I think OwnCloud has a mobile interface and syncing features as well now.
I am very excited and waiting for http://git-annex.branchable.com/
Question: Why the base64 encoding instead of a simple gzipped tar file? Also why instruct people to feed untrusted stuff from the internet directly into bash via curl? That is definitely not safe as a matter of policy.
But I like the idea of PacketKite. Nicely done.
Also curious about Dalpay. Are they a good alternative to PayPal?
I ended up with the weird merged python file (see: http://pagekite.net/wiki/Floss/PyBreeder/) because I wanted the continued perceived simplicity of a single .py, but I ended up wanting to refactor my code into submodules. So I made PyBreeder to reverse the refactoring, basically. It is a little silly and will probably go away over time. Regarding the bash installer, I don't see much of a difference between trusting my installer or trusting pagekite itself. Both came from the network. The bash installer is at least easier to review than "install.exe" or the shell scripts embedded in an RPM or .deb. My goal was to get people up and running in literally two commands, this was the only cross-distro/cross-OS way to accomplish that.
Dalpay are OK, but they have their warts. I'd rather deal with a small local company than a monster like PayPal, and being in Iceland my options for actually receiving funds from PayPal and the likes were actually rather limited.
My point was not price though, but freedom. If people are looking to move out of the cloud and take things home, I suspect this is at least in part driven by an urge to take control of their data and become more independent.
Controlling the tools is, by many, considered to be an important part of that.
It is interesting to see that folks can "replace" dropbox with ftp/ssh/rsync/webdav etc. But the strength of dropbox or similar solution (self-hosted or otherwise) is the consumability model (music transcoded and streamed, Photos resized and presented as slideshows, controlled share support). With more and more access to the data coming from mobile clients, the differentiation of these services from those "traditional access services" are their support for new mobile clients/OSes.
I tried to use Duplicity a few times with WebDAV (for box.com), and it kept freezing, becoming unable to resume the transfer, unable to see that I have files on the share even when I managed to upload all the files with the desktop client, and various other bugs. It's not as robust as I'd like, sadly.
If trends like this continue there is good potential for selfhosted personal clouds.
I've been doing it for years. You can use a WebDAV share in Apache and mount it from Windows XP and above. That's pretty much DropBox with COTS software there.
I switched to Skydrive in 2009 though as it's just easier and it (at the time) supposed machine->machine replication with Live Mesh.
I'm sad that LiveMesh is being retired by Microsoft as it actually did exactly what I want - just P2P sync. I'm looking into OwnCloud at the moment.
