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16 December 2011, 15:00

ownCloud adds commercial services and support

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The open source file sharing project ownCloud has formed a company around its file sharing platform so that it can further develop its products and commercially provide professional support and marketing. The first commercial products from the new company are expected in the first quarter of 2012 – the project's open source products will continue to be available.

ownCloud handles centralised storage and synchronisation of files, appointments and contacts across multiple devices; the data remains on the user's own server and is not entrusted to any foreign suppliers. Users can also host their data on any other server and the project supplies images for users to create an Amazon Web Services hosted version. Currently, ownCloud only supports data access through a web browser and the WebDAV protocol. Clients for mobile devices and desktop systems are still under development.

The new company has been set up by the founder of the original ownCloud project, Frank Karlitschek, and Markus Rex, a former SUSE/Novell executive who left Novell at the time of the Attachmate acquisition. Funding has been secured, led by General Catalyst who are based in Boston, where the new headquarters for ownCloud, Inc have been established. Details of the funding were not disclosed, but an article on ReadWriteWeb quoted sources as suggesting a seven-figure dollar sum.

The latest version of ownCloud, 2.0.1, is available to downloadDirect download; the source code is hosted on Gitorious, and is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPLv3).

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