Opendesktop.org – Libre Cloud Services
opendesktop.org
opendesktop.org
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
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!
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??
On the other hand there are people (like myself) who are privacy focused, and the first alarm bell is who the heck are these people? They're a random company I've never heard of, hosting free software which I can (and do) host myself and offering to store all of my private, personal and/or important information for me.
Although they may very well be perfectly legitimate and caring people, how do you know their goal isn't to get as many people's data as possible and sell it off to <insert your worst nightmare here>?
This is the issue with the brand recognition problem, and I'm not sure what that target audience is that you fit into.
Also, you can easily find out who they are as they have an "About Us" on their website which has a "Contact" link that goes to https://www.opendesktop.org/contact
Hive01 GmbH Am Speksel 10 33649 Bielefeld Germany Contact: contact@opendesktop.org
They are also on Wikipedia and seem to have been around since 2001. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDesktop.org
There, you find out that this project was started by Frank Karlitschek and is heavily involved on the KDE project, which is widely known in the Linux community.
The reason you think they have no brand recognition is that they don't have the marketing of the big cos you know about like Google and Facebook... it doesn't mean they are no-ones that cannot be trusted as you seem to be implying.
If you want something to host at home, and you have sufficient bandwidth, a Raspberry Pi (4b) can get you started relatively cheap, with an external HDD/SSD.
In terms of securing it, my recommendation would be that you don't expose your services themselves but setup a VPN you can access remotely and connect to that to use your self-hosted services. This may not always be convenient so you could expose specific services as required.
Regarding the static IP (or lack of) you'll want dynamic DNS; I wrote a (simple) tool in Golang which I can compile to run on my (Ubiquiti, mips64) router, it uses Digital Ocean's API to provide Dynamic-DNS.
If this doesn't appeal to you, a cheap $5 VPS on DigitalOcean or similar is a good place to get started too, you can use Let's Encrypt for free TLS certificates and there's plenty of help around to get started.
Check out /r/selfhosted on Reddit, they're a helpful and friendly bunch.
Exactly. The problem isn't only "will they sell my data via B2B", or, "Do they hand out data to governments via classified programs like PRISM?"
The question is "how is this yet another centralized trove of data protected". Governments and organized crime both hack servers. The real question is "how protected is data when that happens?"
The reason self-hosting is so nice, is you can harder the hell out of your own server, you know it's up to date, and you know compromising it is low priority.
So my take is this: Any cloud service promoting itself as libre, without using end-to-end encryption for all communication, and client-side encryption for *everything* else, is indistinguishable from malicious companies. You're supposed to know what you can do for the user, and you're also supposed to actually implement those best practices.
Also, since the effectiveness of web based crypto has been discussed ad nauseam, and debunked by major names like Arcieri and Kobeissi, I'm just going to state "you better deliver FOSS native clients for your cloud, otherwise it's not going to matter".
I'm a happy user of Microsoft/Google/Apple but there needs to be some alternatives.
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.
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.
See also a blogpost of mine on this topic, about federated forging: https://staticadventures.netlib.re/blog/decentralized-forge/
I know about ActivityPub related discussions back in 2018[0] which links to a blog post[1] from the author of the activity app[2] that is natively included in every Nextcloud installation. However this app does not currently implement ActivityPub.
Did I miss something?
[0] https://nextcloud.com/blog/activitypub-the-new-standard-for-... [1] https://www.schilljs.com/2018/01/10/nextcloud-2018.html [2] https://github.com/nextcloud/activity/
since most of the cpu time is used in your browser, not in the cloud, the free offer is a relatively very cheap entry level teaser for supported, maintained and potentially on-premise deployments.
Charging for infrastructure is acceptable. I think libre initiative should rather charge from the get go, it reduces the risk that some day a VP joins the organisation and decide to monetise the sale of our data rather than offer a reasonable pricing model where the owner of the data is the consume, not personal data exploiters.
The investment in adopting a service is consequent, with daily use the effort to migrate away keeps growing. So, no, we better not experiment with offers hosting our digital life.
I dont know how this can work with a private documents model - presumably you don't want to share your data, but just the compute. May be IPFS or something of that nature...
Don't expect any GUI/WebUI though.
[0] https://www.pressebox.de/inaktiv/hive-01-gmbh/Open-Source-pr...
Their public-IP-VPN model is directly derived from UX research from the yunohost.org project (https://internetcu.be/), except instead of using network-neutral community-operated ISPs (eg. from the ffdn.org federation) for providing the VPN all goes through Amazon. They also mention the possibility to use your own domain name, but according to the technical details blogpost you still need to use their primary nameserver (also on Amazon), rendering their claim about their gateway not being able to access your communications more than dubious, since they operate both the DNS zone and the public IP (so they can effectively transparently MITM your mails if they want to, and so can Amazon).
