ownCloud 3 released

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

What’s so exciting?

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

What’s new?

ownCloud Version 3 gives users the unique ability to access and edit
documents in multiple ways. Users can access files directly if ownCloud is
mounted via WebDAV, access them offline if the file is synced locally with
the upcoming syncing client, or access and edit files directly from within a
browser with the new text editor.

The browser based text editor supports 35 programming languages for syntax
highlighting, keyboard shortcuts, drag and drop text, automatic indent and
outdent, unstructured / user code folding and Live syntax checker (for
JavaScript, Coffee and CSS). The editor is based on the ACE JavaScript
Editor. The editor supports basic text files. Editing more advanced formats
like doc and ODT is planned for future releases.

ownCloud Version 3 supports installation of new third party applications and
add-ons directly from a central repository of ownCloud applications.
Developers who want to offer new features can upload new ownCloud
applications at apps.owncloud.com. ownCloud users can browse and install the
new applications directly from within the ownCloud Admin interface. Both
users and developers can develop and use this new application store. The
system is based on the open collaboration services standard.

ownCloud Version 3 ships with an integrated PDF viewer for convenient
viewing and printing of PDFs, even with browsers that don´t have a PDF
plugin installed. The viewer is based on the pdf.js library.

ownCloud Version 3 adds a photo gallery application to help view and
organize photos of different file types. Photo albums are automatically
created for uploaded photos.

Most importantly though, his release is really a remarkable testament to the
hard work and dedication of our community. Since the release of Version 2 in
October, the ownCloud community has enabled ownCloud for Juju Charms
(Ubuntu) and built pre-configured software and virtual appliances ready for
direct deployment in SUSE Studio. Additionally, the community has created a
new owncloud.org website, improved installation documentation, created a new
bug tracker, and a new ownCloud forum!

Thank you!

ownCloud Inc. and the ownCloud community

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


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

So why is it good for an open source project to have a company which offers enterprise services and solutions around free software?

One year ago I wrote an essay for a soon to be released book which sums it up quite nicely. Here is an excerpt of my text:

—-
The Free Software motivation

Most Free Software developers have two basic motivations to work on Free Software. The first motivation is the fun factor. It is a fantastic experience to work together with very talented people from all over the world and create great technology. KDE, for example, is one of the most welcoming communities I know. It is so much fun to work with thousands of contributors from all over the world to create software which will be used by millions. Basically, everyone is an expert in one or more areas and we collaborate to create a shared vision. For me it is always a blast to meet other free software contributors, exchange ideas or workon our software whether we meet online or in real life at one of the many conferences or events. And it is also about friendship. Over the years I have made many good friends in KDE.

But contributors are not motivated only by fun to join the free software community. It is also the idea that all of us can make the world a better place with our contributions. Free Software is essential if you care about access to technology and IT for developing countries. It enables poor people to participate in the information age without buying expensive licenses for proprietary software. It is essential for people who care about privacy and security, because Free Software is the only way to see exactly what your computer is doing with your private data. Free Software is important for a healthy IT eco-system, because it enables everybody to build on the work of others and really innovate. Without Free Software it would not have been possible for Google or Facebook to start their businesses. It is not possible to innovate and create the next disruptive technology if you depend on proprietary software and do not have full access to all parts of the software.

The need for an ecosystem

These are the main reasons why I want to see Free Software become mainstream. To make this happen, we need a lot more contributors than we have today. By contributors I mean people who write the core frameworks, the desktop, the servers, the great applications. We need people who work on usability, artwork, promotion and many other important areas. KDE is already a really big community with thousands of members. But we need more people to help to compete with proprietary software in a big way. The Free Software community is tiny compared to the proprietary software world. On the one hand this is not
a problem, because the distributed software development model of the Free Software world is much more efficient than the closed source way of writing software. One big advantage is, for example, the ability to re-use code better. But even with these advantages we need many more contributors than we have today, if we really want to conquer the IT world.

We also need companies to help us bring our work to the mass market. In a nutshell, we need a big and healthy ecosystem that enables people to work on Free Software for a living.

