Recent content in Articles on Björn Schießle - I came for the code but stayed for the freedom
On June 2nd, 2016, Nextcloud was born. While the celebrations in our Berlin office are already in full swing , this is my personal retrospective. Shortly before that, I wrote a somewhat cryptic blog post about leaving ownCloud and that something new was coming, without revealing what it would be: “The Road Ahead” . A few weeks later, I could finally share more details and introduce…
This is a updated version of a old blog post from 2020 . The guide here was tested with Nextcloud Hub 5 and Keycloak 21.1.2. Please keep in mind , the main goal of this article is to get Keycloak up and running quickly to test the Nextcloud OIDC connector. It is not a detailed guide how to setup Keycloak for production! It is quite likely that I missed some important security setting which you…
NOTE: There is a updated version of the article which works with the latest Nextcloud and Keycloak. Please continue here! If you looked at the Nextcloud app store you could already find OpenID-Connect connectors before but since Nextcloud 19 it is an officially supported user back-end. So it was time for me to have a closer look at it and to try it out. Get a OpenID Connect provider First step was…
At the beginning of this year I gave two times a presentation about Nextcloud Talk. First at the annual CS3 conference in Copenhagen and just one week later at FOSDEM in Brussels. Nextcloud Talk provides a full featured real-time communication platform. Completely Free Software, self-hosted and nicely integrated with all the other aspects of Nextcloud. You can download the slides here
This year the FSFE community meeting was combined with the “South Tyrol Free Software Conference” (SFScon) in Bolzano. For me this was a special event because the first international FSFE community meeting ever happened as well at the SFScon in 2006. Back then I met many people from FSFE in person for the first time. For me this was the starting point for getting more and more involved…
These days I looked up the German word “Kulturtechnik” at Wikipedia which translates to “cultural techniques” in English. Surprisingly there is no English Wipipedia article for it, so I have to quote the German one. This section attracted my attention the most: [Für Kulturtechniken] sind ein oder mehrere Voraussetzungen nötig: das Beherrschen von Lesen, Schreiben und…
At this years CS3 Workshop in Krakow I presented the current state of Nextcloud’s Global Scale architecture. Probably the most interesting part of the talk was the current development in the area of Federated Cloud Sharing, a central component of Global Scale. Originally, Federated Cloud Sharing was developed by Frank Karlitschek and me in 2014 at ownCloud. These day it enables cloud…
What does software freedom actually means, in a world where more and more software no longer runs on our own computer but in the cloud? I keep thinking about this topic for quite some time and from time to time I run into some discussions about this topic. For example a few days ago at Mastodon . Therefore I think it is time to write down my thoughts on this topic. Cloud is a huge marketing term…
At this years Nextcloud conference I gave a lightening talk about Free Software licenses. Free Software developers often like to ignore the legal aspects of their project, still I think it is important to know at least some basics. The license you chose and other legal decisions you make are a important cornerstone to define the basic rules of the community around your code. Making good choices…
Nextcloud now exists for almost exactly 8 months. During this time we put a lot of efforts in polishing existing features and developing new functionality which is crucial to the success of our users and customers. As promised, everything we do is Free Software (also called Open Source), licensed under the terms of the GNU APGLv3 . This gives our users and customers the most possible flexibility…
With Nextcloud 11 we continue to work on one of our hot topics: Cloud Federation. This time we focus on the social aspects. We want to make it as easy as possible for people to share their contact information. This enabled users to find each other and to start sharing. Therefore we extended the user profile in the personal settings. As the screenshot at the top shows, users can now add a wide…
This year I was invented to the Open16 in Mechelen (Belgium) to give a keynote. It was a really nice event with many interesting presentation and talks. I was asked by the organizer to started the keynote with the history of Nextcloud. Why did we started Nextcloud and what do we want to do different. Then I moved on with the main topic: “Restore the Internet - free, decentralized,…
Creating public links and sending them to your friends is a widely used feature of Nextcloud . If the recipient of a public link also has a Nextcloud or ownCloud account he can use the “Add to your Nextcloud” button to mount the content over WebDAV to his server. On a technical level all mounted public links use the same token, the one of the public link, to reference the shared file. This means…
I’m now working for about two years on something called Federated Cloud Sharing. It started on June, 23er 2014 with the release of ownCloud 7.0. Back then it was simply called “Server to Server sharing”. During all this years I never wrote about the broader ideas behind this technology, why we do it, what we achieved and where we are going. Motivation The Internet started as a decentralized…
