Rant of the day: well, at least Microsoft is making loads of money...

Sadly, many if not most of our schools today are suddenly pumping lots of extra money into Microsoft, Zoom and other proprietary software companies, because they need online collaboration. We all know there are many alternatives to giving their students' data away to foreign companies but most don't bother. It is annoying, there is always budget for Microsoft, but not for proper, local, privacy-protecting open source solutions, even if those are better. Why is that?

Reputation, I'm convinced, is the main reason for that.

We teach them the wrong thing

Unfortunately, a lot of people try to convince schools, governments, charitable organizations and even companies to not pay anything at all. They are promoting open source solutions as an alternative that is cheaper or free, which just makes it look inferior to management. They are not telling organizations to pay local and open source product companies instead of Microsoft.

Open source/Free Software advocates hammer on "but it is free"! And when they do, THEY probably think of Freedom. But the person they talk to just thinks "cheap and bad", no matter how you try to explain freedom. Nobody gets that, really, even if they nod friendly while thinking what a silly, idealistic nerd you are. Been there, done that.

I love the enthusiasm, yes, but in the end it is not helpful: it presents open source as a crappy but cheaper alternative without any real support. Well, there are a few overloaded volunteer enthusiasts who might do a great job for a volunteer but can't compete with a bunch of full time paid people at Microsoft. So the schools and governments and companies will simply use those 'free' (as in cheap and crappy) services as a stop-gap and then beg their bosses for budget to be able to pay a "proper" Microsoft service. There goes more public money in NOT public code.

We need to stop teaching companies that open source is a crappy, cheaper alternative to proper, paid alternatives from big American companies and instead tell them that they can pay for an open source solution that has real good support, no vendor lock-in, doesn't leak your data, protects your privacy and is actually better in many other ways. That way open source companies can actually hire people to make products better instead of just doing consulting one customer at a time.

And yes, some companies and some business areas have figured this out - Red Hat and SUSE are obvious examples, and projects like OpenStack have lots of paid people involved. But lots of other companies, from Bareos (backup) to Kolab (groupware) have struggled for years if not decades to build a product, instead getting sucked into consulting.

It doesn't work that way

I have seen loads of open source product companies go bankrupt or just give up and become consulting firms because their customers simply expected everything for free and to only pay a bit for consulting. Lots of open source people work at or set up their own consulting firms, occasionally even contributing a patch to upstream - but not building a product. Not that they don't want to, but they quickly find out that working your ass off for a maybe decent hourly rate does not leave you time to actually work on the thing you wanted to improve in the first place.

Indeed, you can't build a good end user product that way. Frank and myself put together a talk about this recently:



I have also recently written an article about this entire thing, explaining why of all the business models around open source, only subscriptions can lead to a sustainable business that actually builds a great product. Will hopefully soon be on opensource.com.

Yeah but volunteers...

Are fundamental to open source, yes, no doubt. At Nextcloud we could not have build what we did without lots of volunteers, heck, nearly everybody at Nextcloud was a volunteer at some point. And yes, all code we write is AGPL, and that, too is important. I am NOT arguing against that, not in the least.

What I say is:

• You can't build a great product without paid developers*
• You can't build a great product on consulting and only getting paid for setting it up/hosting

But let me then also add:

• You can build a better product collaboratively
• And the (A)GPL are the best licenses to do that

I'm sure there are exceptions to those rules, yes. But compare a great product like Krita, see how its developers struggle every day to be able to pay the bills of just a few full-time volunteers. Do you know how they are currently paying most of them? Last time I spoke to Boudewijn, the reality was sad: the Microsoft App store. Yup. How many does Adobe manage to pay to work on its products? Why should our ambition not be to have as many people working on Krita? Of course it should be. And yes, keep it open source. Is that doable?

Of course it is. Well, maybe not Adobe levels, but we can absolutely do better.

Missed opportunities

I said this was a rant, so I do have to complain a bit. My biggest regret is that KDE failed to catch up during the netbook period (around 2005). I believe that it is in no small part because we failed to work with businesses. Idealism can be super helpful and can also totally keep you irrelevant.

KDE is, lately, working more with companies, trying to build up more business around its product. GNOME has been far better at that for a far longer time, by the way. It is hard, and companies like Kolab, struggling for the last ~20 years to make things work, have shown that. Just being a for-profit obviously doesn't solve all problems. Idealism and hard work are not enough to make a business work. But we can do better, and Nextcloud is an example that shows we can. Now not all things are freaking awesome at Nextcloud, really - we work our a**** off and it is hard. We put on our best face in public but sometimes I just want to bang my head on and in the wall...