The current situation

I started contributing to KDE over 10 years ago and since then I have seen countless highly motivated and talented people join KDE. This is really cool. The problem is that I also saw a lot of experienced contributors dropping out of free software communities. That is really sad. Sometimes it is just the normal way of the world. Priorities shift and people concentrate on other stuff. The problem is that many also drop out because of money. At some point people graduate and want to move out of their dorm rooms. Later some people want to get married and have kids. At this point people have to find jobs. There are some companies in the free software ecosystem that offer KDE-related jobs. But these are only a fraction of the available IT jobs. So, a lot of senior KDE contributors have to work for companies where they work on proprietary software, unrelated to Free Software. Sooner or later most of these developers drop out of free software. I underestimated this factor 10 years ago, but I think it is a problem for open source
in the long term, because we lose our most experienced people to proprietary software companies.

My dream world

In my dream world people can pay their rent by working on Free Software and they can do it in a way which does not conflict with our values. KDE contributors should have all the time they need to contribute to KDE and Free Software in general. They should earn money by doing free software. Their hobbies should become their jobs. This would make KDE grow in a big way, because it would be fun to contribute and also provide good long-term job prospects.
—-

I think the excerpt explains nicely why we need the ownCloud company if we want to really change the world.

So ownCloud Inc. helps us in several important areas without taking any freedom away.

• Developers can pay their rent with working full time on ownCloud. Are you looking for a job? Drop me a line.
• ownCloud Inc. helps to market ownCloud in the IT world more effectively than an open source projects can do.
• ownCloud Inc. brings ownCloud to companies, governments, schools and other organizations.
• It helps developers with travel support and other costs
• It helps with infrastructure.

The business model of ownCloud Inc. is very similar to the ones by Red Hat, SUSE, Nokia/Trolltech, MySQL, Kolab Systems and other free software companies. We will offer services and support around ownCloud for enterprises.

ownCloud is and will always be free software (AGPL) and the development will be controlled by the community on our public mailing list. So ownCloud Inc. is not taking anything away from the existing ownCloud community. On the contrary. It adds important parts so that we can make a bigger impact together.

This is why I am so excited today.

• Welcome to ownCloud, Inc.
• ownCloud, Inc. Announcement
• The technology behind ownCloud

ownCloud 2 is released

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

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


Go to ownCloud.org to download your ownCloud to put it on your workstation or server or try our live demo at demo.owncloud.org. Ownloud is also available on all major Linux distributions but it´s designed to run on most webspaces withour special configuration.

Let´s take our data back!

dot.kde.org
ownCloud.org


Frank

We have a "Qtest Mobile App Port Contest" winner!

At the end of last year we announced the Qtest Mobile App Port Contest. The idea was to port your existing Qt application to a mobile platform and win 10.000,- EURs. The 5 early bird winners and the 5 second place winners get a Nokia N900. The contest was a huge success and more developers than expected participated.

At the end 59 Qt applications were ported to MeeGo and Symbian and submitted for the contest. All the applications are available on Qt-Apps.org and MeeGo-Central.org. The jury looked at all the submissions in the last weeks and picked the 5 second place winners and the first place winner of the contest.

So without further delay:

The second place winners are:

• Kontact Touch
• Polka Touch
• Piano Chord Finder
• Geeky Avatar
• Smoke Life

The first place and 10.000,- EUR goes to:

• Lugdulo'V

Gratulations to all the winners.

Welcome to the cloud age, Apple

Yesterday Apple announced their new internet service called iCloud. They finally have features which are essential for people who live in a connected world and have more than one device. I can't help myself but to compare this features with the stuff we are doing in KDE with the ownCloud project since last year.

It seems that we support everything iCloud is doing and a bit more if you look into the feature set. And we have a fundamentally more advanced vision and architecture.

Features

ownCloud supports all the basic features of iCloud:

- Access your files from all your devices (webDAV, HTML5, Sync)

- Syncing Application Data (Bookmarks, Settings, ...)

- Listen to your music from all your devices (Sync, Ampache, HTML5 player)

- Access your movies from all your devices (Sync, HTML5)

- Access you photos from everyhere

- PIM Syncing (work in progress)

Additional Features

ownCloud has even more advanced file storage features which are currently not supported in iCloud:

- Versioning of all file changes with a git backend

- Sharing all your files with whoever you want

Extensible

ownCloud is extensible. Everybody can write AddOns for ownCloud to extend its basic features:

- Examples for "ownCloud Apps" are RSS readers, Todo Lists, Notes Syncing or Collaborative Gaming

- The ownCloud Apps are installable from within ownCloud

- Updating of Apps

- HTML5/JS/PHP/SQL support

Device support

ownCloud supports more devices than just Apple devices.

