I see it will be rainy and not that warm. Ah, sad...

LinuxTag 2014 - all change

A much bigger deal, for me, is LinuxTag. This year, it is considerably different from the previous few years: no more in the Messe! Instead, the team is collaborating with DroidCon and Re:Publica. That, combined with the location (Station in Berlin), could potentially be awesome! Here I give one talk about the future of KDE. I'll also be speaking at the Community Leadership Summit Europe about Open Governance.

But more importantly, I'll be organizing the LT booth for three projects: ownCloud, KDE and openSUSE. Yeah, ambitious again! Not only that, we're not going for the traditional booth. Instead, I've proposed to do something different: have a track of technical mini-workshops at the booth. 45 minute talks, small, hands-on, about the technology of these projects. So, think about building packages with the Open Build Service, writing an ownCloud App or developing a QML based Plasma widget.

Needing some help

The idea seems generally liked but I haven't found anybody for any of the three above potential talks - so if you can and want to do that or something like it, please let me know! We won't have too much traditional booth space, just enough for a bit of stuff and one or two ppl answering questions. The talks will repeat every day so as volunteer, you give your talk 3 times, once every day. Otherwise you are free to enjoy the talks as well as the Re:Publica booth area. As the tickets are not cheap (Eur 149!) this is a nice way to get into LinuxTag for free (I have only 2 tickets per booth, though). You'll get hugs and Club Mate as much as you want. And there's travel support available for all these projects!

Help me out, please! And if you can't - at least, be sure to visit the booth at LinuxTag or come say hi at the openSUSE Conference!