Still, see the video, read the blog hopefully soon on opensource.com - there are ways.

Thoughts welcome.

Edit:
* let me qualify that statement. You can do it without paid developers in a small project, I dunno, grep or ls or the awesome simplescreenrecorder and tools like that. With those there is a risk of the apps going unmaintained and new ones popping up all the time - look at music players in the KDE community. I'd rather see one well maintained than new ones pop up with all their different flaws, but I totally get that for a volunteer it is often easier and more fun to start fresh. In either case, once you start building something huge, it gets pretty hard without long term dedicated resources. Note that it can be donations-run (like Krita and many others), with a charitable organization. I do think it is about more than 'just' the resources. If somebody 'just' sponsored 25 people to work full-time on Nextcloud, the end result would be different than the situation today. The need to deliver something that makes customers happy (which means focus on details, scalability etc!) and pressure to do things you wouldn't want to do in your free time (developer documentation...) make a big difference.

In any case, I really don't think projects like LibreOffice, Firefox, Nextcloud, KDE or GNOME and the Linux kernel itself would be where they are today without people paid to work on them.

Privacy, self-hosting, surveillance, security and open source in Berlin

August 22-29 we're organizing a conference to discuss and work on privacy, self-hosting, security and open source in Berlin: the Nextcloud Conference. We expect some 150-200 people to participate during a week of discussing and coding and, especially on the weekend, presenting and workshopping. So I thought I should blog about why should you be there and what can you expect?

If you care about protecting people from the all-pervasive surveillance, re-gain privacy and security of data and believe in self hosting and open source as solution for these issues, this is the place to be. Our event is special for two reasons:

The team that started ownCloud

We're doing it. And most of us have been, for a decade or more, in KDE, GNOME, SUSE, Ubuntu, phpBB and other earlier projects. The code we wrote has influenced millions of users already and we will go further and wider! Expect to meet people with a can-do attitude.

Second, Nextcloud has got a huge momentum, name recognition and has become one of the largest ecosystems in the open source privacy/self hosting area. It isn't just about us! Large companies, small startups and innovative individuals and small communities all over are building on and around Nextcloud. A few examples:

• Our keynote speaker is former Mozilla president Tristan Nitot, who is currently CTO of Cozycloud, another private, open source self-hosted cloud solution.
• We're working with the GNOME community on deeper Linux desktop integration (we hope we can bring those also to KDE's Plasma!) and lots of projects built on our technology, like the super cool Mail-in-a-box
• Many third party apps like the buttercup password manager, DAVdroid android app, PrivacyIdea 2FA and Gluu SSO, Collabora Online and the innovative open source Blockchain storage SIA provide Nextcloud integration. And more are coming, expect announcements at the Nextcloud conference!
• We have well over 70 different providers like CiviHosting
• You can find over 80 apps on our app store offering all kinds of additional capabilities and integrations, from Kanban or time planning apps to the mentioned authentication and external storages to music players to drawing apps to full text search to...
• One organization after another implements or moves to Nextcloud, with the TU Berlin  (where our conference takes place, like last year) and the capital of Albania merely the last in the long list.

We are doers

So the Nextcloud conference is where you can find a wide range of individuals with interest, skills and ideas in the area of privacy and freedom activism, and they are doers! There is a reason we say "bring your laptop" on our conference page, though with that we don't mean we only want coders there!

Designers, activists and advocates are just as welcome. That is because Nextcloud is about more than technology. Frank is somebody who sometimes asks the hard questions and obviously it his vision is a strong diver, but we're all long time open source and/or privacy activists and deeply and personally motivated. Our entire community is built on drive, passion and a will to take on the challenges our society offers in the area of privacy, self determination, freedom.

That is the why you should be there. To help make a difference.

Now the what.

Getting Stuff Done

Our goal is to get work done; and facilitate communication and collaboration in our community. During the week, we simply provide space to talk and code (with wired and wireless network, Club Mate & other drinks, and free lunch). In the weekend, we have a program with talks & workshops. The setup is simple:

In the morning, everybody is in one room. First, we all hear from long time privacy activist and former Mozilla president Tristan Nitot. After that, community members working on a wide variety of interesting things around privacy/self hosting/open source and of course Nextcloud talk, shortly, about what they do. Just 3-8 minutes to give the audience an idea of their project, their plan, their idea, how to get involved, a call for action. Now again, everybody is in the room, so in the break, everybody has heard the same talks and has the same things to discuss! If you have something to add, be it about TOR, protests, encryption or anything else that is related: SUBMIT A TALK!

Collaboration & sharing ideas

Last year we announced the Nextcloud Box.
This year - be there and find out!

