I don't disagree with this, but I wonder why you think that this means it has more liberty. Unless you happen to be one of the ones that controls most of the capital, of course.

The problem is, social networks invariable involve sharing data with your friends. With most of the current models, that means that you need to trust the server that your friends are using. Even for email and XMPP that's a problem: if half of your friends are using GMail for both then there's a good chance that Google can get a big chunk of our email and your social graph. Privacy preserving protocols are an ongoing research area, but I've not yet seen anyone trying to integrate them into a well-defined standard with a good reference implementation.

The news here is that you're willing to spend an entire day touching PHP for only $100.

If they had a federated model and I could easily migrate away from storing stuff on their servers, then I might be tempted to pay them so that I didn't have to go to the trouble of running the server and keeping it patched. The last time I paid to be in a walled garden, it was CompuServe, and I learned my lesson.

Sounds like you're using Facebook for exactly it's intended purpose: to allow someone to build a big database of things that you do to target advertising. You're not just telling a website something, you're telling Facebook what other sites you visit and care enough about to log in to and what your identity on those sites is.

In case you were wondering, no that whooshing noise above your head wasn't someone trying to stone you to death.

I'm using Mb and MB when I mean Mb and MB. If you read all of the words in my post, you'll see that the 10MB/s is over the 1Gb/s connection.

When I was a student, sharing a house with three other people, we paid extra to get the 1Mb/s connection that was the fastest that the cable company offered. The top gradually grew to 3Mb/s, 5Mb/s and then 10Mb/s. When it hit 10Mb/s (I'd moved house and was living with a different group of people, but) we still paid for it. But then I stopped caring. The 10Mb/s went from being the fastest that they offered to the slowest. Then 20Mb/s and 30Mb/s became the slowest. I'm now still on their slowest connection (although living in a different city). At work, I have a GigE connection that means that most of the time the bottleneck isn't my local connection, and I can usually get 10-20MB/s to any moderately large Internet site. I very occasionally notice the difference between the speed at home and at work, but most of the time there's no user-perceptible difference. Oh, and my ISP sent me a letter a few weeks ago saying that they don't offer 30Mb/s anymore and they'll be moving me to 50Mb/s soon. I think somewhere around 10-20Mb/s was when I stopped noticing Internet speed as a bottleneck.

Unless I'm misreading something, Seafile seems to just do file sharing (for which a simple WebDAV server is mostly enough). The value of owncloud (for me, at least) is that it also does contact and calendar sync, so my phone and computer always have the same data for these.

I found it pretty easy to set up on FreeBSD - install the owncloud, php5, and nginx packages and then a tiny bit of configuration (mostly copying and pasting from the owncloud site). The only gotcha was that the default nginx configuration doesn't know the correct MIME type for svg files, so I needed to fix that or none of the images in owncloud worked correctly.

OwnCloud is open source and does the same things as Dropbox (although in really crappy PHP on the server, so you'd better have a lot of spare cycles to burn - it's the first time for several years I've seen file transfers across the Internet be CPU limited).

The problem is that they're comparing apples to oranges. Of course a direct local connection will be faster than two devices sharing the same Internet connection and going via a server, but most of the time that I want to use a server as part of a sync workflow it's because the devices aren't together and I want to do it asynchronously. The equivalent for BitTorrent Sync would involve having a central server somewhere (possibly in your own home) that's always on and is a party in the sync.

Florian, I was anything but wrong about you! Look at all of that self-justifying blather!

Anyway, I have better uses of my time than to waste another minute with you.

I'm really not interested in hearing from you any longer. It's very clear that we'll never agree on anything, and the fact is I don't consider you someone whose opinion I value or who is worthy of any of my time.

That should be "SCO and MS arguments".

We knew what was going on when you ran your anti-IBM campaign, sometimes even positioning yourself as arguing on behalf of our community. It was a way to lend credence to IBM and MS arguments during the SCO issue. To state otherwise is deceptive, perhaps even self-deceptive.

Florian, you would not be devoting all of this text to explaining yourself if you didn't feel the need to paint your actions in a positive light. That comes from guilt, whether you admit it to yourself or not.

Go write your app, and if you actually get to make any money with it you can give thanks, because it will happen despite what you worked for previously. Keep a low profile otherwise because your credibility is well and truly blown and you can only make things worse. And maybe someday you can really move past this part of your life. But I am not holding out much hope.