The Unhosted Project
Introduction
A little over a year ago the Unhosted project was started. The goal of the Unhosted project is to give users back control over their data stored at their favorite web applications. Popular web applications like Google Docs, Facebook and Flickr store user data on their servers. Web applications have a number of benefits compared to applications running on the desktop like for instance Microsoft Office:
- You can access the application anywhere, e.g. on holidays while using your smart phone;
- The application provider may take care of creating backups of your data;
- No maintenance of the application on the client required, always the latest version through the web.
Unfortunately they also have a number of drawbacks:
- The application provider has unlimited access to your, possibly corporate or research, data;
- The user is locked into the application, i.e.: there usually is not a way to extract all your data from the application and use it with a different application;
- The application provider may revoke access to your account depending on their Terms of Service without giving you back your data;
- There is no way for anyone to make sure the program does (only) what is advertized.
There is also a drawback for web application developers:
- It can be very expensive to operate a popular application on the web, i.e: lots of servers, bandwidth and maintenance of infrastructure may be required;
The Unhosted project aims at resolving these drawbacks using open web standards while maintaining the benefits of web applications.
How does it work?
In Web 2.0, and also Web 1.0 applications, the user controls only the browser. The web application and the data are under the control of the application provider as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Web applications, Web 2.0.
In order to improve this, Unhosted externalizes the data from the application as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Web applications, Unhosted.
Now the browser is in charge of managing the communication between the application and the data, giving the user the ability to select a data storage provider they trust, or even operate one themself.
Available Applications
Currently one application - Libre Docs - is available that is suited for demonstration purposes. Libre Docs is based on EtherPad Lite and can be used to collaboratively work on documents located at the storage of one of the participants.
More applications are currently being developed for deployment through the 5apps project.
Data Storage Providers
In the near future all students and researchers in The Netherlands will be able to use Unhosted applications with storage provided through SURFnet and SARA. The storage will be connected to SURFconext, allowing every student and researcher access to their storage using their institutional account. Also, a commercial storage provider supporting Unhosted applications, OwnCube is available.
