I've been using OwnCloud for a few months now, and I'm very happy with it. My own primary use for it has been to replace Google for syncing my contact lists an

I've been using OwnCloud for a few months now, and I'm very happy with it. My own primary use for it has been to replace Google for syncing my contact lists and calendars, thanks to its CardDAV and CalDAV support, but I've also used it sparingly for file storage. It certainly gives you a lot more flexibility than Dropbox: you can have access to your stored files via WebDAV, if you just want to directly access them on the network rather than sync. I haven't even installed the desktop sync client. But at this stage, OwnCloud is definitely a solution for hackers and geeks rather than the general public. It's a self-hosted application, and doesn't always work well with shared hosting. I initially tried to get it running on my web hosting account, but eventually had to move it to my VPS due to OwnCloud not working well with the web host's Apache config. I also ran into a number of minor bugs that I had to correct in the source. Overall, the release version seems more like a beta than a robust release at the moment, and even where it does work well, you certainly are exchanging "just works" for greater flexibility and configurability. Most of us may prefer to make that tradeoff in the direction that OwnCloud does, but I suspect that most Dropbox users wouldn't.