Also it appears to be a private for-profit company, and their Github linked on the footer has exactly 0 public repositories. But they have a referral system to encourage you to convert your friends. All in all, without knowing/judging the people involved, it looks like a typical PR stunt from a money-hungry corporation who would not contribute to a broader selfhosting ecosystem.
In my very personal opinion, i'd strongly recommend to take a look at established, community-run solutions in this field: yunohost.org, freedombox.org, libreserver.org... FreedomBox also has hardware boxes to sell, while Yunohost relies on a network of local communities to distribute their own (both based on free-software-friendly Olimex hardware). I believe LibreServer is entirely software and does not sell boxes. I'd be happy to elaborate on some technical/political approaches of these projects if you're curious.
getumbrel, pretty much a source-available (not quite FOSS) two-developer effort, is going after the same market as thehelm and used "self-hosting" bitcoin (lightening) wallets as a wedge, because there is indeed an overlap between adopters of decentralized-tech such as cryptocurrency/defi and users who prefer self-hosting. See getumbrel's v04 release blog post: https://archive.is/xZEec
> All in all, without knowing/judging the people involved, it looks like a typical PR stunt from a money-hungry corporation who would not contribute to a broader selfhosting ecosystem.
Fair. Not sure if thehelm is a PR stunt, but the founders have successfully exited from at least one venture in the past (I believe, Rapid7).
> In my very personal opinion, i'd strongly recommend to take a look at established, community-run solutions in this field
Thanks for pointing me to FOSS alternatives. I responded to OP's What is their business model? How do they afford to host all this without selling data or charging money? by pointing out that there indeed are for-profit efforts in this space up and running, even if nascent.
I'm not really sure about that. If you have stats about the proportion of cryptocurrency/defi users actually selfhosted, i'm curious. On the other side, i've rarely encountered people in the selfhosting/privacy ecosystems who are interested in cryptocurrencies.
> I responded to OP's
Fair enough :)
And I think this is attested by the number of projects similar to Umbrel like Ronin Dojo, Raspiblitz, MyNode and even hardware vendors like Nodl and Start9. CryptoCloaks sells accessories like cases for RPis, a popular device for running Bitcoin and Lightning nodes. Some people might even go beyond and get their blocks from the Blockstream satellite transmission.
I'm not sure you'll ever get stats about that because those people like to remain hidden. Perhaps the growth rate of Bitcoin and Lightning network nodes operating on the Onion network might be a good starting point.
I had no idea this was a thing! Thanks for the reference.
It sounds like Blue Systems is an IT company with no business purpose other than philanthropy.
I'm kind-of amazed at how much freaking out everybody's doing on this thread when instead they could just do a little looking.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDesktop.org [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Systems
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.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/openstreetmap/comments/pc9fof/opens... [1] https://tiles.musa.kodapan.se/compare.html
The largest conurbations are cities but you can’t say that a city is always larger than a town (or vis versa).
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?
I slowly stepped away. This is all too controversial for me.
I'm sorry, what? Is that another joke I don't understand?
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
This is true! That's why guix project has been working on `guix challenge`, which lets you inquire about checksums for a specific package from various repositories, to make sure they are the same. I personally think such an approach is a huge step in making software somewhat-verifiable by non-tech people (although guix is not exactly approachable by that audience, i'm talking about the principle).
> Remote attestation? Can we verify what is running in memory?
Yes and know. You can if you trust the hardware/software doing the remote attestation. Signal project for instance has argued that a centralized server with Intel SGX "secure enclaves" is the safest we can do. I personally strongly disagree, and i believe vulnerabilities found since then in Apple/Intel/AMD security chips go against that argument.
Software security is almost tackled with bootstrappability, reproducibility and "challenges". Hardware/firmware security is an entirely new thing...
If it that isn't 'safest', what do you think is safer (and practical)?
Distributing trust is safer and practical. A single, centralized server will always be vulnerable, whatever defenses in depth you deploy. Standardization and decentralization is more valuable in the long run for privacy/security than any customized efforts.
That's what allows us these past years to do PGP over email over Tor onions, transparently via onionMX SRV records (+ a local cache/mapping to prevent lying DNS). Meanwhile, Signal still requires a unique identifier (phone number) to operate and mandates usage of AWS and other privacy-hostile providers to reach their server, and there's nothing we can do about it because they control the entire infrastructure. Some resources on that:
- https://gultsch.de/objection.html <-- A free-software Jabber/XMPP client developer's answer to Signal team's stance against federation and open standards
- https://north-shore.info/2019/06/02/signal-fails/ <-- A critique of Signal from a militant, non-tech, "security culture" perspective
Of course you have to trust them with anything going in clear-text on their servers. But you don't have the vendor lock-in you'd have with proprietary alternatives. It can be a great bridge between Google/Apple/Microsoft/etc and self-managed, if nothing else.