- KDE/GNOME/Windows/Mac

- Android

- MeeGo

- iPhone/iPad

- all other devices with WebDAV/HTML5 support

No DRM

We don´t use DRM or check digital fingerprints.

Everybody can access and share their files without restrictions

- ownCloud handles all music files

- ownCloud handles all movie files

- Unlimited sharing of files with your friends

Open Standards

We use open standards instead of proprietary protocols.

- WebDAV

- OCS (Open Collaboration Services)

- Ampache

- HTML5

Decentralized

ownCloud is running wherever you want. You don´t have to put your private data into the hosting center of a big company. ownCloud runs:

- on your root server

- on your desktop at home

- on your company/project server

- at your internet provider

- on your appliance at home

- on every webspace with PHP support (university, school, ... )

Free Software

ownCloud is completely free software. This is especially important for a software which is supposed to store a big part of your personal data.

- ownCloud is released under the AGPL license.

- Everybody can check what is happening with their private data

I think ownCloud has the potential to become the cloud storage solution for people who don´t like vendor lock-ins and care about freedom and privacy. More information here: ownCloud.org

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

In Baden-Württemberg, Germany are elections in 10 days. I wrote an open letter to politicians from all major parties to ask them about free software, cloud services and the german data protection act. Let´s see if I get interesting answers.

---------------------------------------------

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

als Stuttgarter, Open Source Entwickler und Gründer eines Startup Unternehmens hab ich mehrere Fragen zum Thema Freie Software und Cloud Computing.

Seit einigen Jahren ist ein Trend zu beobachten, dass immer mehr Daten von Privatpersonen, Institutionen und Unternehmen auf so genante Cloud Services im Internet abgelegt werden. Diese Daten liegen oft ausserhalb der Gültigkeit des deutschen Datenschutzgesetzes. Für Unternehmen und Bürger ist meistens undurchsichtig wer heute und zukünftig Zugriff auf diese personenbezogenen Daten hat. Die meisten dieser Cloud Services basieren nicht auf freier Software, so dass der Benutzer nicht weiss was mit seinen eigenen Daten passiert.

Auch Unternehmen speichern zunehmen eigene geschäftskritische Daten oder Daten Ihrer Kunden ausserhalb Deutschlands auf proprietären Cloud Services.

- Wie beurteilen Sie diese Entwicklung und sehen sie die Notwendigkeit zu einer gesetzlichen Regulierung?

- Welche Massnahmen möchten Sie ergreifen um Freie Software und Private Cloud Services in Deutschland und speziell Baden-Württemberg zu fördern?

- Sind Sie der Ansicht dass das deutsche Datenschutzgesetz auch europaweit oder weltweit anwendung finden sollte?

- Beabsichtigen Sie die Gründung von Startup Unternehmen in Baden-Württemberg zu fördern die sich für freie Software und freie Cloud Dienste einsetzen?

mit freundlichen Grüssen

Frank Karlitschek

Geschäftsführer hive01 gmbh

Vorstand KDE e.V.

-----------------------------------------------

I sent this letter to:

Stefan Mappus - CDU

Nils Schmid - SPD

Winfried Kretschmann - Bündnis 90/Die Grünen

Ulrich Goll - FDP

Stefan Urbat - Piratenpartei

We hopefully find the answers here soon:

http://www.abgeordnetenwatch.de

Cheers

Frank

--

Update 25. March:

I got answers from all candidates except Stefan Mappus - CDU

Nils Schmid - SPD

Winfried Kretschmann- Bündnis 90/Die Grünen

Ulrich Goll- FDP

Stefan Urbat - Piratenpartei

ownCloud update

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

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

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

Another cool thing is that we have a first provider to offer hosted ownCloud services if you don´t have webspace to host it yourself. PackageCloud offers a free ownCloud installation for 100MB and an installation with unlimited storage and traffic for 5,- EUR per month. I think this is a very nice offer. Completely free software and more affordable than other cloud solutions. Try it here if you don´t have your own server.

https://www.packagecloud.com/?au=owncloud

We will participate in this years Google Summer of code again. So if you have ideas add them to the brainstorming page here: http://community.kde.org/GSoC/2011/Ideas#ownCloud

We are also planing the first ownCloud developer meeting.
It will take place between 15. and 18. of April in Stuttgart, Germany.
http://community.kde.org/Sprints/ownCloud2011
We will hack on ownCloud and plan the next releases.

Please send me an email if you want to join the meeting and help working on ownCloud.

Cheers
Frank