Opinion

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. It is a fact that one company has a gigantic market share in searching which is indeed a threat to the freedom of internet users. The key to be found in the web is the key to success with whatever message or service a web site might come up with, and all that is controlled by one enterprise driven by commercial interests. That should be realized by a broad audience. ...

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. 10, 2018[/caption] ...

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. It is based in Schwabach, Germany. For me it is the first time that I am working in company that doesn’t do only software. At Heidolph, software is just one building block besides mechanical and electronic parts and tons of special know how. That is a very different situation and a lot to learn for me, but in a small, co-located team of great engineers, I am able to catch up fast in this interesting area. ...

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. ...

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. ...

This is the third and final part of a little blog series about a new chunking algorithm that we discussed in ownCloud. You might be interested to read the first two parts ownCloud Chunking NG and Announcing an Upload as well. This part makes a couple of ideas how the new chunking could be useful with a future feature of incremental sync (also called delta sync) in ownCloud. In preparartion of delta sync the server could provide another new WebDAV route: remote.php/dav/blocks. ...

[caption id=“attachment_548” align=“alignright” width=“240”]Nautilus Shell, David Bygott[/caption] Incremental Sync is probably the feature that most people ask, or even sometimes cry for. Recently there was another wave of discussion about ownCloud is doing incremental sync or not. I will try again (as in this issue) to explain why we decided to slowing that feature. Slowing means that it will be done later, not never, as it was stated. It is just that we think that other things benefit the whole idea of ownCloud more. That has plain technical reasons. Let’s dive a bit into. ...