ownCloud 1.0 is here

Today we are releasing ownCloud 1.0

This is the first step of the 1.x series with a planed 1.1 really soon.

You can download ownCloud 1.0 now and put it in a webspace with PHP support and it should work.

So what is ownCloud?

ownCloud is a central place where you can store your files and documents. You don´t have to upload your personal data to central closed services like Google Docs, Dropbox or Ubuntu One. All the data is under your own control.

You can access your files via WebDAV from Linux, Mac and Windows Desktops without a special client because WebDAV support is build into all modern operation systems and distributions. On Linux you can use the KDE KIO-Slaves or mount it via FUSE into your home directory.

If you can´t use WebDAV for example on your smart phone you can use the webinterface to access your files.

The data transfer is encrypted if your web-server supports SSL and ownCloud has no problems with firewalls and proxy servers.

ownCloud support the Open Collaboration Services API so your ownCloud can push notification to your KDE Desktop if something interesting happens, like your storage is full or somebody is accessing a shared file of you.

So 1.0 is only the first step and we are already working on the next versions.

Future plans are:

- Versioning of all files using git as a backend.

- Easy sharing of your files with others.

- Storage for KDE applications to save and share configuration data. (Martin Sandsmark is working on this)

- Syncing client so you can access your files offline. (work has already started)

We already have a basic plugin system and plan to improve this a lot for version 1.1.

So in the future developers can write add ons for your ownCloud.

Examples are:

- A photo gallery plugins. So you can share your photos with others without uploading it to services like Flickr or Picasa.

- Music server. You can listen to your music from every device without copying it around.

- Podcast catcher. A central place to collect your audio and video podcasts and access it via a HTML5 interface or a native media player.

I´m thrilled by the current development speed. It´s only 5 month after I started the project during Camp KDE in San Diego in January and we already have the first enduser ready release. The reason for this speed is that we already have a very active and motivated developer community of great people. Thanks a lot to everybody who contributed to this release.

You find the download file and more information on the website ownCloud.org.

If you want to help with the development or integration with other projects send a message to the ownCloud mailing-list.

I will give a talk about the future of ownCloud at Akademy in Tampere in 2 weeks. Please join as there if you are interested in KDE and cloud computing. I also plan to organize a BOF session to discuss the future of this project with everybody who´s interested.

You can find more information here:

http://owncloud.org

http://www.gitorious.org/owncloud

https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/owncloud

Cheers

Frank

Linuxtag day one

I´m at Linuxtag in Berlin again this year. As every year it´s a great event, interesting people and interesting talks.

Together with the fanstastic weather here in Berlin we really have a great time.

My personal highlights of the first day are:

Launch of the Individual Supporting Memebership Program "Join the Game" together with Jos on the Stage Wednesday morning.

Please check out jointhegame.kde.org if you like what KDE is doing and you want to help us. I´m proud that we got Georg Greve the founder of the free software foundation europe at a first member of "join the game". He is also holder of the german "Bundesverdienstkreuz"

The KDE booth team is doing a teriffic job in explaning the visitors what KDE is doing and what the "Join the Game" campaign is.

Our second member of the "Join the Game" program is Vincent Untz the current release manager of GNOME and president of the GNOME foundation. Cornelius will become a "Friend of GNOME" in exchange. We want to show that the KDE and GNOME communities are friends and that we enjoy working together.

My next highlight of the first day was the release of ownCloud 1.0 RC1 of course.

This is probalby the final release candidate befor the release of our first und user ready release 1.0. But I have already several ideas and some code for new features in 1.1. So 1.0 is only the first step.

You find more information on the website ownCloud.org. Please test it and report your bugs if you find problems.

I was also as part of a groundtable about free software and cloud computing in the afternoon on the Univention Stage. I thing it was a very interesting discussion. The Audio Podcast should be available soon.

I can also announce that I´m willing to sponsor an internship to work fulltime on ownCloud for the next few month. The ideal candidate is at lease 18 years old and can work at out office in Stuttgart. You find more information here: http://opendesktop.org/jobs/?id=109

So please apply if you are interested. :-)

In the evening we had our yearly LinuxTag dinner sponsored by our friends from Nokia. Thanks a lot. It was great.

I´m looking forward to the next few days of Linuxtag and we have a few more interesting announcements in the pipeline ;-)

Cheers

Frank

ownCloud status

I want to give you an overview about the stuff thats happening in ownCloud world.

