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Canonical gave up on operating its Ubuntu One cloud storage service more than a year ago, but this week it released the system's file-syncing code under an open source AGPLv3 license.
Though Canonical is primarily known for its open source Ubuntu operating system, it also has some closed source products and services, including Ubuntu One.
Ubuntu's desktop "on its own will die"—Shuttleworth [said, explaining] why Canonical must expand. "Today, we're happy to be open sourcing the biggest piece of our Ubuntu One file syncing service," Canonical Director of Online Services Martin Albisetti wrote. "The code we're releasing is the server side of what desktop clients connected to when syncing local or remote changes. This is code where most of the innovation and hard work went throughout the years, where we faced most of the scaling challenges and the basis on which other components were built upon."
Canonical hopes the code will be "useful for developers to read through, fork into their own projects or pick out useful bits and pieces."
What project ideas would you use this code for?
(Score: 2) by Marand on Friday August 14 2015, @04:50AM
Someone should just write an AppArmor profile for it if you're concerned about the exploitability of mod_php (we use AppArmor for this site as an additional line of defense).
Because adding apparmor to the mix makes the entire thing even more user-friendly and less error-prone for your average user...
While PHP's design lends it to making bad code much more easier than other languages, it is perfectly possible to write secure and stable PHP code.
It's possible to write secure, good code in any language. That doesn't mean some languages don't go out of their way to make it harder, though, which is the problem with PHP and security. The track record of PHP itself has done a good job of showing that secure PHP basically requires fighting against the language itself and hoping that the devs don't do something bone-headed or make some fucked up change between minor versions that makes previously-safe code unsafe. The situation gets worse when you stray from Apache+mod_php, too. For example, I prefer lighttpd, which means using PHP gets even riskier if I choose to run it, because PHP's largely tested against mod_php and you get a bunch of fun edge cases using it other ways (fastcgi, php-cgi)
I wasn't trying to turn this into an excuse to attack PHP, though. The point was (and still is) that it's an area that should be welcoming new code, because the choices are fairly limited right now, and the most common solutions are practically a minefield for the average user. Instead of "cool, new code!" the news is greeted with a snarky remark about rsync (original poster), a "make your own" suggestion (another comment farther down), and "all you need is ownCloud" (also farther down).
I found it interesting because, at least based on the brief code-browsing I did, it looks like the entire thing is in Python, and it seems to be a case of "create one thing to do one job" rather than trying to piggyback on top of browsers. Between the server and client code, there's a chance to have an actual, personal dropbox-esque service with multiple clients. Ubuntu One failed as a commercial service, but having its source and the option of running your own has the potential to be a great thing.