 Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot. So my name is Frank Karlecek. I'm an open source and free software developer for a long, long, long time. I think close to 20 years. Yes, I'm officially old. I'm involved in all kinds of different open source projects. For example, the KDE project I worked with for a long, long time was a board member there for some, for a while. But I think nowadays I'm mostly well known for us being the founder of Oncloud and also being the founder of NextCloud, the successor of it. So I want to talk a little bit about the current problems with centralized services, internet services that we see and then a little bit about potential solutions for that, which is like having everything distributed and federated. A little bit about NextCloud. Don't want to talk about it too much here, but some ideas of what we are doing to solve these problems. And then hopefully at the end we still have time for some, for some questions and answers, which in my opinion is always the most, the most fun part. Okay. So this, you've all seen this, right? This is a beautiful poster that is all standing around here on the outside. I actually took this photo, photo this morning here because I find it actually quite interesting, especially for this talk here. Interesting because of a few things. First of all, you have here, let me see if this works. Not really, doesn't work, whatever. You see here, no, strange things. No, what's happening? Okay. So I can describe it. See in the middle you see, you see that the topic is artificial intelligence, machine learning, personal assistance. I saw this morning lots of talks in this area, especially personal assistance, which I personally find very interesting. And also a lot of discussions and talks about cloud. So a lot about this personal assistance thing, like the Amazon Echo that you all know probably, Google Assistant and Apple Siri and other devices like that. Another thing you notice on this poster is on the very top, FOSS, free and open source software. This is an open source conference that we are here, which is already interesting because most of the services that I mentioned earlier actually not open source. So Amazon is not open source, Google Assistant is not open source, Apple Siri is not open source and so on, which I find already quite interesting here that we have a topic here which unfortunately is dominated by not open source solutions. Another thing you see here on this poster is Asia. Obviously we are in Asia here, which is a little bit different than most of this cloud service backends because all the services that these devices are talking to are actually run by US companies somewhere else, not here. So I find this already quite interesting as a poster because it quite nicely demonstrates the challenge that we all have here as an open source community. So this is all getting more centralized. All these services are getting more centralized. Although Amazon Echo is talking to centralized Amazon services, Google is talking to the Google services and so on, which is quite interesting because the internet actually started in a decentralized way. So the internet started completely federated and decentralized. So what does this mean? If you look at the Wikipedia definition of it, it says that the internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks. So the internet by itself, by nature, is a distributed and federated medium. It's not centralized. So what exactly do I mean when I say centralized? What I mean with centralized is there is no central instance. So there's no central internet server. There's no central company which manages the whole internet. There's no central instance. It's always possible to have different providers. So for example, get your email from one provider. You can get your, whatever, your chat service from another provider and your website is hosted somewhere else and you can also choose between them. So you can say, I don't like this internet provider anymore, this internet service provider, the email provider anymore. I switched to a different one and it still works. And this is possible because there's different server software and different client software available. If you look at FTP or the web itself or email again or XMPP as chat, so there's all kinds of different, mostly open source service software and client software available. So you can host it wherever you want. You don't have to go to a central internet company which somehow manages your central messaging service. It's really distributed and federated. And of course, mostly open source and free software. Examples for this decentralized internet services are mail again. And let me explain a little bit more what I mean with that. It is possible that I have my own mail server at home or my company has a mail server or my university has a mail server or someone goes to Yahoo or Gmail for their mail services. So it's possible to have different mail services. But the thing is that we can all send each other email. And I can send a mail from my personal company mail account to an account that's hosted by Gmail, for example. And this is all possible because there are open standards involved, SMTP, to send emails around. There is no central email company. It's not needed, but it still works. Other examples are use net, news groups, not very much used anymore, unfortunately, but also very distributed and federated service. ISE has a very, very early, very good chat protocol also distributed the web itself. The web itself is fully distributed and federated. There is no central company, some company which manages like the central website of the world and everybody has to be linked from there. This doesn't exist. Everybody can run a web server and XMPP of course as a chat protocol. Okay, this is all great. This is the nature of the Internet, as I said. Unfortunately, if you look at newer services, they tend to be more centralized, which is a problem. Examples are files you can share, like Google Drive or Dropbox or OneDrive, very centralized. Everybody's uploading all their files to this one central service. Social networking, like Facebook and Twitter and a few others, but you can't really host it yourself. It's not open source. You can't really run your own Facebook at home, Facebook server. It's not possible. Video voice communication, a lot is done by Hangouts and Skype and other services, so it's not really federated. Messengers, right? We all use these messengers on our mobile phones, which are really completely locked down to a central instance, not open at all, not a software, not a protocol. Then this whole area of artificial intelligence or personal assistance, as I mentioned earlier, this is really like you buy a device or it's included in your device, it's included in your television, for example, or in your smartwatch, and