I released the beta 1 one month ago on gitorious and I´m thrilled by the positive response in the mean time.

We already have a small but very active developer community hacking on ownCloud. In the last 4 weeks we implemented this significant improvements:

• Location independent. You can put your ownCloud installation in any directory inside your web-server root and it works.

• SQLite. ownCloud is ported to SQLite to simplify installation. MySQL is still working thanks to our database abstraction layer.

• We have an improved AJAX Web-interface

• We have a first run wizard for the initial configuration.

• Automatic creation of the database tables.

• Work on plugins for music management and pictures galleries has started.

• Improved WebDAV interface for better KDE/Desktop integration.

• Improved documentation

At the moment I´m working on an Open Collaboration Services API for integration into the KDE Social Desktop. You will get notification on your Desktop if something is happening in your cloud storage.

Next on the list is the sharing features so that you can give other users read or write access to specific files or directories.

We got 24 proposal from students who want to work on ownCloud for Googles Summer of Code. This amount of interest is amazing. We can´t approve that many slots of course and KDE will announce the KDE GSoC students in the next few weeks.

Because of that fast progress I updated the roadmap. I think we can launch an very interesting Version 1.0 in early may.

http://owncloud.org/index.php/Roadmap

What can you do to help?

We still need help regarding desktop integration. It would be great if KDE could store its settings in the personal ownCloud of the user. So a KDE user has always the same desktop settings on all the devices.

Also integration in digiKam and Amarok would be great to simplify accessing and sharing of photos and music.

You can find more information here:

http://owncloud.org

http://www.gitorious.org/owncloud

https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/owncloud

Exiting times!

So what do you think?

Cheers

Frank

ownCloud - development started

I committed ownCloud 1.0 beta 1 to gitorious.org yesterday

So what is ownCloud ?

I announced the ownCloud project during my Camp KDE presentation in January in San Diego.

Here is a short overview what we want to achieve with ownCloud.

KDE runs on all kinds of devices and operating systems

- work and home PCs

- tablets and netbooks

- mobile phones

The more devices you have the more problematic it gets to keep your data/files in sync between the devices. Also sharing your files with people, collaborative working on documents and versioning/backuping of documents is difficult.

A lot of KDE users and developers "solve" this problem by using web/cloud based services as applications.

I see people using:

- Google Docs instead of KOffice

- last.fm/pandora instead of Amarok

- Gmail instead of KMail

- Flickr instead of digiKam

Or people use proprietary services like Dropbox or Ubuntu One.

This trend is problematic and we have to make sure that free desktop applications don´t get replaced by web based apps and become irrelevant in the next 10 years. It is also important that we still own our data and don´t loose control over our personal files.

I think we have to make sure that our great KDE desktop applications support features like sharing data, accessing data from any device, automatic versioning, backuping and encryption.

ownCloud solves this by adding a personal server companion to your KDE Desktop/Netbook/Mobile. You can use it to store your files in your personal cloud storage and access it from all your devices. It will also support versioning, backuping, sharing, syncing and other server based functionalities which are useful additions to KDE applications.

ownCloud is the central exchange point for my data and a companion for different KDE powered devices using the AGPL license.

You find more information here:

http://dot.kde.org/2010/01/24/kde-gears-free-cloud

http://www.socialdesktop.org/kdeandthecloud.pdf

Great, but how do I use it?

At the moment the software is in beta stage and has only limited features. So I suggest that endusers wait a few more month bevor using it for real data.

ownCloud can be installed on:

- your own root server

- your home PC with (DynDNS)

- your company/workgroup server

- rent it from a service provider (a provider is already interested in providing hosting)

- buy a dedicated storage device connected with your home internet line (if somebody builds such a device)

What do we have today?

At the moment we have a fileserver feature to store your documents in your personal cloud storage. The files can be accessed via a web interface which also works with mobile phones. Or you can access the files via WebDAV. So you can mount your document folder on Mac, Windows, Linux PCs or use the KDE WebDAV KIOSlave directly. Access can be SSL encrypted and works with proxy servers and firewalls.

The access is logged in an internal logging system, so you can see what is happening with your files. We have a plugin system, so it is easy to write additional server services like a personal music server or a central storage for your KDE configuration.

What are the plans for the next few months?

