My random thoughts about politics, society and technology (tag: nextcloud)

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.

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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...

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. Within this folders I store all notes, protocols, etc. Each of this project folders contain a “Next Steps.md”-file which contain the next steps in the project. With a growing number of projects, it become harder and harder to keep an overview over all the separated “Next Steps.md”-files. Wouldn’t it be nice to have one overview file which contain all the next steps and updates itself automatically when I change one of the individual files?

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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...

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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