it only talks to this one service. You can't say, okay, television, can I please then do my personal assistance thing with my own server over there? That's not possible. And automotive, right, this whole area with self-driving cars. Cars are really like big computers on four wheels nowadays. There's a lot of calculation, communication going on. They only talk to their own cloud backends. So this is all very centralized. You might say, okay, why not? This works well. What's the problem? Well, there are a few problems with that. First of all, this is all proprietary software. And we are an open source conference here. So this is already the first issue here. Because we care about open source because we can look into the code because we can change it, we can study it, we can improve it, all not possible, all not possible with all these services I mentioned. Cost is a problem. You might say, what do you mean? My Dropbox account is free. Well, if we start to use it more and more, and at one time we have all our files uploaded there, it's no longer for free. And if there's a monopoly, then there's the danger of increasing the prices, of course. Speed, you might say, I don't know, I never had a problem with synchronizing my Word file. Well, if you have a lot of data, then the centralized services are actually a problem. One of our users is, for example, CERN, the research institution in Switzerland, they deal with petabytes of data. If you would tell them, hey, if you have to upload all your petabytes of data to a hosting center on the other side of the world, only so that your colleagues can see it, that doesn't really make sense. Legal issues. So basically, if you're in a country outside the United States where most of these services run, then you have interesting legal issues. Also questions about how independent is a country? Still, I mean, if a country would totally depend on a different country for water supply or for electricity, everybody would say, well, that's a problem. But if you completely depend on a different country for all our IT needs in the future, that's interesting. And last but not least, no ownership of the data. So most of the terms of services actually say if you upload your data there, there's some rights. It depends which service you use. But for most of them, you give up some rights over your own data only because you want to synchronize it. That's not good. So what can we do? What can we do? Well, first of all, first step is quite obvious. We are an open source conference here. Let's write an open source alternative. Let's write an open source alternative for cloud services. And there are some examples for file sync and shared as H Explorer, there's own cloud, next cloud, cosy cloud, C file and so on. And then no problem. Then you have your own self-hosted alternative to this cloud services. Then you have your own personal dropbox for example, for your friends and family. But you can already see with this picture here, what the problem might be. Because now you have not one central service, but you have lots of these small islands. And I have my local next cloud at home. My company has a next cloud at home. My university has a next cloud. My parents use some next cloud somewhere else and we all are very secure, but also very isolated. That's also not a solution. So what can we do? We invented a concept of federation, which looks very similar to what I mentioned earlier with email. So the idea is that you can have your own, all your different instances, but it can actually communicate with each other. So in the same way, when I have my mail server at home or mail server at my university, and I can still send a mail to Gmail, in the same way, you can share your files between instances. So let's say this one instance is my mine at home, which is just a small Raspberry Pi. And this other one is an instance at my company. We can still have a sharing link. So we can still have like a shared folder. Every time I upload something in this one shared folder, it automatically pops up on this shared folder on the other side. So it behaves as one big instance. The same way email behaves as one big messaging system, but it's actually completely federated. So that's great. So here's an example from a next cloud, a screenshot. As you can see here in the middle, you have all your files there. In this example, here's some photos. If you click on a photo, you see the sidebar here. And here in the sidebar, you can type in a username. You can say, I want to share this photo with this user. And what you can do then is also you can type in the ID of a remote user. So in the same way, you can type in an email address, which is a user name, then an ad symbol, and then a host name. You can type here, type in a username, ad, and then a different next cloud server. And this way, my next cloud server communicates other next cloud services. Hey, here's a shared file. And this other user gets a popup. Do you want to accept it or not? And then you have this file shared between different servers. So this is great. This is basically implemented the same system that, well, that exists for email basically. Okay, so everything, everything done, everything implemented, everything awesome. So victory, right? So we have saved the internet. Everything is distributed and federated now. Great. No one is using Dropbox anymore. Obviously not. Because this is a lot better. It's open source and self-hosted. It's awesome. So we have one. Well, not really, I think. Because obviously, still everybody's using Facebook. Everybody's using Google Drive and so on. No one is using the self-hosted services. So why is that? Let's look at a few examples. Everybody in someone knows Diaspora here? Okay, some people do. So Diaspora was an idea to build like an open source self-hosted federated Facebook. It's basically the same way next cloud is a self-hosted federated Dropbox or Google Drive replacement. So you can take Diaspora, run it in your company, a university somewhere, and it talks to other instances, and it's fully federated, which is great. Well, and there's this other thing, this totally legacy product called Facebook. No one is using it, right? Well, obviously, Facebook has one and Diaspora not so much. So why is that? I don't know. Then there's XMPP. XMPP is a nice chat standard, fully distributed, federated, encrypted, supports all kinds of communication methods, really nice. But there's like, there's apps like WhatsApp, which somehow have won, are more popular. They're not open source, they're totally centralized. They have evil terms of service. Still, everybody's using it. I don't know why. Well, then there's Identica. The same way it's distributed federated Twitter alternative. So still, everybody's using Twitter. You get the idea, right? So Akiga is like a self-hosted Skype alternative. Everybody's using Skype