People can look up the speakers, join the meetings proposed and so on, in the afternoon. Because after lunch we have 2 (or more, not sure yet) tracks of workshops as well as hacking, coding and meetings in the coding rooms. Unconference style, so to say.

We now have several dozen talks and workshops already submitted and well over 100 people have registered but we are looking for more input in all areas so consider to be a part of this event!

It is free and open, supported by the TU Berlin which offers us a free location; and Nextcloud GmbH which sponsors drinks & practical stuff; and SUSE Linux which sponsors the Saturday evening party!

Learn more and register!

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.

SCALE14x fun - openSUSE, KDE

Last weekend was SCALE and I had a lot of fun. Thought a report on the KDE/openSUSE presence would be good!


An impression from the trip - as in, Oslo->Los Angelos.


The event started with talks and I even managed to join the keynote by Corey Doctorow before heading to the booth!

openSUSE

If you didn't know it yet, now you do: both the KDE and GNOME booth are organized by openSUSE, and more precisely Booth Master Drew Adams. His energy makes, I think, openSUSE the most active community booth at FOSDEM with about a dozen volunteers (!!!). He keeps bringing in new people, amazing really. The corner booth worked out great though they wanted to try and move the openSUSE booth to be next to the SUSE one (which was sandwiched between Mageia and the FSF). Thinking about it now - it would have made SUSE pale in comparison...

Such a great presence at an event has a real impact in many ways, from introducing people to openSUSE and giving users a chance to chat about it to also showing people the Geeko matters and what it is up to. Plus, it's a great time for the team, too. So, awesome many points for Drew, really. Next time you see him: give him a hug!


The openSUSE Booth where visitors were thought about the Ways of the Geeko: Tumbling and Leaping!

KDE

I asked for volunteers in a blog some weeks ago and the good news is that people stepped up! Scarlett, who's working on becoming a Debian maintainer, as well as her Debian sponsor Diane, both stepped up to help out. Backbone of the booth this year was Barrington Daltrey who hasn't been representing KDE at SCALE for some years but decided to get back in the game again. A massive thanks to all three volunteers! I'm hoping that next year, Bert and Linda Yerke (who couldn't make it this year) are able to join again, we can have a real KDE party then! Especially as the Yerkes created some great swag last year (the awesome Konqi stickers!) and I have high expectations for what they might bring in 2017.

In any case, with these volunteers, the booth was staffed and lots of people could get their questions answered and had a place to leave their praise and thanks.


GNOME and KDE - brothers in arms!


Scarlett took a pic with me ;-)

Others

Of course, there was also the GNOME booth, well staffed and with demo devices. Walking over the rest of the exhibition hall, I spotted other distro's and projects. Elementary looked nice (their icons seem their biggest asset, seeing how they were promoted) and I talked to people at the Ubuntu booth. Their booth had a big Dell banner and two Dell employees to talk to about the Dell Developer Edition laptops. A great project and the team is doing an amazing job! Soon, the new Dell XPS devices will become available through the program and I'm thinking about getting one.

I must admit, though, that after putting the Dell XPS 13 next to my own Samsung np900x3c, the Samsung still feels sleeker, thinner, lighter, more durable. Sadly, the Samsung was a bit ahead of its time and battery life is a serious weakness. I take battery life over performance and big screens any time (not over ram, though, I want 16GB to stop running out of ram). So I'm hoping for a premium, Core M based (passively cooled) laptop from Dell, WITH Ubuntu on it. One can dream, right?


SCALE is tiring or relaxed, you pick.


Swapnil interviewing Elementary!

Besides the booths, there were also talks and lunches and dinners and conversations with loads of people


HP had only a magician at their booth. Fun, yes. But I prefer the real stuff ;-)

I'll next do an ownCloud-at-SCALE14x blog, but separate as that's where I spend most of my time and I thus have a lot to write about it!

Home Automation, AI and the Crownstone

Waiting for that future where you're dressed automatically? I'd rather do that myself and don't have a Roomba yet but as tech marches on, we'll get more automation in our homes.

With more and more 1984, Brave New World and Farenheit 451 being brought to this century by our esteemed leadership and our corporate overlords, I'm hoping that this tech will be ours, rather than theirs.

Enter a nice player in the "automate stuff" arena: Dobots. In their own words:

Our goal: Really smart buildings. Really smart robots. We're a startup in AiTech with applications in CleanTech and GreenTech.

What makes them nice is that they are real Open Source folks, putting what they code on github under a free license and working with and building on open tech.

