That’s why I don’t particularly welcome FLOSS community based distro pushing for closed web services. They should be well aware of the “culture of openness” and they should hence offer open web services to their communities.

Bottom line: nothing wrong with using non-open web services when free alternatives are not available, but we should keep clear in our minds that that is not the ideal world wrt “standard” FLOSS ideals.

I’ve been running my own server from home for years now (details below). However, over time I’ve found that administering all this stuff yourself is just far too much hassle! Web applications in particular are very hard to keep up-to-date because they don’t tend to work very well with traditional package managers.

These days I use GMail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Reader, Rememberthemilk, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, LastFM… the list goes on! After working for Google for a short time I realised that the backup and data redundancy they have in place is so much better than any backup system I could implement myself, it just isn’t worth the effort on my part! Also, web applications you run yourself don’t currently have the social/network effect of cloud-based services. I wrote down some opinions on cloud computing on my blog http://tola.me.uk/blog/2009/03/05/cloud_computing

Having said all of that, there are some things that cloud-based services don’t currently do very well and there are certain types of information I’d rather have physical control over. That’s why I’m trying to start the Webian Home Server project – to make running a home server much easier, and to take advantage of emerging web standards for rich multimedia in the browser http://webian.org

I’m a big advocate of open standards for data, even more than open source for software development. The ideal situation for me would be that web services would use open standards instead of proprietary APIs so that you could freely move your data between providers or host it yourself. Unfortunately standards by their nature only emerge when technologies become… standard, so restricting yourself to standards-based services means missing out on a shed load of innovation and cool features. For that reason I think there will always be compromise between features and openness.

For those who might be interested, I’ve previously used my home server as: * Document server (filesystem mounted over sshfs or WebDAV from Mac/Linux) * Media server (Ampache and Samba server with XBMC as a client) * Calendar server (mod_dav and phpicalendar with Sunbird/iCal as a client) * Wiki (PHPWiki/MediaWIki) * Source code repository (Subversion + WebDAV + trac) * News reader (Gregarius)

I’ve never found a mail and contacts server that I was happy with, but I’ve played with software like Horde and Hula/Bongo.

open data is seriously hindered by closed source web services (hello #ubuntu one),because you can’t trust the API implementation #shotofjaq

I’ll briefly expand here on that (yes Aq, you managed to convince me that it is worth to post something larger on the subject )

My main point is that advertising open data as the solution to privacy issues is no solution, or at least is currently being overrated. Those among us which are free software zealots have several reasons to be such, but an important one among then is trust.

I don’t need to trust blindly someone giving me a binary program and telling me “just use this API which will work that way”. I can look at the code and ensure that it is doing what the API promises.

Open data (at least as presented in this issue of Shot of Jaq) stops at the API level, I need to trust the other end side of the API “contract” to do what the API promises (e.g. deleting the information I asked to delete). As long as the code of the web service implementing the API is not open (and that’s why I’ve mention Ubuntu One, which currently isnot) I must stop there.

Then I’ll agree that having a, say, AGPL-licensed web service won’t be necessary enough to complete the trust path (the web service can for instance just claim to be comformant to some source code whereas in practice being not), but it will surely be an important extra step in the right (for me, YMMV) direction.

Thanks for the show, it is high-quality radio (even if I don’t always share the conveyed messages).

Gerv

The way I proffer to work results in the creation of a huge number of relativity small files, because of this version control is absolutely essential, which is not provided by the majority of file sync services. There really is is nothing better than TeX for writing technical documents and no on-line `word processors’ come any where near the power and efficiency of a decent editor like Vim or Emacs.

And yes, I do run my own server

A friend of mine was playing an online game this weekend in a game server with like 15 of his friends. They ended up playing with an admin who booted their whole team because he didn’t like one of their usernames: 2gaymeninaboat. Well, they looked up the admins profile on the gaming site, then they looked at his facebook page, twitter account, flicker account and any other social media they could find on the guy. Then they started playing with his mind. There were pictures of the guy on some fishing trip that they asked him about and that kind of freaked him out that they knew about it. They got him to let all of them back in the server. He was a little freaked out that strangers could find out all kinds of personal information about him just by doing some simple basic searching.

I think there is some credible caution that people should take. I try not to put too much personal information online and I always set privacy settings fairly strictly, especially on facebook. There are avenues that you can use to make your life public, but I think people should be very thoughtful about which ones they put sensitive personal information on. I also think that people should be more selective of how much of their lives they live online. Probably at LEAST half of my friends on facebook I don’t ever need to hang out with because they tell everything about themselves online. There is nothing to get to know, no real reason to spend time with them.

I deal with the e-mail access issue by leaving messages on the server until I’m quite sure I’m ready to delete them. When I had a day job this wouldn’t be until I had a copy on both work and home computers. Now that I work from home, and don’t travel much, I try to delete mail from the server on a weekly basis. Yes that means I can’t instantly access last month’s mail from the local coffee shop – oh well!

That is traditionally a difficult problem because these systems are distributed over a large area, the communications channels are sometimes rather shaky (especially in bad weather), and a lot of the people installing them quite frankly aren’t really that adept at wide area networking. The volumes of data however aren’t typically that great. The difficulty is in synchronising it (from the field to the database). In fact, it is quite normal to only connect intermittently in order to save on data charges.

In reverse, you have service people who replace hardware, but then the correct current configurations need to be downloaded from central storage to the field.

There are a number of projects that I’ve worked on in the past where I would have loved to have something like this as an off the shelf solution. Is that feasible, or is that the wrong approach entirely?

I keep hard backups at home on an external hard drive (no need for a server yet). I will also burn dvds periodically of things like family photos as well, hard drives won’t last forever. If they go out, you’re screwed, but if you have them backed up on a dvd you can save them on another hard drive later. I will admit that this is becoming less and less an option since dvds will hold only 4.7 gigs and storage needs well exceed this. Blu-Ray disks will be a better option when I get a burner. Dual layer Blu-Ray disks can hold 100 gigs, that’s more like it.

I also believe in off site backup. I don’t do this yet, but it’s something I am more and more concerned with as my digital data collection continues to rise.

In the end it came down to the usual big players, MS, Google and surprisingly the CLI-only VPS. Zoho would be where I would look if I started a small business but Google won out at the end of the day with its SSO, consumer features and constantly evolving product suite so I use there services wherever possible and it’s been amazing to not have to worry about syncing and moving information. It’s been brilliant for me and I realised that I don’t need to keep using those old services just because other people I know are still on them. I’ve got to dump MSN, Skype, JungleDisk/Amazon S3, Xmarks and TomTom. I can’t recommend this excercise enough if you want to streamline youronline life. Something for scratchpad even? Backupify will hopefully handle my backups once they fix all the bugs which are preventing it from working atm.

Looks like I hate privacy and fredoom. YMMV.