Hello,

I wanted to tell you about a project called IndieBox: indieboxproject.org/ and to see if there was interest in having its creator come in for a talk and demo. In fact, I'm pretty sure I initially heard of this thing on the Sudoroom mailing list a while ago.

The goal is to create a box for consumers to easily be able to run their own web apps locally on computers they physically control, so they truly control their data.

The software component is a distribution based on Arch Linux called UBOS. It easily manages web apps as packages, the same way most distros package desktop apps. Did you ever consider how easy it is to install LibreOffice, but how you can't really do that with WordPress and OwnCloud side by side? You have to fiddle with database provision and Apache configs. Well, UBOS handles all of that, as well as concurrent installations for multiple users, upgrades and backups, and it even has a testing framework to make sure upgrades work smoothly.

I've seen a couple presentations now at the Hacker Dojo by the guy running the project, whose name is Johannes Ernst. I figured that there would be more interest in a place like Sudo Room for a project like this. I have been an occasional visitor to the Sudo Room, not sure if people remember me. However, Johannes doesn't have any connections to Sudo Room, so he asked if I could reach out to you folks to see if you were interested in having him come in to do a presentation.

This may be of particular interest to the Mesh project people, since they are working on local apps. I also told Johannes to check out PeoplesOpen. So, I can post it in that group if people think it's more appropriate, to try to make it part of a SudoMesh meeting. However I thought that the general theme of independences from large companies would resonate would the larger group, so I wanted to post it here first to see what people thought.