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Opendesktop.org – Libre Cloud Services
- cs702 5y agoQuestions: 1. Who is providing these apps and services? 2. What is their long-term goal? 3. Why should I trust them with my data? 4. Where are they located? 5. When did they get started? 6. How do they plan on becoming financially sustainable?
- rd07 5y agoI think some of your questions can be answered by visiting their website. https://www.opendesktop.org/about https://www.opendesktop.org/about https://www.opendesktop.org/contact https://www.opendesktop.org/contact
- cs702 5y ago1. I see zero information about any of the individuals involved, or their backers. 2. I see zero information about the organization's long-term goal. 3. I see zero information as to why should I trust them with my data. 4. They do show an address in Europe, but I see zero information about the location of key people and servers. 5. I see zero information about the history of the project and the involvement of key people. 6. I see zero information on financially sustainability.
- degenerate 5y agoFor those unfamiliar with this product (such as I), here is a brief paraphrased history from Wikipedia: In 2007 openDesktop.org was established as an umbrella page for content from the sites such as Xfce-Look.org, GNOME-Look.org or Linux-Apps.com, which now continue under pling.com The websites are operated and maintained by hive01 GmbH, based in Bielefeld, Germany. Does anyone here use it? How's the mobile sync?
- mappu 5y agoDo you know anybody from Bielefeld? Have you ever been to Bielefeld? Do you know anybody who has ever been to Bielefeld?
- xcambar 5y agoI've met someone, once, that claimed to be from Bielefeld. I slowly stepped away. This is all too controversial for me.
- ccozan 5y agoIn case some was wondering about this, here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_conspiracy
- prox 5y agoIt’s funny that a scientist like Merkel had heard of the conspiracy (maybe on usenet itself?)
- input_sh 5y ago> scientist like Merkel I'm sorry, what? Is that another joke I don't understand?
- Havoc 5y agoShe has a phd in quantum chemistry so reference to that are quite common
- paraknight 5y agoNo, she actually used to be a research scientist and has a quantum chemistry PhD (you can read her thesis online)
- input_sh 5y ago
- zxspectrum1982 5y agoI am old enough to remember :-) Hive01, those sites and the umbrella site opendeskop.org were started by Frank Karlitschek, who was very involved in KDE ~15 years ago. Then he sold the company and went on to found OwnCloud, and later on to fork as NextCloud. Actually, before OwnCloud there was an attempt to create a company to assemble and sell PCs with Linux and free software but that failed.
- bachmeier 5y agoI've come across this before. Have never been able to find out what you get with a "free account" or why someone is giving away free accounts.
- wolverine876 5y ago> Have never been able to find out ... why someone is giving away free accounts. It seems straightforward to me: They call themselves "Open" and "a libre platform", etc. They are part of the FLOSS movement.
- bachmeier 5y agoI don't see how that answers either question. Being part of the FLOSS movement doesn't explain who is funding the costs of the service or why. It's unrelated. And it certainly doesn't tell me what you get with a "free account".
- cwilby 5y agoSomebody with money to literally burn, is my guess.
- ognarb 5y agoGood guess, see BlueSystem in Wikipedia.
- mappu 5y agoIt's owned by Blue Systems who employ a lot of KDE developers. See https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenDesktop-Acquired https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenDesk...
- southerntofu 5y agoA free account isn't usually free, but rather donation-based (free price). Also, hosting services for users is incredibly cheap unless you host some very resource-intensive services. All in all, for ~100€/mo housing fees (+ hardware costs) you can serve (dozens of) thousands of users, selfhosted.
- kxrm 5y agoAccording to the payout terms.[0] It appears this service is making money though some sort of store front on pling.com. They are hoping you use Open Desktop to contribute to their store. Looking through the store, it feels a-bit like Patreon. [0] https://www.opendesktop.org/terms/payout https://www.opendesktop.org/terms/payout
- gnulinux 5y agoWould someone be able to help me understand what is 'Libre Cloud'? Even if your code is released under AGPL or something like that what guarantee do you get that software running and not that plus a tiny delta? So how can cloud be libre when I cannot treat it as nothing but untrusted 3rd party entity? Is the argument here that opendesktop.org is a trusted party?