They previously did industrial cleaning robots and other stuff. Currently, they are running a kickstarter for a smart power outlet as a first foray into home automation. EDIT: they've instead decided to, for the first run, only create EU plugs as there was little interest in the US. You can order them on the crownstone.rocks website.

Enter the Crownstone

How is AI relevant for power outlets? More than you'd think. One example is SLAM. SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) tries to answer two key questions in Robotics:

• Robot Localization: “Where is the Robot?”
• Robot Mapping: “What does the world around the Robot look like?”

(read more about SLAM here)

Dobots has turned this around in the crownstone, using these algorithms to map your house and localize people in it. Yes, the Crownstones know where THEY are and where YOU are. While not exactly a localization tech, the Crownstone uses Bluetooth LE for this so it works with pretty much any device. And the best part: their localization code is, in Javascript, to be found on github!

This means you need no motion detectors or cameras to know where people are in the house, keeping things simpler and cheaper. But Bluetooth LE is used for managing the Crownstones, too. Rather than turning to WiFi or (expensive) central control hubs, Dobots lets the Crownstones automatically create a mesh network. Your smartphone acts as control hub (apps on github, of course) though you can also take a Raspberry Pi, plug in a bluetooth usb module and have it act as hub. That way, even when you're not at home, you can control devices or get notificationsthat, say, your television, computer or other devices are getting unplugged. It uses XMPP and WebRTC to get through your firewall and guess where you can find the Cordova based Raspberry Pi app...



But there's another innovation in there which helps avoid extra devices and complicated configuration: extremely fine grained power usage monitoring. Yeah, it can tell you how much power your fridge and TV use but more importantly: it can automatically detect which device you connect to it! So when you leave the house, it can kill power to your tv but not your fridge... I've been told they think they eventually will be able to figure out different makes and models of laptops based on their power signature. Now is that cool, or what?

The algorithms to do this are currently Matlab code but once finalized, they'll be on github, too.

Dobots regularly works with students who get to play with their tech and come up with new, innovative use cases. And this works wonders. Just some results from a recent hackathon:

• Team 1 developed ChildLock. Devices are only turned on when adults are in proximity.
• Team 3 developed Start VR. Virtual reality that allows you to picture your own furniture in an Ikea store.
• Team 4 introduced Never Lose. Lights indicate for elderly people where they have lost items with iBeacons.
• Team 5 used Crownstones to indicate the way to store employees.
• Team 6 worked on Tommy. An AI that analyzes patterns of daily life to combat loneliness.
• Team 7 developed Any Morning. Your phone using the Crownstones guides you to your morning routines to make you leave your home on time.
• Team 10 implemented Tipspromenad. Kids have to find objects in a place combined with solving puzzles for fun!
• Team 11 developed SpotOn. In emergency situations lights indicate how to flee a building

All together

The Crownstone has some nice advantages over the competition:

• Functional. Dimmer, iBeacon, a current measuring device, a standby killer and more in one.
• Cheap: you get 2 ready-made or 3 do-it-yourself for Eur 75 but there's no need for a hub, motion sensors or other stuff.
• Open. Using open protocols and code on github and I expect interesting applications to come from the community.

I did an interview with their COO - for more background, read it on LinuxVeda.

So I say - if you are looking to start with some basic home automation, go and get some Crownstones and get started!

ownCloud Server 8.2 is here

And on time following the new three month release cycle! The previous release, ownCloud Server 8.1, was all about stability, performance and security. Now, more work has been put in the user experience. That shows in the new sidebar, the new gallery app and refreshed style but for system admins, there's a large number of new control points as well.

Gallery app

For end users, the design improvements are nice but the new Gallery app is truly a transformation. It is essentially the 'Gallery Plus' app, developed by Olivier Paroz. It is essentially a full rewrite based on the new app framework, after which lots of features and performance improvements were made. The app has been around for a while and Olivier has solidly proven himself as maintainer so I'm really glad this app is now a part of the core ownCloud experience. Below is Oliviers' talk from the ownCloud Contributor Conference, introducing the new Gallery to the community!

Notifications

The new notifications are cool, too - only one app supports them, for now, and that one isn't there by default so you won't see notifications until apps get updated. But as soon as they get adapted to the new API, accepting share invitations or getting notified of changes becomes easier and nicer. If you want to play with the notifications right now, go get the announcementcenter app and send some news to your users to see how it works!

New Appliance and Proxy app

Technically not new, as both were announced at the conference and made available since then, but super awesome: we have an official ownCloud appliance. This will make installing ownCloud a lot easier for a lot of people - and bring back some kind of Windows Server support, too.