and so on and so on. So obviously, we haven't won yet. So everybody's using centralized services, not so good. What can we do? So why didn't this work? So what's the problem? Why didn't this work? So we as an open source community, we sort of failed, right? We built great software, but everybody's using proprietary software somewhere else. So someone has any idea why we failed with that? Reliability? Yeah? Sorry? Trust. Yeah, trust. Very good, yes. Some other idea? Yeah. Complexity to set up, complexity to set up. Yes, yes. No, no, you need to know what you're doing. Yes. Someone else? What do you mean with that? Sorry? Like a funding? Yeah, okay. Okay. Lots of good points. It's really hard to say what we need to do to bring our open source project to the next level. A few things, some of them mentioned already, making self-hosting super easy. So as discussed, like making is really easy to have your own instance. Because at the moment it's just easier to go to Dropbox and create an account than to have like a next cloud instance. Finding people is something which is usually very hard. So this is a problem if you share with other people, then you're on your own instance and maybe you have created like an account for your parents and your dog and your friends and that's it. But the rest of the world you can't find. Of course you can type in the ID if you know it, but usually you don't know it. So how can I actually find people to collaborate and to communicate with them? I think we as open source project also has to collaborate more with each other. There are lots of projects that want to solve this federation problem. We have to work together. We have to think outside the box and innovate. Just building something that exists somewhere else. Just do a copy of Facebook. Just do a copy of Twitter. It's not good enough. So we have to make a better one. That's key. And we have to innovate. We have to think about the future. Now I want to talk a little bit about some examples what we are doing at next cloud. I'm not saying that we have the solution here because we don't have the solution. But some ideas how this could work in our opinion. First of all self hosting. How can I get next cloud? Well, we want to provide all kinds of different ways to get your own next cloud server. First of all, there are devices like the one on top. Just like nicely preconfigured boxes that you can buy. You could put into your company or at home and then you have your own little server. So this is something we do. One is called a spread box. The other is called the next cloud box. Second is we want to package it and make it available for all kinds of Linux distributions here. So just with a simple install or also as a docker container if you prefer that. So we make it really easy and super fast to set up your own server. And then the third option is of course what I have here with this hosting center. There are also a lot of service providers who offer this already. So if you go to our website nextcloud.com slash providers then you see like over 20 service providers who offer this already. So you can go there and use it. Okay, great. Now I have my own little next cloud. What do I do next? Okay, let's go through like a real world use case here. Let's say I'm on vacation and I take some photos and I want to share this photo with my friends. Very common use case. Okay, first I take some photos with my phone or with my DSLR and upload it to my desktop whatever. Then the next thing you have to do you have to upload it to your next cloud server. Here are some screenshots on the left. There's our iOS app. On the right this is a desktop app for Mac Windows and Linux. Also available for Android. Also a dedicated app which automatically in the background with automatic photo upload can upload it to your server. So this is super easy. It just happens automatically. You need to set up it once. Just a few simple steps and that's it. And then all your files are automatically uploaded not to the Google cloud, not to the Apple cloud, but to your own next cloud server. Okay, great. So now I have here on my next cloud I have my nice vacation pictures all here, all visible. That's nice, but that's only for me. Obviously I want to share them with my friends. So what can I do? While here on top you have to share menu and you can click on it and then you get this nice pop-up here and then you can see already a few friends that you worked with and that you shared with in the past. You can just click on them and say okay share my vacation pictures. And at the top there's also search contacts. There's an input line. And the key here is that I want to type in any name, even names on remote servers, even people on different servers. And I want to be able to find my friends even if they have their next cloud account on a different service provider, self-hosted somewhere else, have a different box or whatever. And this is actually what we want to make possible or what we implemented already. So in this search field you can actually find people from all over the world, even if they're not on the same machine. And you can also by the way do more than sharing. If you click on this dot menu you can also call the people and email the people, chat with the people and so on. So it's more about all about communication and not only about sharing. Okay how does this actually work? How can I find people on other servers? How can I find people on different next cloud servers? Well this is an example here of my personal page on my next cloud server. And as you can see here and all these input lines you have these small lock icons here. And if you click on them, here an example with address, you can decide that okay my address is only private, only visible for me, or it is visible for all my contacts. So people in my address book should be able to see and find me by address, or you can say visible for public. And if you if you select public then this this record is automatically uploaded to a lookup server, where it can be found by other people. This is something which is works a bit similar than GPG key servers that some of you might know. GPG is the same problem that you have to exchange the public keys to work together. And optionally you can upload your public key to this key server and then you can actually be found. We implemented the same the same concept here. So you have this lookup server which does master master replication, so it's not only run we run one instance but it's also run by other people, it's replicated around and you can then find other people. In the future we move to a distributed hash table there which we don't have at the moment but this is the next step. And I'm also a member of W3C as an invited expert and we work together with them to make this in a standard. So the idea is that you have federated services but you have the same use