- wolverine876 5y ago> Even if your code is released under AGPL or something like that what guarantee do you get that software running and not that plus a tiny delta? An interesting question: How do you verify the code running in the 'cloud'? And to rehash an old but relevant point: Practically, you don't know if local FLOSS software is the same as its released code, and you don't even review the code so it doesn't matter, to a degree. You are still operating on trust to some degree. But with local FLOSS software, someone else might review it, which seems difficult for hosted cloud software.
- southerntofu 5y ago> Practically, you don't know if local FLOSS software is the same as its released code There's strong efforts for reproducible builds and bootstrappable distros in the past years. NixOS and guix have pioneered the field, but i believe both Debian and ArchLinux are now over 90% reproducible. > seems difficult for hosted cloud software Yes, it's outright impossible. That's why we need effective decentralization via free-software selfhosting solutions, so that you can place your trust in people you actually know and trust, not a "random" centralized free software operator like this one. That's the lesson framasoft.org has learnt when their degooglization campaign was a little too much successful, so they started a new "deframasoftization" campaign which gave birth to the chatons.org federation of non-profit hosts. In the english-speaking world, libreho.st comes to mind.
- wolverine876 5y ago>> Practically, you don't know if local FLOSS software is the same as its released code > There's strong efforts for reproducible builds and bootstrappable distros in the past years. NixOS and guix have pioneered the field, but i believe both Debian and ArchLinux are now over 90% reproducible. That's a valuable step, but few people build their OS. In practice, few people will know if their copy matches the released code. >> seems difficult for hosted cloud software > Yes, it's outright impossible I think it may be possible, but it will require different tools. Remote attestation? Can we verify what is running in memory?
- Chilinot 5y agoWhat is their business model? How do they afford to host all this without selling data or charging money?
- lnxg33k1 5y agoDonations probay
- Chilinot 5y agoDoesnt seem very future proof. But looking around on their website that seems to be their (atleast publicly) only source of income.
- eVeechu7 5y agoIf there is continuing value to a community, that community will likely continue to fund it. That seems more future proof than venture capital or corporate largesse.
- hirako2000 5y agoExactly my thought. I'm getting sick entirely of this proliferation of free services that obviously can't scale without increasingly high funding. There are free software for each of those services which can be stood up locally, takes more time but offers more guarantees in the long term for privacy and resilience.
- simonh 5y agoThese are mostly online sharing and collaboration type services, or have sharing features. That means running it on your server and sharing with others doesn’t solve the trust issue, your just requiring that other people using these services you host have to trust you. If you’re just using the single user services then sure, if you have the technical skills and resources doing it yourself is more private.
- 5y ago
- rd07 5y agoStumbling upon this site while browsing for KDE Plasma theme. Searching with 'open desktop' or 'opendesktop' terms on HN does not seems like someone has posted them in the past, so I decided to post it. Looking at their services, there is an opportunity to create a mobile-desktop ecosystem out of them like Google services.
- 908B64B197 5y agoWhat's the pricing?
- pjfin123 5y agoLibreTranslate has open source translation too: https://libretranslate.com https://libretranslate.com
- ducktective 5y agoLooks like it doesn't have "compute" machines (only storage, etc)
- nowugetme 5y agoWhat is their business model? is it similar to https://setkorp.com/ https://setkorp.com/
- jamesholden 5y agoI don't see anywhere about their 'files' system either, how much storage is allowed or any kind of limitations. This is concerning..
- hellpirat 5y agoWhat this for?
- bni 5y agoWhy would I trust them? To me, source code being libre is neutral when trusting/not trusting my data to some entity.
- Lio 5y agoMy own very minor gripe is with the maps component. Because it uses OpenStreetMap as a map source it doesn't show any settlements larger 250,000 for my area because those settlements call themselves "towns" and not "cities". When you zoom out all you see is a blank space with no labels for quite a large area of the screen. Meanwhile very small settlements (< 20K people) are shown at max zoom just because they happen to have the right kind of church building, which in the UK means they can call themselves "cities". I've raised this issue with OpenStreetMaps support for many years and they just either say it's something to be fixed by client libraries or it's not important. They could be right I guess. However, Goople maps, Apple maps and Microsoft maps handle this correctly and that's what OpenDesktop explicitly say they are trying to replace here.