On top of that, the appliance contains the ownCloud Proxy app, which is really great for lowering the bar even further. Simply put, ownCloud Proxy enables you to take a laptop and an Internet connection, connect to your privately hosted ownCloud from anywhere, without requiring you to make any changes to your local network settings – no router configuration, no DNS entries, no domain name registration. The ownCloud Proxy service relies on a partner who provides the service for a fee. Right now, there is one partner, pageKite. It would rock if somebody else saw business in this, too, of course!

Now, go, go and get it. Note that the VM isn't available as of right now (14:05) because it's still building... An 8.1.3 based one is there, though.

Meetup and a release party in B'lin?

Today at 7 it is ownCloud meetup time in C-Base again (and also in Munich, by the way!). As ownCloud Server 8.1 is scheduled for the beginning of next month, I hope to grab a daily ownCloud snapshot, put it on a Banana Pi and run the cool Smashbox testing tool against it to see how it fares.

Even more interesting, I hope to see if I can install older ownCloud releases on other Pi's and compare the performance changes between 7, 8 and 8.1 for example. Performance is one of the big improvements that should be coming in 8.1, with 4x speed up of things like file syncing. I'd like to see if I can measure that!

I have several Pi's and (after having given workshops on how to install ownCloud on them) plenty experience in getting them running, but no experience with Smashbox whatsoever. So - I can use some help. If you're interested in joining the fun, be there tonight!

On a different note, ownCloud comes out in the beginning of next month - that means that the NEXT meetup is essentially a release party at C-Base. Sir, yes, sir - release party time! See you there?

There'll be a meetup on the 6th of July in Nuremberg, I guess that's a pre-release party as the release is set for the 7th. Munich also has a meetup on July 15, like Berlin.

ownCloud workshops - two down, two to go.

some had already given up at this time...

The success rate is going up - where, at the first ownCloud workshop at the openSUSE conference, we had no successful installation, yesterday in Helsinki we reached a two-out-of-five. Both workshops had around 20 participants but usually people collaborated in groups of 3-5, following my guidelines on how to get ownCloud up and running on a Banana Pi development board.

Whoah, two out of five?

I admit it isn't easy and partially, that is intentional. The instructions in the document are sparse, especially for newbies - but even an experienced Arch'er threw his towel in the ring after almost three hours. Then again, what is a workshop for if not for enjoying the struggle of learning something new? And certainly everybody did that - struggle and learn new things.

The winning team still hard at work

The second team to get ownCloud running

Those who have any experience installing ownCloud know the difficulty can not be in ownCloud - and indeed, once you are set up with a running Banana Pi with SSH access, installing ownCloud is a matter of minutes. But getting there is no picnic! Why?

The hardest part by far is with the networking part of the workshop - the moment you've SSH'ed into the Banana Pi, 85% of the work is done. The challenge is significant - requiring not just Linux on the host laptop (yesterday, Ubuntu got 4 new users as neither Mac nor Windows were up to the task) but also handling stuff like tcpdump, Wireshark and a bunch of low-level command line tools like dd, mount, dpkg, ssh and so on. For most participants, the hardest challenges were:

• Windows and Mac. I'm sure they are awesome operating systems, but something which is a few mouse clicks on a Linux system (sharing the wifi internet connection over a Ethernet cable with the Banana Pi) seems virtually impossible. On Linux, NetworkManager makes it as easy as creating a new wired connection, choosing "shared network" under the IPv4 tab and ticking the "this connection requires IPv4". Now, just enable this network after connecting the Pi and done. I have no experience with Windows or Mac whatsoever, but if nearly 15 IT students with internet access can't figure out how to make these operating systems do the same thing - I can only assume it is hard.
• Command line familiarity. If you're new to Linux, an instruction like "mount the USB stick and copy over the data to the Pi" takes more than a few minutes and requires you to learn at least two new tools and looking through system logs. 
• New tools. You'll be looking for alternatives to Linux commands like dd on Windows and Mac first, and once you've given up on your familiar platform you get to learn tools even most Linux users rarely need. 
• Geeks. "Can't you do this easier with TCPDump?" "You can do this with the ip command too, you know" - I could only reply "Try, and if it works, show me how." Rest assured, I learned a few things - but haven't changed my instructions. Yet.

Seriously, I love it. Three hours of a workshop full of people trying various ways of skinning the cat. To me, the fact that nobody got completely through my instructions merely means they had a good time on the way. At least, that's what they said - "the best workshop I've been at" is just awesome to hear.

And... working! A Banana Pi was the reward.

