My random thoughts about politics, society and technology

Nextcloud and OpenID-Connect

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 would like to enable for a live system.

Real-time communication and collaboration in a file sync & share environment - A introduction to Nextcloud Talk

Nextcloud envolved from a file sync & share solution to a full featured but still modular collaboration platform. Nextcloud Talk is a component which becomes more and more popular and enables Nextcloud users to perform 1:1 or group chats, video and audio calls. This presentation gives a introduction to the latest version of Nextcloud Talk, released together with Nextcloud 18 Read more...

New challenges for Free Software business models

Different Free Software business models evolved over the past and the most successful are threaten these days by the raise of IaaS providers. What does this mean for the future of economical success of Free Software? Read more...

Cultural Techniques

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 Rechnen, die Fähigkeit zur bildlichen Darstellung, analytische Fähigkeiten, die Anwendung von kulturhistorischem Wissen oder die Vernetzung verschiedener Methoden.

Read more...

CS3 Workshop 2018 - Global Scale and the future of Federated Cloud Sharing

Enable large organisations to scale Nextcloud beyond the typical limitations. As part of Global Scale we will also work on Cloud Federation 2.0, based on the Open Cloud Mesh specification Read more...

Software freedom in the 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 which can actually mean a lot. In the context of this article cloud is meant as something quite similar to SaaS (software as a service). This article will use this terms interchangeable, because this are also the two terms the Free Software community uses to discuss this topic.

Nextcloud Conference 2017: Free Software licenses in a Nutshell

Lightening talk about Free Software licensing and how it is handled at Nextcloud. 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.

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.

Keynote at Open16 - Restore the Internet

Keynote at the Open16 on how Nextcloud can help to restore a free, decentralized and open Internet. 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. This means that as soon as the owner removes the public link all mounts will disappear as well. Additionally, the permissions for public links are limited compared to normal shares, public links can only be shared read-only or read-write. This was the first generation of federated sharing which we introduced back in 2014.

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. This was one of the key factors which made the Internet successful. From the World Wide Web, over IRC, news groups, e-mail to XMPP. Everything was designed as decentralized networks, which is why if you are on the Google servers you can email people at Yahoo. Everybody can set up his own web server, e-mail or chat server and communicate with everyone else. Individuals up to large organisations could easily join the network, participate and build business without barriers. People could experiment with new innovative ideas and nobody had the power to stop them or to slow them down. This was only possible because all underlying technology and protocols were build on both Open Standards and Free Software.

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.

Road Ahead

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 ownCloud Inc. The new company around the ownCloud initiative which he just started together with the help of others. I was directly sold to the idea of ownCloud and a few months later I was employee number six at ownCloud Inc.

Guake Terminal Improvement for Multi-Monitor Setups

Guake is a top-down “Quake-style” terminal. I use it on a daily basis on the Xfce desktop. The only drawback, Guake doesn’t work the way I want it on a multi-monitor setup. On such a setup the terminal always starts on the main (left) monitor. But for many people, including myself, the left monitor is the small Laptop monitor. Therefor many people prefer to open the terminal on the secondary (right) monitor. If you search for “Guake multi-monitor” you can find many patches to achieve this behavior.

Federated Sharing – What’s new in ownCloud 9.0

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 harder to share pictures with your friends or to work together on a document. That’s the reason why we at ownCloud are working at a feature called Federated Cloud Sharing. The aim of Federated Cloud Sharing is to close this gap by allowing people to connect their clouds and easily share data across different ownCloud installations. For the user it should make no difference whether the recipient is on the same server or not.

The next Generation of Code Hosting Platforms

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 contribute a bug fix or a new feature to the 3rd party library or application you use. With a few clicks you can create a fork, add your changes and send them back to the original project as a pull request. You don’t need to create a new account, don’t need to learn the tools used by the project, etc. Everybody is on the same platform and you can contribute immediately. In many cases this improves the collaboration between projects a lot. Also the ability to mention the developer of other projects easily in your pull request or issue improved the social interactions between developers and makes collaboration across different projects the default.

Integrate ToDo.txt into Claws Mail

I use Claws Mail for many years now. I like to call it “the mutt mail client for people who prefer a graphical user interface”. Like Mutt, Claws is really powerful and allows you to adjust it exactly to your needs. During the last year I began to enjoy managing my open tasks with ToDo.txt. A powerful but still simple way to manage your tasks based on text files. This allows me not only to manage my tasks on my computer but also to keep it in sync with my mobile devices. But there is one thing I always missed. Often a task starts with an email conversation and I always wanted to be able to transfer a mail easily to as task in a way, that the task links back to the original mail conversation. Finally I found some time to make it happen and this is the result:

The ownCloud Public Link Creator

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 generate a public link for it… Here it is!