At the end of the day, we largely trust canonical or the distros maintainers to not do anything malicious, even by accident.
I see Libre cloud as a similar situation, though with more avenues for larger-scale abuse. Hopefully, just like with other things FOSS, the community will validate that everything is fine and the risk is minimal.
We speak for ourselves!
Guarantees are hard to come by. That's where reasonable amounts of risk assessment enter the picture.
If you're looking for absolute certainty
Compiling from scratch isn’t necessarily such a big deal these days (guix/NixOS/gentoo for base system, locally built containers for orchestrated services).
Personally I’m fine with putting some level of trust in the maintainers of Debian apt repos but everything else I definitely do take a look at where it’s coming from and what’s going on. There’s a middle ground between fine-combing the source tree and blindly accepting whatever comes from arbitrary upstreams.
Long answer: It could be, if proper protocols and data structures would be employed that make it trivial to move the data off the server, mirror it or dual host it on multiple servers at once. So far there is however barely anything that does that, git for version control, IPFS for simple file hosting, but that's about it. The tools to build a "Libre Cloud" don't really exist (and federation is snake oil).
I'm very interested in this domain. Hubzilla has pioneered account migration with the ZOT protocol, and there's discussions in the Jabber/XMPP ecosystem to implement something similar. Personally, i'm curious about going beyond a single protocol and migrating entire server services from a hosting coop to another: https://ttm.sh/dVy.md (draft blogpost)
> The tools to build a "Libre Cloud" don't really exist (and federation is snake oil).
There's Yunohost.org, Freedombox.org and Libreserver.org (ex FreedomBone). They're very cool, and enable non-tech users to selfhost.
Why would you say the federation is snake oil?
With federated services your are still just user@host, completely under the control of whoever owns host. Furthermore the federation aspect is completely optional, if host decides to blacklists some other hosts, there is nothing you can do about it. So I don't see the advantage over the Twitter, Facebook and Co., when everything that makes federation special can be taken away at any moment.
Without some public-key crypto or something that allows you to move your identity to another server or better yet, never exist on any specific server to begin with, I just don't see the point.
In general, I think the only way to build a "Libre Cloud" is by making the cloud part as stupid as possible. Have the actual app run completely on the client, use the cloud just as dumb object store with little to no awareness of what it is serving.
Not exactly, no. It can be taken away when your server operators decide it. But in the federated model, we go with explicit trust relationships and non-profit, community-operated hosts so that's not a problem in practice. In fact, i'm glad my server operators actively defederate from neonazi-friendly nodes, so that i don't have to deal with them... just like i'm glad my email operator validates DKIM and uses rate limiting to prevent spam.
> some public-key crypto or something that allows you to move your identity
That's a very interesting approach. It's been implemented in the ZOT protocol (Hubzilla ecosystem), and has been talked about in the Jabber/XMPP and Matrix ecosystems too. I'm excited for that future, if we can come up with an interoperable spec across protocols.
> use the cloud just as dumb object store with little to no awareness of what it is serving
That's an interesting approach indeed, and i'm interested if you have more resources/links on that. I've been thinking for a while about reducing the difference between federated and P2P services, like how servers could help you seed your content, and/or act as inbox for when you're offline.
I've started drafting a blogpost in that direction a while back.. nothing much in there yet but if it can be of interest to you: https://ttm.sh/tHG.md
These seem like advantages to federation. You can choose your masters, and you can choose another master (and they can choose to get rid of you) at any time.
I don't think that the advantage of federation over centralized services is that you can say and do what you want and everyone has to listen to or service you. It's that you have more options than one.
Of course, in the worst case, most nodes could federate into an exclusionary cartel controlled by a single, well-financed organization. But that means that the worst case for federation is the only case in the current situation.
-----
edit: I do think that the major thing missing from the web 2.0 user-provided content internet are tools to facilitate democracy and self-governance. With properly done tools and ownership structures, maybe the users can actually own their accounts, and have as much of a say in how their node was run as you would expect in an organization of peers.
That's only if your federated protocol supports account migrations (usually with some form of crypto-identity). This was pioneered as part of the Hubzilla ecosystem and ZOT protocol. Nowadays there are efforts to port this approach to ActivityPub/XMPP/Matrix, we'll see where that goes!
Of course it's all easier if everyone owns their domain name and you can migrate "transparently". But the tooling for giving away free, pseudonymous domains is limited so far (afraid.org, netlib.re, eu.org..).
Looking through the store, it feels a-bit like Patreon.
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?
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.
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.
It seems straightforward to me: They call themselves "Open" and "a libre platform", etc. They are part of the FLOSS movement.
All in all, for ~100€/mo housing fees (+ hardware costs) you can serve (dozens of) thousands of users, selfhosted.
[0] https://e.foundation/ecloud/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%2Fe%2F_%28operating_system%29...