For the next workshop (coming Thursday at the Open Tech Summit in Berlin), I'll further streamline the instructions (but not too much!) and I mean to put in some 'advanced' challenges for those who simply know too much about Linux to stay busy for 3 hours. I want to know how to do this without Wireshark and NetworkManager, to name two things...

of course - food and beer as reward for hard work

I'll also have to make Linux mandatory. The USB sticks with instructions and software I provide will be openSUSE live sticks for the next workshop, as I can't expect everybody to have Linux by default on their laptops. And of course you can use Windows or Mac if you really want and are up for the challenge, I don't mind including instructions for these platforms. But nobody got them working yet so expect some struggle.

You will also need a laptop with a working ethernet port, no amount of creativity has been enough to work around the physical limitation of not being able to plug in the other end of the networking cable...

Besides the satisfaction of getting ownCloud running, the first to succeed earns the Banana Pi they worked with!

If you can't make it to Berlin, I will give workshop later this month also in Dubrovnik (see my earlier blog) and if you'd like to have this workshop close by - let me know, perhaps we can arrange something.

Open Tech Summit Berlin, openSUSE Conference and more

This is a fun month. Not only are we moving forward with the ownCloud Contributor Conference (some cool interviews coming out soon), but there's a sudden avalanche of events this month. The ownCloud.org blog already wrote about it - we have had FOSDEM, SCALE, Chemnitz and may others I didn't attend myself. Find out about the openSUSE conf from last week and the upcoming OTS in Berlin!

Bunch'o'geekos

Last weekend I was at the openSUSE Conference which was a great event. I gave a workshop on how to install ownCloud on embedded devices (like Raspberry Pi and Banana Pi) with about 20 participants and while it wasn't as easy as I had hoped, everybody had fun.



There were two great BBQ evenings as well, with beer and time to talk to many, many old and young geeko friends.

I absolutely had a great time - thanks, everybody, for working on the conference and being there! I look forward to next years' event.

Upcoming

This Friday I'll give a workshop at Happy Hacking Day 2015 in Helsinki and later this month I will keynote at the DORS/CLUC conference in Zagreb, Croatia.

Open Tech Summit Berlin

Next week, May 14, is a home game, as I'll give a workshop at the Open Tech Summit at the Kalkscheune in Berlin.

I will spend a few more words on this as the event has been announced rather late, yet it looks like the place to be for Berliners next week!

The event will feature talks, workshops and panels with topics ranging from open hardware to design, graphics, software, start ups and digital policies. In a barcamp style track there is space for adhoc meetings, lightning talks and breakout sessions. There will also be dedicated workshops for kids and maker enthusiasts, where you can make your own gadgets (TV-B-Gone, upgrade knitting machines, your own traffic lights) and Fashiontec wearables. In the evening it will have an “OpenTech-Himmelfahrt” lounge and the Linux Professional Institute offers Linux certification at a discounted rate.

Speakers will include a bunch of interesting people from Freifunk, Mozilla, VLC, 3D printers and many other cool projects, discussing everything from software to hardware hacking.

Workshop and discounted access to OTS

And of course, Blizz and myself will run a workshop on how to install ownCloud on cool devices. We have some with us, but it's recommended you bring your Raspberry Pi, power, a SD card, a laptop and a network cable. You can bring your server, desktop or laptop for installation of ownCloud too, of course. You can register for the workshop here and if you haven't yet registered or gotten tickets for the event - here's a nice discount.

ownCloud Meetup to test devices in Berlin

Coming Wednesday, it's time for the monthly Berlin ownCloud meetup again. Last month, we wanted to play with some little development boards, install ownCloud on them and see what they could do. But we had over a dozen new participants join, turning the meetup mostly in a 'how to get an ownCloud development environment up and running' session.

That was great fun and I'd love to see everybody again - but the devices are also in the office, looking at us like they want attention. So, if you're interested in playing with Banana Pi, Raspberry Pi, cubietruck and similar stuff, come and join our meetup. Wednesday, starting at 7 at c-base Berlin in the main room, we'll grab some tables and bring devices, power cords and chargers and get going.

We'll see how far we can get, but goals include getting some decent performance statistics of the differences between the various devices and ownCloud releases as well as finding some ways of optimizing the ownCloud performance on these boards.

Note that ANYBODY, seriously, ANYBODY is welcome. We'd be more than happy to help you get started with any type of ownCloud hacking, so if you don't care about Raspberry Pi's but rather hack on 2048 CPU clusters - fine with me. Feel free to bring one and we'd be happy to turn it into a fun toy ;-)

Oh and if you tend to get hungry in the evening, bring something to eat. We'll probably grab some pizza.

You can RSVP here but you're welcome in any case!

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 ;-)

SCALE is almost here!

