Blog posts from Frank Karlitschek
I think social networking is one of the very important pillars of an open and free IT world. I’m personally fascinated by how social media is changing the world. I was involved in the creating creation of the biggest social network in Germany in the 90s. Later in the early 2000s I developed and ran the openDesktop.org network which had social networking features way before Facebook, Twitter and…
All software needs to have clearly defined goal. Something it wants to achieve. A reason for its existence. For Nextcloud it is the following: It’s clear that communicating and collaborating through the internet is the future. Some people realised this a long time ago. The rest have realised it now after COVID-19 forced all of us to work, study and learn from home. For Nextcloud this is nothing…
A few weeks ago I was honored to deliver the keynote of the Open Source Awards in Edinburgh. I decided to talk about a subject that I wanted to talk about for quite some time but never found the right opportunity for. There is no video recording of my talk but several people asked me for a summary. So I decided to use some spare time in a plane to summarize it in a blog post.
2018 is over and 2019 starts. This is a great opportunity to look back, reflect and to try to look into the future. I predict that 2019 will be a very good year for privacy, open source and decentralized cloud software. Maybe even the mainstream breakthrough of federated and decentralized internet services! Let me explain why: The mainstream opinion about centralized services started to change in…
Today the Nextcloud community released Nextcloud 14. This release comes with a ton of improvements in the areas of User Experience, Accessibility, Speed, GDPR compliance, 2 Factor Authentication, Collaboration, Security and many other things. You can find an overview here But there is one feature I want to highlight because I find it especially noteworthy and interesting. Some people ask us why we…
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Install this template by following those simple steps: STEP-1 : Hugo installation Check this link below for install hugo on your computer. hugo install documentation STEP-2 : Create your project Hugo provides a new command to create a new website. hugo new site <new_project> STEP-3 : Install the theme Run this command hugo new site timer-hugo and then go to the themes folder inside of timer-hugo…
Today is a big day. The Nextcloud community is launching a new product and solution called Nextcloud Talk. It’s a full audio/video/chat communication solution which is self hosted, open source and super easy to use and run. This is the result of over 1.5 years of planing and development. For a long time it was clear to me that the next step for a file sync and share solution like Nextcloud is to…
Today is a special day for Nextcloud and me because Nextcloud gets a cool and important new capability. This is end to end encryption for file sync and share. Nextcloud supports server side encryption for a long time and all file transfer over the internet is encrypted with TLS/SSL of course. But there is still the need for full end to end encryption to make sure that the data is secure in all…
Last weekend I attended the openSUSE conference in Nürnberg. This is a really nice conference. Awesome location, great people, and an overall very relaxed atmosphere. I gave a talk about Nextcloud Security and what we plan to do in the future to make hosting a Nextcloud instance even easier and more secure. I attended the Saturday keynote which triggered a reaction on my side that I wanted to…
The architecture of Nextcloud is a classic Web Application architecture. I picked this architecture 7.5 years ago because it is very well known and is proven to be scaled relatively easily. This usually works with off the shelf technologies like http load balancers, clusters of Linux webservers and clustered databases. But for many years users and customers asked for ways to distribute a single…
Today the Nextcloud community released the Nextcloud 12 beta. The final release will be out later this month. This is a major new step forward. And it is also an interesting release because we are entering a new area for the product. At the beginning, 7 years ago the focus was clearly file sync and share. Of course this term did not exist at the time or at least I didn’ know it. The task was to…