experience then with Google and Facebook where you can just type in any name you can find anyone. You do the same without a central server. Okay and then I basically have shared this with someone. Another feature we have here is that on this sidebar you can also comment for example on vacation pictures you also want to have comments from your friends and family. And the interesting thing is that you have all these avatar pictures with names and you can also click on them and they can say okay here this user here will comment it on that. I want to call this person or email or chat with this person and so on. And this is all integrated into next cloud so if you for example click on chat then this nice window here opens at the bottom of the screen. So we have a full XMPP chapter chat integrated so it's which is also fully federated by the way that users don't have to be in the same server and you can chat with them automatically fully encrypted of course about these files that you shared. Another thing you can do is you can click on call and then a window opens here which by the way this is actually not yet available so this window is only full screen not on the bottom of the screen but what we have is a fully implemented web RTC video calling video voice calling integrated. So if you want to do a call around your files that you shared you can directly talk with the people in the right context and again 100% open source 100% self-hosted all the video calling is done peer-to-peer it's fully peer-to-peer and fully encrypted of course. So most of these other services if you read that signal for example now supports video calling it's encrypted and so on and same with other services is all nice but they all go through the central server so they all collect all the metadata they all know who talks to whom when why what in this case this is fully federated and self-hosted of course and of course you can also do like bigger video calls with a bigger group of people if you want to. Okay so now I'm done with my presentation want to have this last slide with the summary I think what we want to have is a fully federated and secure and self-hosted internet infrastructure around sharing of files and around communication email, chat, video, voice, sharing of files and so on. It is super easy that everybody can do this so the smallest instance of next cloud is running on a Raspberry Pi 2 this is this next cloud box just like $30 the biggest installation we are doing is for 20 million users at a moment for a big service provider and everything in between is also possible obviously so if you just run want to run it in your company university you can just go to our website download the zip file is fully present open source you can use it of course you can also work with us and then we can help you with setup and security and so on. It's really important that everything is distributed and federated on the internet going forward I think this is really key the trend to decentralize services this is not a good one this is really this is like threatening the foundation of the internet which is by design not centralized. Great UI and UX is really important so it's really important that the service and the software that we building here as open source community is really usable looks nice is easy to understand open protocols and standards everything we have to do is has to be open product protocols and standard based because there we can work together it has to be open source and free software obviously here and I think we have to change the rules of the game here so we can't just like reimplement something that exists somewhere else already we have to really be innovative and move forward and doing good software and then we then we can set our goal okay thanks a lot all right we have time for a few questions it's a slow time that's good you have a few minutes for a few questions is there any questions out there in the audience yes I see a few hands hi here yep I think this is massive seriously I mean it's like open source web 2.0 if it works and I think it could work it looks by the looks of it I mean maybe I tried and it sucks when the user experience or whatever but on the on the screens it looked amazing do you my question is what is the business models that you think can create around this because obviously the hosting has to be made by someone right I mean you can't rely on people just like offering the internet connection to other people for free so how do you envision that working yeah so maybe I should have said this in the very beginning so I'm standing here with my with two heads on the one head is like the founder of the open source project first on cloud down next cloud as open source project but of course we also have a company around it which employs and most of the core volunteers we have 25 people at the moment and what we're doing as a company is that we are helping bigger companies bigger organizations to host it and to run it and make it secure and do we also offer long term service-level agreements so it's a bit like redhead like redheads everything redhead is doing is open source but you can get a subscription from them which and makes sure that you have all the security patches and all the help and you have the telephone hotline and so unavailable and we do exactly the same for next cloud so it's fully open source you can download it if you want if you want to run it in your critical mission critical way in your company then you probably want to talk with us and we can help you're doing this okay but that that's your business model as developers of the software right yes the business model for because you talked about internet service providers hosting this already right so how do they monetize that I mean what is their incentive to offer you the service or because then it's federated I mean it's like you hosted somewhere but anybody from anywhere else can actually access it right so yeah internet service providers actually interesting there that come to us like really like crazy they all come to us and say okay we want to offer this we want to help our customers we have customers come we have loyal customers for many many years and they want this kind of service they don't want to create a different account by a different company in the US somewhere and and move away now that service provider want to offer the products to the customers that the customers want and they come to us and they want to use it and most of them just downloaded and used it themselves especially the smaller ones and the bigger ones that work with us to make it really good but it's really really popular so we don't do any advertisement or anything but like most of the big service providers they're already offer some kind of next-class hosting okay thank you and we've read out time thank you very much Rano applause for Frank