As you may know, the LDAP backend in ownCloud 5 got a couple of new features and some changes under the hood (see point 3 on ownCloud 5 released, Google Reader Alternative). Seven maintenance releases later, some bugs have been smashed, but an irksome quirk is left.

Today we released ownCloud 5!

I do not want to repeat what is already written in the Announcement, but I like to share some other points with you.

1. Frank blogged about this release not from a technical point of view, but in terms of a Vision, the greater idea behind ownCloud as part of the Internet as it was designed. In times when centralized solutions become more and more popular again and states fall back more and more into dark ages again with expanding surveillance ignoring more or less active their constitution (USA, Germany, Hungary are just examples) the Internet with decentralized actors is more important than before. Big hubs like Facebook or Google are easy to control, easy to manipulate. Read Frank's blog ownCloud 5 released: a vision realized, a vision expanded

As posted before, I spent the last week at LinuxTag in Berlin. For us (ownCloud) it was pretty good. It was our first appeareance there, hence we got a lot of interest and visitors. We got higher visibility through the two booths, i suppose, but especially because of our most recent ownCloud 4 release. All in all a good combination that made ownCloud overtake Ubuntu One in Google Trends (12 months view, click to enlarge).

During LinuxTag, Frank also gave an interview to Golem, a German online magazine, about features and the history of ownCloud and the company behind.

This years LinuxTag is coming close! For the nth year in a row the German Kubuntu community will represent their distribution of choice at Europe's leading conference for Linux and Open Source. For the first time, also ownCloud will attend there, with a community and a commercial booth.

It will also be the first time for me not to be directly an the Kubuntu booth, but – thorugh my involvement – mainly there for ownCloud. We also just released ownCloud 4! We like to give you a look on our freshly baked version, meet us and drive us up the wall with questions.

First for those who do not know it yet: since start of February I am happily working for the free software (open source) project ownCloud. My main tasks are to integrate ownCloud into other products, for example into the Univention Corporate Server (short UCS).

As the ownCloud project will stay under the AGPL, there will be no secret code behind. The basic integration consists of creating a UCS package which nicely installs into the server and does auto-configuration and joining the environment. The goal: after installing ownCloud via package management it is instantly available for the users. That means, the setup procedure runs automatically and the LDAP module will be configured, so that users may login directly after installation.