Interesting piece from over the holidays that I ran across while catching up on my reading. Jon Buys of OSTATIC dreams of a world where every household has a server – a truly open and distributed cloud.
Think about that for a moment. Some of the biggest issues hitting the cloud and cloud applications – security, openness/portability, up time – could be greatly mitigated if people could run their own web applications – like email, file sync and share (you knew I’d get there) and even distributed documents.
Of course sever complexity makes that difficult to happen now, but as low power devices get more powerful and applications get simpler (and yet, more powerful), this is something I am convinced will happen.
Early adoptors are already able to experience this today. Enterprises and Organizations can run their own, secure file share solutions – ie. ownCloud – and open source enthusiast can already run this at their own home or at any hoster they want to use.
This decentralized infrastructure – but still accessable and behaving like your own cloud service is one of the central ideas why ownCloud was created.
ownCloud can also help service providers offer a competing product to Google Drive, Dropbox, Apple iCloud or Microsoft SkyDrive – not just giving customers a choice, but further decentralizing technology.
That’s a good thing.
