My random thoughts about politics, society and technology (tag: nextcloud)
Nextcloud and OpenID-Connect
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 to get an OpenID-Connect provider, sure I could have chosen one of the public services. But why not have a small nice provider running directly on my machine? Read more...
The Power of Workflow Scripts
Nextcloud has the ability to define some conditions under which external scripts are executed. The app which makes this possible is called “Workflow Script”. I always knew that this powerful tool exists, yet I never really had a use case for it. This changed last week. Task I heavily rely on text files for note taking. I organize them in folders, for example I have a “Projects” folders with sub-folders for each project I work on currently. Read more...
The most sincere form of flattery
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 and independence. The ability to use, study, share and improve the software also allows to integrate our software in other cloud solutions as long as you respect the license and we are happy to see that people make use of this rights actively. Read more...
Cloud Federation – Getting Social
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 range of information to their personal settings and define the visibility for each of them by clicking on the small icon next to it. Read more...
Transfer Public Links to Federated Shares
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. Read more...
History and Future of Cloud Federation
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 network, meant to be resilient to disruptions, both due to accidents or malicious activity. Read more...
Freedom for whom?
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 complete different angle. I want to look at it from the position of a software company and its business model. Read more...