Introduction to the new ownCloud Encryption App

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 the more secure AES algorithm. The complete encryption is built on top of OpenSSL a well-known and tested encryption library. Further, the encryption app is integrated into ownCloud seamlessly. This means that the encrypt and decrypt happens transparently so that you can still use all the other features from ownCloud like sharing, different viewer apps, WebDAV access etc.

Free Software, Open Source, FOSS, FLOSS – Same same but different

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 they differ from each other?

A successful year for the 1. RFC Stuttgart

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!

Free Software in Schools

At the moment Free Software in education is one of my main interests in the Free Software ecosystem. FSFE’s Fellowship wiki already provides some useful information on this topic. It’s quite interesting to see the development in this area. Further I think schools play an important role for the adoption of Free Software in many areas. What pupils learn and get used to during school is what they want to use and what they demand if they enter the business world. I also think that it is important to get as early as possible at least a basic idea about the role of software in the information society.

Fedora and gpg-agent

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 `/home/schiesbn/.gnupg/S.gpg-agent': No such file or directory
gpg-agent: no gpg-agent running in this session

By default the gpg-agent on Fedora creates the socket in /tmp instead of in /home/schiesbn/.gnupg. So you have to move it manually over to your home directory once gpg-agent has started.

Fellowship meeting Stuttgart

It’s time for the next Fellowship meeting in Stuttgart. It will take place at Thursday, 2 April at 19:00! We are going to meet in the “Unithekle”, Allmandring 17 , 70596 Stuttgart. Short term changes are announced in the wiki.

This time we want to talk about Free Software in education. I think this is an interesting and important topic. We live in the digital age. Therefore pupils should learn how to use and develop information technology in an social and sustainable way and all pupils should have equal opportunities. So if you know pupils, teachers or parents which are interested in Free Software, just take them with you to the Fellowship meeting.

“Frühjahrsfestival zum Datenschutz” at Stuttgart

Freie Software alleine garantiert keine sichere Software, aber sie ist eine notwendige Grundvoraussetzung um überhaupt sichere und vertrauenswürdige Software zu schaffen. Read more...

Happy Birthday FSFE!

Today the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) celebrates his 2³ birthday! For 8 years now, the FSFE works for basic rights and freedom in the digital age, a world in which our life increasingly depends on software.

In this eight years FSFE achieved a lot, from the local area to Europe and even up to the United Nations. It ranges from highly visible activities like the Document Freedom Day and the recently launched pdfreaders.org to a lot of behind-the-scenes activities like the work at the United Nations, promoting Free Software interests at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), contributed to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), taken part in discussions at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), taught project managers of the World Bank about Free Software and many more.

Jabber Mail Notification

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 general: Do i have to fetch the information or does the information come to me? Personally i always preferred to get the information and not to hunt around for them.

PDFreaders.org launched

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 the Fellowship.

Many websites with PDF documents have a link to a proprietary PDF reader from one specific company. This initiative tries to change this and offers buttons to link to pdfreaders.org which leads people to a list of free as in freedom and vendor neutral PDF readers.

An awesome event is over: KDE 4.2 Release Party and Fellowship Meeting at Stuttgart

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 awesome! 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. After that i gave a talk about the work of FSFE, especially in 2008, explained the role of the Fellowship for FSFE and highlighted some cool activities from our Fellows. My slides can be found here (German). I think i could attract some people and would be really happy to see some new faces at our next Fellowship meeting (probably somewhen in March). If you don’t want to miss it, subscribe to our mailing list for South Germany.

Quick Guide to GPLv3

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.

The Matrix Has You

While browsing the Web i have found the video presentation “Free Software and the Matrix” by Alexandre Oliva.

Just take some time, watch this presentation and you will see how much the movie “The Matrix” discusses the issues of the Free Software movement.

Back from Chemnitz

At this weekend Rainer and I were in Chemnitz at the [“Chemnitzer Linux Tage” (CLT)][1]. It was the first time that FSFE had a booth at this event and for me it was the first time going to a fair especially to work at the FSFE booth.

The first day was really hard for us. Because of the late decision to go to Chemnitz we had a bad place for our booth and many visitors hadn’t seen us. But luckily we had found a much better place for the second day. This is a picture of our booth at the second day, it was in the central corridor in front of the entrance:

Test your knowledge of the GPL and LGPL

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 answered a few questions wrongly but this time everything was correct. Too bad that in a few months we will have a new GPL and LGPL. 😉

a lot of impressions and news

I’m back from the SFSCon and the first international FSFE Fellowship Meeting in Bolzano (Italy). For me i can say that it was a great event and it gaves me the opportunity to meet a lot of great people from the Free Software Foundation Europe and around Free Software in general.

