[Discuss] OpenSuSE's answer to Dropbox: ownCloud

[Rich Braun]

For the past couple of weeks, I've been running OpenSuSE 12.1 on my home
desktop; it eliminated stability problems in the X11 drivers which I had under
11.3/11.4 (Intel graphics lock up every few days, requiring reboot).

Monitoring the OpenSuSE website, I ran into the following blog entry
timestamped yesterday:

 http://news.opensuse.org/2011/12/20/opensuse-and-owncloud/

Back in June, I tried running a tool called SparkleShare (mentioned by someone
here on this forum) to provide a Dropbox-like method of making my files
available everywhere, without putting them on someone else's server, and
without having to jump through scp/rsync hoops (i.e. allow non-technical users
easy access on systems other than Linux, and make it more convenient for
myself to do things like back up photos from my cell phone).

SparkleShare does not support Windows clients, it has lots of installation
headaches, and it requires git on client machines:  not ready for the real
world, basically.  In my personal notes from June, I mentioned Eucalyptus as
the foundation for such a thing (and forgot all about it until an interviewer
mentioned it during my current job search).  But that doesn't really address
this problem directly; it's just a cloud-server deployment mechanism, not a UI
and multi-platform device driver for secure file sharing.

The above URL on the OpenSuSE site is Jos Poortvliet's writeup of a solution
that directly addresses the Dropbox challenge head-on.  I'm excited about the
possibility that an open-source project is attempting to address it with the
same hands-off-my-data anti-corporate philosophy that motivates my own
open-source commitments dating back at least to SOSS (a file-sharing project
that I worked on 20 years ago).

Hopefully I'll soon find the time to experiment with ownCloud and mirall to
see how robust the solution is.  Meanwhile I'm sharing this to encourage BLU
members to do the same.

-rich