I usually don’t write political blog posts, especially if it relates to a country of which I’m not a citizen off nor live in. While I definitely have very clear opinions and views, I want to stay neutral in this blog and only talk about the technology side of things. It seems that the new US administration is in the process of shaking-up a lot of traditions and regulations, while also redefining…
Last Friday was the 6 month anniversary of Nextcloud, a good opportunity to look back and reflect on what we have achieved since we started. I also have some interesting news to share, including that Nextcloud GmbH is a profitable company already! Half a year ago a most of the ownCloud engineering team including myself started the Nextcloud project. Our goal was to take lessons from the past and…
In the past few weeks I talked a lot about thing we want to improve in Nextcloud. Fair community involvement, transparency, no CLA and no closed source apps, a better business model, working closer with customers and partners and more. But today I want to talk where I see the future of Nextcloud as a product. The challenge Nowadays we are storing more and more of our information in the cloud. And…
This is a big one! As announced 5 weeks ago I left ownCloud, Inc., The company that I co-founded. Not because I abandoned ownCloud or the idea behind it. Actually the opposite. I don’t want to go into details but there are a lot of things that could have been better at ownCloud Inc. Usually this is something that could just be ignored. You leave your job and work somewhere else. But ownCloud Inc.…
On the ownCloud blog, Jos shared today that the ownCloud community has hit an impressive milestone! The project I started 6 years ago just got a contribution from the 1000th volunteer who considered ownCloud worth the time and effort to contribute code to! Only a year ago, we were so proud having hit over 550 contributors at our 5 year anniversary. It is stunning how fast ownCloud has continued to…
Recently I had to make one of my hardest decisions so far. Because this has an impact beyond myself I want to share this here: I am leaving ownCloud, Inc. today. But, the journey of ownCloud and Frank is not over! 6 years ago until now I founded the ownCloud project a little over 6 years ago with the goal to enable home users, companies, universities and big enterprises to host their own cloud…
I’m super happy to report that ownCloud 9.0 is released today. This is the biggest and most important ownCloud release so far with a ton of performance improvements, bug fixes, cleanup but also new features. Especially exiting is that fact that more people have contributed to this release then ever before. We also collaborated more with partners then ever. Examples are CERN and AARNET. This is…
It seems that our generation will be known as the generation who decides if people will still have privacy in the future or not. Will people still have the tools to protect their digital lives in the same way their are able to protect their analog lives? Over the centuries people figured out ways to lock their home for strangers, protect their family life, their money transactions, keep their…
I’m an old guy who is in IT for a long long time. The reason why I love computer and information technology is the constant change, improvements, new technologies, business models, companies, products, use cases appear, have their golden age and disappear again. I love this reinvention and questioning of the past. This is what makes IT for me more exiting than a lot of other areas of our world.…
I launched KDE-Look.org, the first website in the openDesktop.org network nearly 15 years ago. This is a long time and I announced today that I sold the network to Blue Systems . So I think it is time for a look back at how everything started and where we are today. How it started I became really interested in Desktop Linux around 1996 when a friend of mine showed me a beta of KDE 1.0 running on…
Today I have very exiting news to share. Effectively January 1 2016, my company hive01 GmbH has been bought by Blue Systems GmbH. hive01 GmbH runs the network of opendesktop.org sites like KDE-Look.org, KDE-Apps.org, GNOME-Look.org, Qt-apps.org and all the other 30 websites As you might know I have founded the website network 15 years ago and was running it since then. Over the years the websites…
Today 2015 end and 2016 begins. So I want to use the opportunity to look back what happened in the ownCloud world in the last 12 month but also in my personal life. I’m very thankful to work with so many skilled, friendly and dedicated people in the ownCloud community to push this idea and product forward. This is just amazing. So what are the most awesome things to look back on?
