Today ownCloud 5, a very important milestone for the ownCloud community and perhaps the most important release so far, was released.

Version 3 of ownCloud, the open source, cloud application that enables you to run your own cloud server from your computer, has been released. This comes roughly 47 days before the launch of a commercial entity that would provide products and services for ownCloud.

Even if you have done nothing wrong, the government agencies examining your files have no contractual obligation to you to keep them safe, nor even to get rid of all their copies once they've determined you're not guilty or that they pulled the wrong party's data.

BalaBit IT Security – also known as the “syslog-ng company”, based on their trusted logging solution,used by 650 000 corporate customers world-wide – forecasts a new trend on the logging market, driven by cloud providers. According to BalaBit, within the next few years not only compliance would drive the logging investments, but the exponential increase of cloud services and providers.

The open letter, in the form of a blog entry from Red Hat VP Mark Bohannon, contains thinly veiled criticism of Microsoft and other companies that are launching their own public clouds.

When Richard Stallman talks, the FOSS community tends to listen, and that's just what could be observed in the Linux blogosphere over the past week or so.

Google's new cloud computing ChromeOS looks like a plan "to push people into careless computing" by forcing them to store their data in the cloud rather than on machines directly under their control, warns Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the operating system GNU.

ownCloud is free and open source solution for a central place where you can store your files and documents. You don´t have to upload your personal data to central closed services like Google Docs, Dropbox or Ubuntu One. All the data is under your own control. You can access your files via WebDAV without a special client.