In less than a week, SCALE13x kicks off in Los Angeles! The hotel it takes place in is full so it promises to be busy - of course, there are more hotels around.


ownCloud will have a booth (#80) and I'll give a talk with Frank about data ownership, why it is important and how you can get it ;-)

There will be a kick-ass openSUSE booth, as always, and a KDE table as well. I am looking forward to meeting old friends and making new ones!


See you there?

FOSDEM 2015

FOSDEM was crazy.

ownCloud booth between Diaspora and Tor

Regulars know it always is but it somehow managed to surprise me still.

The ownCloud booth was pretty much continuously swamped with visitors and even with 3-4 people there almost all the time, we could barely talk to everybody who had questions - let alone approach people who might have. So, sore feet, but still a blast. My biggest regret is that I barely left the booth to check out other projects I love. Luckily, ownCloud was flanked by awesome projects!

Diaspora, Tor, KDE, openSUSE...

I had a chat with the Diaspora folks at the booth next to us and greatly look forward to the upcoming release. They had a nice flyer-y paper which also included some development stats with the number of active contributors and such, a very useful thing to have so you can quickly see how a project is doing. Diaspora had a hard time since the crazy start, but things are picking up again and 66 people contributed to this important project over the last year.

I only visited the KDE booth a few times for a chat and to check out the new t-shirts (we brought a bunch of the 'old' style t-shirts with us and Ovidiu brought the new ones), not much different from openSUSE. I did talk to the usual subjects and met Douglas. Great to hear the merger of Factory and Tumbleweed is working out very well.

The Open Build Service continues strong and it was interesting to hear some thoughts on a conversation with Debian developers. They are (finally?) also working on reproducible builds, being bitten by some of their processes. I mean, if you become a Debian developer, you're nearly root on all the build systems and have a lot of fun with all the supported architectures. Compared to the robust, transparent processes and easy dealing with multiple architectures and different distribution versions on OBS - it seems a pointless struggle to me. It's not like OBS is evil, proprietary code, nor obscure and barely maintained! But I guess change is hard in such a bureaucratized organization.

Oh, and I look forward to the openSUSE Conference in den Hague! There is good progress with the organization of the event. Perhaps some Debian core developers should participate and have a look at OBS before Lennert solves the problem in a way that makes packaging irrelevant ;-)

Tor - darn, despite standing next to them, I didn't have time for a good conversation and I'm glad some FSFE friends walked past our booth or I wouldn't have known about the FSFE's upcoming valentine campaign I hope we can participate in!

marketing material package assembly

ownCloud

I mentioned our booth was busy. Wow. We have been creating some marketing materials and this was a bit of a test run. I send out materials in envelopes, and I thought - "let's bring 8 packages and see how they fit. Those left can be taken by the other team members to other events."

Result:

• stickers were out (from all packages!) by 3PM on Saturday, flyers on Sunday morning. I need to re-assess the configuration of the packages.
• The developer and user flyers are not easily (or at all) identifiable as such. And the usage of red on the developer flyer triggers people to grab that one first. Looks like my education as psychologist failed me here, I should have known!
• Everybody who had a look at the user flyer could tell me what ownCloud was about - the contents are good.
• People are baffled by the fact that a PHP app that runs on a Raspberry Pi can scale to +500K users at universities or organizations like CERN. We can explain this better!

So, both in terms of organization and contents of the marketing materials, some good ideas on improvements.

Besides the materials, the conversations were mostly 'the usual': incredibly up-beat. Of course, nothing is perfect but the vast majority of visitors was very positive and enthusiastic about ownCloud. Over half had it running and was curious about the upcoming release, while the other half either already knew about it and was planning to play with it, or was very delighted to hear what it was as they had been looking for a way to get out of the proprietary file storage world.

... rulez

I swear, if the average citizen was anything like the FOSDEM visitor, the ownCloud user base would be twice the size of the proprietary clouds combined already... Of course, the world isn't like that and ownCloud is has to overcome some hurdles still.

Then again, if you see the recent announcements like OpenCloudMesh, universities and public research institutions around the world are diving all-in on ownCloud. At FOSDEM, two staff members from the ULB IT team (where FOSDEM takes place) came by the booth to share they were experimenting with ownCloud for staff and students and I talked to many employees and owners of a variety of companies busy testing or deploying ownCloud.

With the quickly growing number of ownCloud providers, perhaps the future for ownCloud (and data ownership for consumers and businesses alike) lies in such deployments, rather than people running their own servers. This is already a huge decentralization compared to everybody on one of the 4 or 5 clouds from Google and friends, which would help our privacy and security.

If things continue like this, the number of 2 million ownCloud users will have to be revised up to triple that before 2016 is here. I'd welcome that!