The Fellowship Meeting was also the place were a new project of the FSFE was launched, the Freedom Task Force (FTF). A project which works in partnership with gpl-violations.org and offers licensing education, fiduciary services and licence enforcement. For more information follow the link above.

Login with GnuPG smartcard

Libpam-poldi allows you to use your Fellowship crypto card to log in your GNU/Linux system.

First check if poldi detects your cardreader: ‘poldi-ctrl -d’. Unfortunately some cardreader doesn’t work with poldi and the existing free driver. For example the cardma4040 needs the non-free driver from Omnikey.

If poldi successfully detected your cardreader you can start to configure poldi. Poldi has a pretty good documentation so i will keep my explanations rather short.

French “iPod Law” violates Human Rights

The so-called “iPod law” contains reduced fines for file sharing and forced companies to open their DRM specification to enable competition.

The French Constitutional Council has declared this aspects unconstitutional. The justification: The “iPod law” violated the Human Right of constitutional protections of property.

Mr. Menard, a partner at the Lovells law firm and a specialist in “intellectual property” said: “The Constitutional Council effectively highlighted the importance of intellectual property rights,” and added that Apple Computer and other companies could not be forced to share their copy-protection technology without being paid for it.

Interview with DefectiveByDesign

Thanks to Markus from netzpolitik.org i have found this interesting interview with the DefectiveByDesign campaign.

The campaign has received quite a lot of attention in the media. For example the “Bono petition” saw press coverage in more than 115 news papers and news sitest in the USA.

Here a answer from DefectiveByDesign to a probably common question on this topic: “Are those two goals (content protection and consumer protection) compatible with one another?”

DefectiveByDesign: A better word than consumer, to describe me and you, is citizen. So is content protection and the rights of citizens compatible? When we live in a age where all digital works of art and all human knowledge can be transferred at (next to) zero cost, and where the cost of making one more copy is zero. Is it right to be building digital fences and digital handcuffs around this art and knowledge? If, as citizens of a society, we can see the advantages of allowing art and knowledge to flow without impediment, we as citizens will also have reason to find new ways to recompense the artists and knowledge purveyors. In fact, there are more artists working today than ever before, and more of their art is being enjoyed because of technology free from DRM and free of the Big Media gate keepers. The term “Content Protection” is a loaded term, framing the debate with their slant. I would say that this term really describes their attempt to hold back advancing society.

Read more...

Second draft of GPLv3

After about seven month of discussion and more than 1000 comments through gplv3.fsf.org/comments/ the FSF has published the second draft of the GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 3 and the first draft of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) Version 3 which is now designed as a set of permissive exceptions to GPLv3 in accord with section 7. The main changes in the second draft of GPLv3 are clarifications of the DRM section, a reworked license compatibility section and provisions that specifically allow to distribute programs on certain file sharing networks such as BitTorrent. For more details look at http://gplv3.fsf.org/gpl3-dd2-guide.html

Open letter to Bono (U2) to take a stand against DRM

DefectiveByDesign, a FSF campaign to eliminate DRM, has written an open letter to Bono the lead singer of the Irish rock band U2 to take a stand against Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). The group has focused on Bono because of his social activism and leadership in the music industry. The aim is to collect 10.000 signatures, at which point they will seek an audience with Bono, discuss with him the threats posed by DRM and request that he be the final signer.

License fee for PDF export?

As a GNU/Linux user i’m used to have PDF export in almost every program. With Office 2007 Microsoft finally wants to offer this common feature to their users too. But it seems like Adobe doesn’t like this idea. As cnet reported Adobe asked Microsoft to remove the PDF export feature or pay a fee for it.

Brian Jones from Microsoft has published some information, too.

Adobe promotes PDF as an open standard. But if Adobe now starts to sue competitors they can no longer claim that PDF is an open standard.

“World Intellectual Property Day” – Canadian musicians say “Not in Our Names”

April 26th was the “World Intellectual Property Day” (German). Brigitte Zypries, minister of justice of Germany, said “We need a better sense of right and wrong for ‘intellectual property’” and announced that the protection of ‘intellectual property’ will be the main focus when Germany will held the Presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2007.

At the same time Canadian musicians like Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan or Sloan say “Not in Our Names”. The “Canadian Music Creators Coalition” (CMCC) will ensure that lobbyists for major record labels and music publishers are not the only voices heard in debates about Canada’s copyright laws and other key cultural policy issues (press release).