- support sharing of files/directories with other people

- using git as a storage backend, so you have a history for all your files

- automatic backuping

- offline support via local syncing

- desktop notification via OCS

- plugin for syncing of notes

- plugin for a groupware integration for example Kolab

- plugin for a personal music server

How can you contribute?

We are looking for developers to make this happen. Especially PHP developers for the server and Qt developer for the syncing client are welcome.

The client could also be implemented in a scripting language like for example Python.

website and wiki: ownCloud.org

mailinglist: owncloud@kde.org

git: http://gitorious.org/owncloud/

Open TODOs are:

- Remove the dependency on MySQL to make the installation of your ownCloud easier. Perhaps SQLite

- Internationalization of all texts.

- Better Ajax Web Interface (Plasma Theming perhaps?)

- Better documentation. Especially for installation.

Cheers

Frank

www.kde.org shows our community

A few hours ago the new www.kde.org website went online. Thank you a lot to everybody who contributed. I think it is a great new site which is in sync with who we are and what we are doing. There are still a few small bugs but I´m already really happy with it.

When we discussed the goals of the new site at the marketing meeting last year in Stuttgart we identified 3 things we want to achieve with the relaunch.

1. communicate our new branding

2. show our community and faces of the contributors.

3. move some less central content and texts to our wikis

I think we accieved all three goals. And additionally we have a great new design and better ways of promote our software.

It´s great that we managed to release all this in time for the KDE 4.4 SC release like we planed.

I developed a few classes to fetch community data from other websites and show the newest stuff on kde.org.

We now have integration with identi.ca, twitter, blogs, dot.kde.org, forum.kde.org, openDesktop.org and hopefully svn and gitorious in the near future. An integration with the upcoming individual supporting membership program is already done.

But to make this happen we need more data from as many KDE contributors as possible. So add yourself to this file

http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/www/media/users_conf.php or ask somebody with www commit karma. Yes, the plan is to unify this with the planet config file in the future. :-)

Gratulations to all contributors.

What´s going on at Camp KDE?

As everybody else is blogging about Camp KDE here in San Diego I think I also should give you an update whats going on here.

I think it is a fantastic conference, perfectly organized with very high level talks. It is great to meet all the old and new friends and discuss various aspects of world domination. Thank you to Jeff and the team at UCSD to make all this happen.

Rain

It rained a lot the last few days here which is unusual for sunny southern california and it seams that we have to live with this weather for all the week. Which is bad because we can´t enjoy the beach that much and I have to cancel my motorbike trip I have planed for later this week. Our hostel is also fighting with the rain. We have power and internet problems and on monday we even had a small river running through the entrance area.

So it´s not true that it never rains in souther california. ;-)

Keynote

I´m happy with the feedback I got for the keynote I gave on sunday. Everybody seams to like my crazy ideas about KDE in a world of cloud computing. You find the slides here: slides

There will be a dot story soon to summarize the announcements.

Open-PC progress

I´m still busy with making the Open-PC ideas reality. I updated the Open-PC.com website with new stuff. We now have a partner to do the telephone and email support and I fixed the final hardware configuration and the price together with our hardware partners. Remember that this is only the first version of the Open-PC. The idea is of course to have different models designed and manufactured by different people and partners.

I´m happy that Slashdot and other major news sites picked this up. It is great how many people are exited about this project. I´m getting lot´s of emails from interested people. This is amazing.

I must confess that I underestimated the work especially because I do basically everything alone. I think the Open-PC should be a real community based project to take off.

So if you want to help, please contact me. I especially need an SUSE Studio / Buildservice expert. :-)

Pleasant Surprise

I´m working for a few month now on improving the relation of KDE with big players in the IT industry. Yesterday it seams to payed of. So Jos and me did some serious business clothing shopping and today we will present KDE to somebody who could bring KDE to millions of devices.

I will keep you informed about the progress.

Small Cloud Survey

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

I would like to have some input from you how you see the advantages and disadvantages of web based applications and storages compared with KDE Desktop apps.

So the questions are:

1. Advantages and Disadvantages of web based application for developers

2. Advantages and Disadvantages of web based application for users

3. Advantages and Disadvantages of KDE Desktop application for developers

4. Advantages and Disadvantages of KDE Desktop application for users.

Please post you answers below this blog post or send it to karlitschek@kde.org

Thank you for your help.

Happy holidays.

Cheers

Frank