Distributions

A "personal cloud": percloud

Over the years, there have been numerous projects seeking to replace one or more of the centralized "social networking" and other services that are in use today. Diaspora, ownCloud, FreedomBox, and others have set out to "break the chains" connecting users to companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and the like. The revelations from Edward Snowden have only accelerated that trend. A new project, percloud, has similar goals but, unlike some of the others, is looking at the problem as a whole, rather than as a collection of underlying technologies. In fact, percloud wants to put together a full distribution that allows users to have their own cloud services, with simplified setup and configuration.

Percloud is the brainchild of Marco Fioretti, who has been involved with free software and open digital standards as a teacher, writer, and activist over the last several years. He put out a call to action back in August for a study of the alternatives to the existing proprietary cloud services along with how to integrate them into a distribution that can even be used by those without a technical background. Fioretti's thoughts go back even further than August, however, and he has written extensively on the topic at his blog.

While he is happy to see other projects out there tackling various aspects of the problem, Fioretti is convinced that they are missing the forest for the trees. The biggest problems that users will face when trying to move their data—lives—away from the commercial services are a lack of knowledge about configuring the various tools and setting them up to federate with their friends' systems. The latter is what will allow users to have their own software, under their own control, but to still exchange information with their friends and colleagues. Federation is, essentially, the mechanism to get out from under the centralized control of today's cloud services.

A lack of consideration for these configuration and federation pieces are what make some of the alternatives—Mailpile, FreedomBox, Diaspora—insufficient, Fioretti said. By pulling all of the pieces together into a single distribution, with an integrated control panel allowing users to easily set things up, percloud would provide one-stop-shopping for those looking to break their chains.

The focus of Phase I of the project, as described in the roadmap would be a feasibility study to determine what parts and pieces need to come together to create percloud. Fioretti had put together an unsuccessful crowdfunding campaign for Phase I. In a status report after the failed funding drive, he shifted gears slightly:

The kinds of services that Fioretti envisions being provided by percloud are email, blogging, social networking, and online storage for bookmarks, pictures, files, and so on. In addition, he sees integrated encryption for all of those services, with minimal setup and configuration. Beyond that, the system should allow users to freely import their data from elsewhere, as well as export it to other services. It is, obviously, a rather tall order.

Much of Fioretti's writing sounds like a manifesto or, perhaps, a rant to some. But he does have a point, and it is one that free software efforts often fail to consider. In fact, it could be argued that the lack of adoption for the Linux desktop may have been caused by some of the same kinds of issues. Free software folks tend to focus on the software and the technology, without considering the higher-level pieces—some of which are not at all technical in nature. Another of his posts describes that issue:

There are quite a number of projects that overlap some part of the percloud vision. Some could be incorporated into the distribution; the percloud in 10 slides [SlideShare] presentation mentions ownCloud and Webmin, for example. Fioretti clearly does not want to reinvent any wheels if that can be avoided. But he does want to focus directly on the non-technical users and their needs, rather than to create a big wad of technical solutions that fundamentally don't play well together.

While Fioretti seems willing to keep working on the project in his spare time, the lack of funding—and, seemingly, other participants—may make percloud something of a dead project. He encourages others to get involved, to work on the feasibility study or other pieces of the problem, but so far percloud appears to be a one-man show. The idea of turning the problem on its head, by starting with an integrated, user-centric interface targeted at non-technical folks, is an interesting one. Perhaps other projects will pick it up and run with it.

Comments (5 posted)

Distribution quote of the week

Comments (none posted)

Mageia 4 beta 1 released

Comments (none posted)

openSUSE 13.1 released

Comments (2 posted)

Distribution newsletters

• Debian Project News (November 13)
• DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 534
• Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 343 (November 17)

Comments (none posted)

Stability first: Ubuntu’s Mir won’t replace X in 14.04 desktop (ars technica)

Comments (21 posted)

PCLinuxOS Makes Desktop Linux Look Good (LinuxInsider)

Comments (none posted)