This discussion is really old. Since the first days of the Free Software movement people like to debate to whom the freedom in Free Software is directed? The users? The code? The developers? Often this goes along with a discussion about copyleft vs non-protecting Free Software licenses like the BSD- and the MIT-License. I don’t want to repeat this discussion but look at the question from a…
I just realized that at June, 1 it is exactly four years since I joined ownCloud Inc . That’s a perfect opportunity to look back and to tell you about some upcoming changes. I will never forget how all this get started. It was FOSDEM 2012 when I met Frank , we already knew each other from various Free Software activities. I told him that I was looking for new job opportunities and he told me about…
Privacy, control and freedom was always one of the main reasons to run your own cloud instead of storing your data on a proprietary and centralized service. Only if you run your own cloud service you know exactly where your data is stored and who can access it. You are in control of your data. But this also introduces a new challenge. If everyone runs his own cloud service it become inevitable…
The last few weeks there has been a lot of rumors about GitHub. GitHub is a code hosting platform which tries to make it as easy as possible to develop software and collaborate with people. The main achievement from GitHub is probably to moved the social part of software development to a complete new level. As more and more Free Software initiatives started using GitHub it became really easy to…
ownCloud Share Link Creator – Context Menu Holiday season is the perfect time to work on some stuff on your personal ToDo list. ownCloud 6 introduced a public REST-style Share-API which allows you to call various share operations from external applications. Since I started working on the Share-API I thought about having a simple shell script on my file manager to automatically upload a file and…
Last weekend we released a first preview version of the new encryption app. This wouldn’t be possible without the work done by Sam Tuke and Florin Peter. Thanks a lot for all your work! Let me take the opportunity to tell you some details about the app, what it does and how it works. The encryption app for ownCloud 5 was a complete re-write. We moved from the relatively weak blowfish algorithm to…
There are two major terms connected to software you can freely use, study, share and improve: Free Software and Open Source. Based on them you can also find different combinations and translations like FOSS, Libre Software, FLOSS and so on. Reading articles about Free Software or listening to people involved in Free Software often raises the question: Why do they use one term or another and how…
This year it was the first time I participated at RoboCup tournaments. It was quite stressful but also really exiting and most important: successful! In April the year started with the German Open in Hanover. It was a hard week, we lived in a bus and worked every day far into the night. But it was worthwhile. After many years of struggle the 1. RFC Stuttgart finale made it and win the German Open!…
While it was quite easy to set up my Fellowship smartcard for SSH logins on Debian GNU/Linux following this instructions I never managed to get it working on Fedora GNU/Linux. At some point of time I just gave up. Today finally I found a solution in an on-line forum. The problem was that gpg-agent always stopped with the error message: $ gpg-agent gpg-agent[2857]: can't connect to…
I always struggled to find the right mail notification applet for my desktop. Furthermore I always stumble over the question: Why do I have to ask the mail server in a defined time interval “Do I have a new e-mail?”. Wouldn’t it be better if the mail server notifies me if a new e-mail arrives? This is probably somehow a new form of the good old question “mailing list vs bulletin board” or in…
Today the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) announced their latest initiative: PDFreaders.org . The initiative started in the Fellowship and is coordinated by the Fellows Hannes Hauswedell and Jan-Hendrik Peters. The Fellowship increases FSFE’s financial independence, FSFE’s political weight, FSFE’s workforce and is the source of many great projects, activites and campaigns. Read more about…
At Friday, 30.Jan.09 we had a joint event between KDE and the Fellowship of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and it was simply great! Beside a lot of KDE and FSFE people we had a lot of visitors and at the end we were about 40 people! All interested in KDE 4.2 and Free Software . At the beginning Frederik started with an introduction and showed all the new and cool things in KDE 4.2.…
The FSF has released a Quick Guide to GPLv3 . This article explains all major changes in an easy-to-understand overview. So it is a good staring point for everyone who wants to understand GPLv3. It is also a good resource for developers who plan to release their software under the GPLv3.
While reading some FSF Blogs i found a link to a license quiz where you can test your knowledge of the GPL and LGPL.. If you want to test your knowledge of the GPL and LGPL than try the license quiz. I remember that i had found this test already some years ago but forgot about it. So i tried it again to see if my licensing knowledge has improved. The last time i did the test i remember that i…