"Open source is the only option for file storage that is really safe and secure.,” says ownCloud Founder Frank Karlitschek.
Frank Karlitschek is founder of ownCloud and maintainer of the project’s general architecture.
There I was, 4 years ago (this past January) at CampKDE in San Diego, giving a talk on data privacy, warning the audience about the risks to their privacy from cloud vendors – in particular, Dropbox. So, build it yourself they said. Sure, I’ve built things in the past, so sure, I’ll do it. And there is where I started my odyssey, first, to protect myself, my friends and my colleagues from the snooping of governments, and other bad guys, and later – as I saw the worldwide interest grow – to build a real and successful project.
I had to decide a few things before I got started of course, including what it is I wanted ownCloud to do, what development platform to use, how I wanted to structure ownCloud, and of course, to name it ownCloud.
My friends and I needed a way we could sync our pictures, documents and even videos to our various devices (instead of using a thumb drive), and even to share those files with friends and family. Dropbox was by then becoming very popular, but I just didn’t want to send my data through a third-party service to be stored who-knows-where. I wanted to create a platform that friends could use the storage they already had – instead of the cloud — but not just for syncing and sharing, but a platform flexible enough to build apps beyond that.
Of course ownCloud would be open source.