People in my generation are used to the fact that you can install a new operating system on any computer. But if you look back in the history of computing and look forward towards the future you realize that this is the exception and not the rule. For a long time hardware and software, at least the operating system part, were sold and used together. The software is already installed on the…
Today the ownCloud community releases ownCloud 8.2. 8.2 sounds like a small improvement compared to 8.1 that was released in July. But 8.2 is major release with a ton of improvements which makes this release one of the most important so far. Main new features are: Next generation Web UI The web interface of ownCloud was improved in a lot of significant areas. The overall design is way more modern…
Two weeks ago I visited 10 refugee camps in Germany and talked with a lot of fugitives. Most of them where happy to tell their stories and agreed to be photographed. Here is a photo series of 9 of them. [envira-gallery id=”556″] License of the photos is: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Full photos can be found on 500px.com
In October 2012 I announced the first version of the User Data Manifesto during the Latinoware Keynote in Brazil . The idea was to define some basic right that all users should have in the digital age. This was still before the Snowden revelations. But it was already very clear that the privacy and security is at risk by cloud services and SaaS solutions that totally ignore the rights and…
Here you go: link I believe that federation of cloud services is the next important step for truly secure and flexible file sync and share cloud software. Because of that we are working for a while on the needed technologies and now have the first draft of an open specification ready. The goal of the Federated Cloud Sharing API is to be a common language for sharing files across different file…
Today the ownCloud community released ownCloud 8.1. You might think it sounds like a smaller release because we called this 8.1 instead of 9.0 but you’d be wrong. The contributor community hasn’t slowed down, quite the opposite. By the end of last year we decided to do smaller releases instead of huge ones. Because of that we will jump to a major version number only once a year and will increase…
From the very beginning ownCloud has had bigger ambitions then just being a file sync and share tool. This is apparent from the name ownCloud. Today, we have more than our documents and photos online. Our social networks and shared thoughts, our appointments and shopping lists, audio and video conversations all happen and are stored somehwere ‘in the cloud’, all connected. You can comment on a…
I’ve visited both FOSDEM and SCALE over the last weeks, where spoke with dozens of people and gave talks about ownCloud 8. We’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback on the work we’re doing in ownCloud (thanks!) and that has been very motivating. Does it scale? A question which comes up frequently is: “ What hardware should I run ownCloud on? ” This sounds like a simple questions but if you…
In just a few hours 2014 ends. This is a great opportunity to look back at what happened this year in the ownCloud world and in my personal life. This was an absolutely crazy 12-month so this blog post is now way longer that I planed. A huge thanks you to everyone in the ownCloud community. It´s a blast to work together with so many clever and friendly people from all over the world.
This Friday the Ohio Linux Fest kicks off in downtown Columbus and I’ll be there! It is my first Linux Fest in the US so I greatly look forward to being introduced in this grand tradition. Of course, I’ll be talking about ownCloud on Saturday the 25, from 13:00 to 14:00 room D142-143. The title of the talk is “crushing data silos with ownCloud”: helping people liberate their data from the…
ownCloud is one of the biggest open source project written in PHP if you look into the latest statistics. It is used for the server part of ownCloudas most of you know. We use other technologies like C++ and Qt for the Desktop Clients, Java for the Android app and Objective-C for iOS, JavaScript for the web-interface and more. But the heart of ownCloud is the server component which is using PHP…
We just published ownCloud 7! This awesome release brings many new features. Among them, I’m most excited about the server to server sharing. Server to server sharing is a first step in true federation of data with ownCloud: you can add a folder shared with you from another ownCloud instance into your own. Next step would of course be to also share things like user accounts and data like chat,…
Today we are happy to announce the release of the ownCloud mobile libraries for iOS and Android. ownCloud is a free file sync and share solution. The main differentiator to Dropbox, Google Drive, and others beside being free software is that you can run it yourself wherever you want. Obviously a central place to you store your files is only useful if you can access it from all devices and…
I m supper happy to announce the release of ownCloud 6 today. ownCloud 6 is a special release in several way. The community did an incredible job with improving ownCloud in several important areas. Quality. ownCloud is a very fast moving project so it is super important to balance innovative new features with rock solid stability. The ownCloud community introduced several important techniques to…
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the new features in ownCloud 6. I promised a special surprise in the coming weeks. And here it is. 😉 In the past few month we have worked on a feature that will be super useful and popular. All the development happened in a public repository on github but we haven t talked about it in public and perhaps it wasn t obvious what it was for people who found it by…
Today we release the first Alpha of the latest (ownCloud 6) Community Edition and I m extremely excited by the latest features. ownCloud 6 is the fastest, best looking, easiest to use ownCloud yet. Oh, and it has a ton of cool, new features that the community can use to safely and privately sync and share files. We also spend a lot of energy on stabilizing and fixing bugs and we will keep on doing…
I wan’t to introduce a small side project of me today that we needed for ownCloud but could be useful for other too. It’s call CONTRIBOOK and I planed to do this for many years. Lately I was sitting in planes and trains a lot so I have some time to finally do the version 1.0 It’s a tool that can be used for community building and showing community activity as we wanted to do on ownCloud.org but…
There is currently a huge public discussion going on about privacy, what it means in the Internet age, is it important or an outdated concept? Are there exceptions allowed? Does the government have special rights to see private documents and communication of the people? Does the government have the right to keep information about what it is doing private or should the government be 100%…