What's Holding ownCloud Back?

In the recent article about the ownCloud event program, I pointed out that while ownCloud has 2.5 million users, it is a drop in the ocean looking at the number of Internet users (a little over 4 billion today). The announcement of the "Let's Encrypt" initiative from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla and others prompted me to write this: it is one step in the direction of removing the limitations holding back wider ownCloud adoption. What does the future hold?

Easy ownCloud

As Frank pointed out in his blog on the future of PHP, ownCloud has ease of use as an explicit and very important goal. And while the technological choices made aren't always so exciting and bleeding edge, they do result in ownCloud being very easy to deploy on a very wide range of devices. Plenty of tutorials exist showing it running on everything from Rasberry Pi devices to big iron at organizations like CERN, where physicists looking for the origins of the universe are routing hundreds of terrabytes of data through their CernBOX build on ownCloud, sharing and collaborating on the data analysis.

Limitations

Unfortunately, there are limitations outside of what ownCloud can directly control.

In the database area, SQLite is default because it requires no manual setup whatsoever. But performance suffers when an installation has more than a trivial amount of data. When sharing with more than 15 users or indexing your mp3 connection, SQLite usage leads to frequent time-outs and other issues!

Another, more serious issue, is the architecture of the current internet. Most users are set up at home behind a firewall provided by their internet router. While this provides some additional security, it is mainly because the limited number of unique addresses available in the still widely-used 'IPv4' protocol. It simply is impossible to assign a unique address to each device connected to your internet at home. But this means your server will not be reachable when you're not home, unless you adjust some settings on your router. While we can configure some routers automatically, most we can't and as every router is different, an easy 'generic' how-to can't be provided either.

A third issue is that an ideal ownCloud platform would be small and cheap devices like the Raspberry Pi, but these are almost all based on 32bit CPU's. Due to technical limitations in the platform ownCloud builds on, this means you won't be able to have it handle files bigger than about 4 gigabyte! That is a big limitation if you'd like to store your virtual machine or Blue Ray collection on your ownCloud.

The fourth issue I see is security. While not the biggest problem of the three, setting up a server to be secure, including a decent SSL certificate, is not easy. I personally couldn't figure it out and while I'm new to server things, I am not a technology hater by any means. My parents wouldn't ever be able to figure it out and more importantly, they wouldn't want to!

Solutions

These four issues to wider ownCloud adoption aren't the only ones, but as far as I can tell, the biggest. So how do we deal with it?

There are several routes to an even easier ownCloud installation. Having a pre-setup operating system in the form of a container (Docker?) or a virtual machine can take care of much of the trouble around database setup and help a lot with the security issue. However, it can't run on light hardware like a Raspberry Pi and doesn't deal with the file size problem.

When it comes to the address limitations, the internet is slowly transitioning to IPv6 which will provide more unique addresses for each person than IPv4 offered in total (see here how Google explains IPv6). So, essentially, we just have to wait for this problem to be solved.

The hardware problem is also working on solving itself: the upcoming new swath of ARM CPU's (and Intel CPU's targeting the embedded market) are fully 64 capable so while current-gen Raspberry Pi devices (and other embedded devices like routers!) aren't perfect for ownCloud, a year from now many new devices will be perfectly capable of providing a great ownCloud experience.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Let's Encrypt" initiative offers a (partial) solution for the security issue. Without it, a pre-configured ownCloud system will most likely be set up to use a self-signed certificate. While secure in principle, it always warns visitors of the self-signed state and thus isn't ideal. Let's Encrypt provides an automated and more importantly free (in terms of cost) solution for this.

And now

While I'd love for all these changes to be implemented yesterday, in reality we simply have to wait for the transitioning to IPv6 and 64bit CPU's. In the mean time, we can already start working on integrating Let's Encrypt into virtual machine and Docker images with a pre-configured MySQL (or MariaDB) and perhaps recommend people to run them on a 64bit capable system like a modern NAS or a NUC. The ownCloud-in-a-Box image on SUSE Studio is a great start!

Meanwhile, getting ownCloud ready to run on a wider range of devices and perform a wider range of 'cloudy' functions like running as backend of the Chromebook devices (see this page and ping me if you want to get involved) should be on the agenda as well. I personally look forward to more 'social' integration in ownCloud, like the ability to comment on images or other data and share these with the people you share files with. We're on it, tags sharing is integrated for ownCloud 8 and a generic metadata repo was created (empty still). Get involved if you can!

Obviously, telling people about ownCloud is still important - which is what the ownCloud event program is all about - and help is welcome. Go to owncloud.org/promote and share the love!