So how does it work? There are no development documents, blog post or anything in the mailing list about how OwnCloud works. Granted it is an open source project and anyone can join in but we need a starting point. I have yet to find anything on the API, architecture or even comments in code that would allow to do more than just stare at the screen of my IDE in abject ignorance. Worse I can't fix anything that is broken because I have no idea where to go to find anything.
I have looked at the wiki, github documentation, googled 20 pages down and searched through the mailing lists. Nada, nothing, zip.
It seems to me I have been here a hundred times before. A company promotes their software as being open source. They want "community help" but they obfuscate everything about the software by hiding critical information on it's internals. Worse, the only way of getting information is to purchase support which would not be necessary if proper documentation was available. It's a form of disguised software protectionism that I really despise. If you have ever read any of my previous blogs you know that I will write about such things until they end. Check out the Simple Machines Forum articles I wrote ( they are somewhere in Google ) which lead to them finally changing (http://www.simplemachines.org/about/opensource.php) their screwed up interpretation of open source. Though they still have not gotten it completely as shown by the conflict in the first and third statements of their license amendments.
- Retain the entire Simple Machines copyright and licensing notice in every file.
- Make clear that the changed product is not the same as the original Simple Machines software (SMF or any other product).
- Do not use the Simple Machines name (or the names of any Simple Machines contributors) to endorse or promote the modified software.
OwnCloud is garnering financing, promoting their services and gaining popularity by blowing the open source horn. While they may be giving out free source code it is by no means in the spirit of open source. The label "community edition" is the tell. How many times have I seen those words and believed that a company is serious about open source? Not once.
OwnCloud, If you want help with promoting, using and developing for your software then you are going to have to come up with more than a few dead links and blank pages in a wiki.
OwnCloud is great for the end user and might satisfy many companies in it's basic form. But enterprise level open source software it is not. There are not enough pluses to offset the minuses caused by a lack of information and community involvement depends on this in the beginning.
So far OwnCloud is a black box ( or dark cloud you might say ) and I am not impresssed. But I am open to change. So hopefully someone in the core or development group has enough time to swing me to the otherside by providing some real basics on how to customize and develop apps for OwnCloud.
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