It is Valentine’s Day, the day where you declare your (secret or not) love. And we will be honest: We love Free Software! #ilovefs
Declaration of love
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants
— Sir Isaac Newton
As any Free Software community, we build on the brilliance of countless other projects. The very language ownCloud is written in (PHP) and the stack it usually runs on (LAMP) are Free and Open and developed by people who recognise the value of open collaboration and Software Freedom. Moving beyond technology, ownCloud was born out of the KDE community, which provided us a warm place to grow up until we could stand on our own feet.
These are merely the first few projects one might think of – making a list of the many projects and individuals ownCloud is indepted to is a futile excercize. Action speaks louder than words, however, and we’d like to think of ourselves as more than mere Consumers. We are Creators, part of this wider Free Software community, participating where we can. So we draw on the awesome effort by Alessandro Cosentino for our 5th birthday, bringing together a list of contributions by ownCloud participants to other projects.
ownCloud contributions
In the coding area, Alessandro identified the following contributions:
- getID3 has benefited a lot from Morris Jobke’s work on the Music app — see for example, this commit derived by this issue report;
- After the News app switched to picoFeed as the feed parser library, Bernhard Posselt has helped the maintainer of the library with numerous contributions;
- Doctrine — see commits by ownClouders bantu, bartv2, PVince81, DeepDiver1975 to the Doctrine Database Abstraction Layer;
- sabre/dav — see commits by ownClouders tanghus, schiesbn, DeepDiver1975, LukasReschke;
- Punic — improvements on the library were dictated by performance analysis at ownCloud (see, for instance, Lukas Reschke’ PR)
The ownCloud Client team has been contributing to tools and libraries they use:
- The client is build with the Qt toolkit and here are contributions to Qt by Danimo, who also made it to the number two contributor to the QtKeyChain library; and here are Qt contributions by %22+project:qt/qtbase+status:merged,n,z%22" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Markus, several of which are ownCloud-specific as well. Danimo also showed that being part of other FOSS projects means helping with reviewing patches.
- csync (kind of a two-way rsync) is another important component of our client, making the syncing itself possible. Klaas contributed heavily to csync, in particular with this commit where he effectively added multi-platform support
Contributions have their story – the links to lists above does not do much justice to them. So, here’s a taste of the story of two contributions to Qt:
- This was a long standing bug in the Client and when a customer was suffering from it, Danimo researched what the best solution would be by investigating Chromium and Firefox sources, and came up with a patch
- This was an abandoned patch by someone else which enabled the client to deal with any kind of proxy settings (i.e. the one from KDE/GNOME/… rather than only the http_proxy variable). Danimo simply took it, polished it and got it ready for inclusion in the release.
Our security team, in their efforts to make ownCloud as secure as possible, report and even fix security issues in various projects ownCloud builds upon:
The client team also found and fixed some security issues, like this one which got fixed after it was found while debugging something with an ownCloud customer – the update was ready in a day!
Love
We’re not ready to say we only love the Free Software communities above – first, because it is an incomplete list of projects we contributed to; and second, because we love ’em all! Please, everybody, keep being as awesome as you are today!
