Citadel v0.2.3 and #Citadel Nirvati Technical Preview Are Available to Download As Alpha Software
"Citadel is modern, mostly open source and soon to be fully FLOSS #Bitcoin #Node implementation originally based on Umbrel, but we have moved most of our codebase away from Umbrel."
Moving self-hosting beyond servers
Recently, self-hosting has been getting more popular. It promises independence of centralized cloud providers, and is giving control back to users. So far, there have been many issues with self-hosting that made many existing solutions impractical to use in practice, or at least significantly diminished the benefits. Self-hosting should be as simple as using cloud providers, but in a sovereign manner. That is why we are building Nirvati. In this post, I want to explain some of the conceptual drawbacks in currently available solutions, such as CasaOS, umbrelOS or startOS; and try to explain how we are building a better platform. Nirvati’s benefits are not just at the software level, but extend to the underlying concepts and ideas. This is why we can’t easily improve an existing software, but decided to build one from scratch.
Who owns your server?
Right now, many popular software projects that facilitate self-hosting are not really open source. While startOS is a notable exception, other solutions, such as umbrelOS or CasaOS claim to be “open”, but delay code releases, or don’t really have an open source license that allows any modifications. This considerably takes away control of “your” server. If you depend on a company to sustain the development of a software, that company could make arbitrary decisions (removing apps via an update, charging a fee for updates, take away download servers, ...) which could significantly impact what you can do with “your” server. Nirvati fixes this by using a Copyleft license. That basically means that you as a user can do anything you’d like with the code. There is just one exception: If you share (or sell) software based on our code with your modifications, you need to grant the same rights to your users we granted you. This ensures that even if a company decides to build a hosting solution or an alternative software on top, their version stays completely open, and we can merge back improvements. As part of the commercial backing, many systems hide support for 3rd party apps, or don’t support them at all, which makes you depend on another service with no easy way to opt out. In contrast, Nirvati allows you to add 3rd party app stores right into the main apps list, not a separate, hidden menu.
Citadel v0.2.3 and #Citadel…
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