- NGRhodes 5y agoFYI, in the UK, historically city status was given to towns with cathedrals, but since the 20th century city status is awarded by the monarch. England has 3 large towns with over 200000 population -Luton, Northampton and Reading and about 30 towns with between 100000 and 200000 population.
- Rygian 5y agoThere is an ongoing proposal discussed on Reddit [0] for an alternate rendering that fills in "empty areas" with a different algorithm. The comparison is really nice [1]. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/openstreetmap/comments/pc9fof/openstreetmap_places_rendering_that_fills_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/openstreetmap/comments/pc9fof/opens... [1] https://tiles.musa.kodapan.se/compare.html https://tiles.musa.kodapan.se/compare.html
- jermaustin1 5y agoThe Hydda map also seems to have some issues in the regard. Looking in the west midlands, Crewe is missing on some zoom level (not sure how far in) while the smaller towns that surround it are there. The OSM map works as expected in this case.
- Tijdreiziger 5y ago
- KronisLV 5y agoI feel like what hurts this the most is lack of brand recognition - half of the people in the comments are asking why they should trust them and rightfully so. When you look at the individual components, like Nextcloud, you know that the company behind that project is interested in making it work. You know that Nextcloud, GitLab and others make money through their enterprise offerings and probably aren't too interested in selling their users' data or finding other alternative ways of monetizing their platforms. When a seemingly random company pops up and just rehosts a number of these FOSS platforms, you tend to be skeptical of their motivations or offerings, seeing as they make bold claims about otherwise insignificant platforms, especially given how often you hear untrue statements about privacy nowadays and even moreso if you don't know or care about their history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDesktop.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDesktop.org Personally, i applaud their efforts and attempts at popularizing these tools and platforms (as someone who self hosts OpenProject, Nextcloud, GitLab, Rocket.Chat and many other pieces of software that i use myself), however i fail to see where their target audience lies: the majority of people who don't care about their privacy will simply stick to the larger cloud offerings of Google or Microsoft office components and something like GitHub for their code, whereas the more privacy conscious folk are more likely to self host software or will need lots of time to build trust with them. I do hope that they have a sustainable existence and a net positive impact on the industry, though!
- brabel 5y agoI don't know... just created an account with them and found this extremely nice! All those projects you mention seem awesome, but I've just never had the patience to setup all those things by myself... looks like using opendesktop.org, I get all those things working in seconds by just having an account (which took me 2 minutes to create). For people asking how they make money: looks like they give you, for example, 5GB of file storage for free but after that you have to have a paying account to get more, which is something I am interested in as I hope they will be much cheaper than Apple/Google offerings, while being compatible with open protocols like WebDAV. EDIT: actually, I don't seem to be able to become a paying customer?! They only seem to have "become a supporter" which is more like for donations to Pling?! How do I actually pay to get , say 1TB storage??
- TheRealNGenius 5y agoLol, you know it’s HackerNews when people complain that something is too expensive, and then in another thread complain that something is free.
- pshirshov 5y agoAnother repacked Nextcloud. Nope, thanks. First of all it's PHP and it's not like they follow the best coding practices. And then - both Android and iOS Nextcloud clients are happy to crash and leave semi-uploaded files unnoticed. I'm not even talking about e2e encryption, which is somehow supported but good luck not to loose your data.
- scns 5y agoOne alternative to this would be [0] by the /e/ foundation [1]. [0] https://e.foundation/ecloud/ https://e.foundation/ecloud/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%2Fe%2F_%28operating_system%29?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%2Fe%2F_%28operating_system%29...
- legrande 5y agoOops: https://www.opendesktop.org/donate https://www.opendesktop.org/donate
- jonnycomputer 5y agoAt first I thought this was associated with Libre Office Document Foundation.
- nowugetme 5y ago<a href="https://setkorp.com https://setkorp.com" target="_blank">Setup your business in Dubai</a>