A couple of days ago Frank released the first beta of ownCloud and I've been playing with it almost continually since then. For those who haven't read Franks blog entry (which is well worth reading) ownCloud is a set of server scripts for personal storage (among other things) and hopes to implement an open source cloud for everybody to take advantage of. If that doesn't make sense, wait for the screenshots :-) New features are planned (and you can see exactly what those features are at ownCloud.org.)
Now for the fun part: First, keep in mind this major caveat: This is software that has not been released, is not feature complete or bug free or ready at all for general use. But isn't it fun to see what the future might hold?
I installed ownCloud on my server at home, put some files in it and then accessed it from as many computers as possible. On linux:
That's my ownCloud server, mounted via WebDAV and being used to store and access files. That alone was pretty cool in my book.
Next I went to a nearby mac and tried to see how difficult it was to access it from there. The answer: not very. Here's another screenshot:
It appears just like any other file system, to the point where I tested out setting iTunes to use it as my media library. It worked, albeit with a few kinks. The last screenshot I have for today is one of just the basic web interface
That's it for today but I hope to be back soon with another entry showing off some other features of ownCloud. If it looks like something you're interested in helping with, the code is available on gitorious, there's a mailing list here and at least a few people have already jumped in with patches.
Good night!
Looks interesting, but what exactly is owncloud apart from a standard WebDAV server, written in PHP?
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