[Discuss] OpenSuSE's answer to Dropbox: ownCloud

[richard.pieri at gmail.com (Richard Pieri)]

On 12/21/2011 11:15 PM, Rich Braun wrote:
> Monitoring the OpenSuSE website, I ran into the following blog entry
> timestamped yesterday:
>
>   http://news.opensuse.org/2011/12/20/opensuse-and-owncloud/

Just a point: ownCloud isn't anything magical, nor is it Linux-centric. 
  It's a nice UI framework for WebDAV servers.

Which means that in practice it is only half of a Dropbox clone -- or 
more pedantically only half an iDisk clone as iDisk predated Dropbox by 
7 years.  ownCloud does the sharing just fine but there is no local 
cache.  If you are off the 'net then you're off the shared space.  The 
caching + sharing make Sparkleshare interesting as a full-on iDisk 
replacement, and Git's conflict resolution makes it a potential killer. 
  Unfortunately, the lack of a working Windows deployment makes it a 
non-starter.

What I've been supporting for my users in the Lab are Git and Unison. 
I've deployed Git servers for several collaborative projects, and I've 
deployed the SmartGit GUI to the semi-techncial users who don't want to 
get their hands dirty with the command line tools.  They've been pleased 
with this, particularly Git's complete replica nature.  They can work 
while traveling and sync up their changes when they have 'net.  What's 
also nice about Git is that it uses SSH for data transfers.  That makes 
it easy to use my existing authentication infrastructure (LDAP+Kerberos) 
for access control.

I've deployed Unison for users who have multiple computers in different 
locations and have a need to keep them in sync with each other.  In 
fact, this has worked so well even with the manual sync process that I 
switched from Wuala to Unison when the former terminated the storage 
sharing option.

-- 
Rich P.