Open Search Foundation

recently I learned about the Open Search Foundation in the public broadcast radio (Bayern 2 Radio Article). That surprised me: I had not heard about OSF before, even though I am active in the field of free software and culture. But this new foundation made it into the mainstream broadcast already. Reason enough to take a closer look. It is a very good sign to have the topic of internet search in the news....

June 14, 2020 · 7 min · 1338 words · Me

Welcome PDF Quirk

How often have you scanned a letter, a certificate or whatever and looked for the right way to call $UTILITY to convert it to a PDF that can be shared via internet? For this very common use case I could not find a tool to make that really easy for the Linux desktop. Given my mission to help making the Linux desktop more common in the small business world (do you know Kraft?...

May 21, 2020 · 2 min · 238 words · Me

ownCloud and CryFS

It is a great idea to encrypt files on client side before uploading them to an ownCloud server if that one is not running in controlled environment, or if one just wants to act defensive and minimize risk. Some people think it is a great idea to include the functionality in the sync client. I don’t agree because it combines two very complex topics into one code base and makes the code difficult to maintain....

August 17, 2019 · 3 min · 621 words · Me

Eighty Percent ownCloud

Recently the German computer magazin C’t posted an article about file sync solutions (“Unter eigener Regie”, C’t 23, 2018) with native sync clients. The article was pretty positive about the FOSS solution of… Nextcloud! I was wondering why they had not choosen ownCloud’s client as my feeling is that ownCloud is way more busy and innovative developing the desktop client for file synchronization together with community. [caption id=“attachment_943” align=“alignright” width=“338”] Code lines changed as of Nov....

December 23, 2018 · 3 min · 442 words · Me

Change in Professional Life

This November was very exciting for me so far, as I was starting a new job at a company called Heidolph. I left SUSE after working there for another two years. My role there that was pretty far away from interesting technical work, which I missed more and more, so I decided to grab the opportunity to join in a new adventure. Heidolph is a mature German engineering company building premium laboratory equipment....

November 23, 2018 · 2 min · 337 words · Me

Kraft Version 0.82

A new release of Kraft, the Qt- and KDE based software to help to organize business docs in small companies, has arrived. A couple of days ago version 0.82 was released. It mainly is a bugfix release, but it also comes with a few new features. Users were asking for some new functions that they needed to switch to Kraft with their business communication, and I am always trying to make that a priority....

October 19, 2018 · 2 min · 231 words · Me

Kraft out of KDE

Following my last blog about Krafts upcoming release 0.80 I got a lot of positive reactions. There was one reaction however, that puzzles me a bit and I want to share my thoughts here. It is about a comment about my announcement that I prefer to continue to develop Kraft on Github. The commenter reminded my friendly that there is still Kraft code on KDE infrastructure, and that switching to a different repository might waste peoples time when they work with the KDE repo....

March 22, 2018 · 4 min · 640 words · Me

SMB on openSUSE Conference

The annual openSUSE Conference 2017 is upcoming! Next weekend it will be again in the Z-Bau in Nuremberg, Germany. The conference program is impressive and if you can make it, you should consider stopping by. Stefan Schäfer from the Invis server project and me will organize a workshop about openSUSE for Small and Medium Business (SMB). SMB is a long running concern of the heart of the two of us: Both Stefan, who even does it for living, and me have both used openSUSE in the area of SMB for long and we know how well it serves there....

May 21, 2017 · 2 min · 295 words · Me

Raspberry based Private Cloud?

Here is something that might be a little outdated already, but I hope it still adds some interesting thoughts. The rainy Sunday afternoon today finally gives the opportunity to write this little blog. Recently an ownCloud fork was coming up with a little shiny box with one harddisk, that can be complemented with a Rapsberry Pi and their software, promoting that as your private cloud. While I like the idea of building a private cloud for everybody (I started to work on ownCloud because of that idea back in the days), I do not think that this example of gear is a good solution for private cloud....

December 11, 2016 · 4 min · 699 words · Me

Recent ownCloud Releases

Even though we just had the nice and successful ownCloud Contributor Conference there have quite some ownCloud releases happened recently. I like to draw your attention to this for a moment, because some people seem to fail to see how active the ownCloud community actually is at the moment. There has been the big enterprise release 9.1 on September 20th, but that of course came along with community releases which are in the focus here....

October 4, 2016 · 2 min · 389 words · Me