I have huge files to upload to my Nextcloud from external colleagues who do not have an account on my Server. As I do not intend to create accounts for them (mostly one-off uploads), it would be great to have a special version of the Nextcloud client for anonymous uploads because the browser based upload is problematic with PHP and browsers involved. Also these uploads can’t be resumed/paused.
This could have several advantages over a browser based approach:
Big uploads would be possible which could be resumed/paused
No PHP changes would be necessary on the server side
Reliability would be greatly improved as browser upload is not as good as the clients for different OS
Maybe this could be implemented into the existing client directly? External users could then download the client and simply insert the shared link into the first start wizard and then the upload could start immediately?
A portable version of such a tool would be even better because then no installation would be necessary for the user.
I’ve also run into this situation. In my case, I created a temporary user account for the person, and instructed them to install the client and sync with that account, which as you can imagine failed because it was too complicated and they gave up.
It would be nice to have a portable uploader that can reliably upload large files to a secure file drop.
Same for me. Going through all of this (creating temporary account, setting up the client, moving everything from the temporary account to the main one) is just too much trouble. There is an app called flowupload which improves the browser upload many times, but it does not allow anonymous uploads.
It is indicated, that this issue might be solved in combination with OC 10. I don’t know if that is true and the references are missing that could help us if these changes were also implemented in NC. @jospoortvliet do you have a bit more insight?
Well, Owncloud 10/X. I am trying to move away from Owncloud because of the non-existing support/features and their attitude (ever heard of no answer is also an answer?). The community is over here at Nextcloud, Owncloud is just an Open Core style company using their users as a testbed for their closed source enterprise version.
But what about Nextcloud? This feature/app in Owncloud is quite undocumented as of yet. Just proves what I said above.
The problems are still there:
It still requires to create accounts for one off uploads by external people.
It requires the external user to install the client and set up everything. A massive burden to support/work out with external people who do not know NC/OC. And if something does not work, you can’t really help because it is outside the scope of your organisation.
This leads people to use cloud services outside your organisation. I would really like to keep them away from these services for multiple reasons (privacy, confidentiality and so on…), so this does not really solve the issue.
Note that there is no feature that is in ownCloud X that is not in Nextcloud 12. That includes the guest app, which will be in the app store soon, probably around the 2nd beta which I expect tomorrow or Tuesday. This should indeed be helpful in this case, though I personally think it’d still be a cool client feature if it could ‘just’ sync any public link. Technically this shouldn’t be terribly hard to do…
Sure. We can backport their code, they can’t take ours without violating copyright, at least if they want to mix it with their Enterprise Edition, either by copying code or let customers using it as app. So yeah, you can use Calendar and Contacts with the community edition, but not the Enterprise Edition.
Yeah, put it in our theming repo for now… We’ll have to migrate those over when we fork the client.
well it isn’t black and white. First of all, you could do anything with it as long as it isn’t exposed to third parties like customers and partners but only kept internally. The AGPL requirement of sharing the source code doesn’t kick in at that point. You can even add proprietary code to it without issues as you’re not distributing according to the terms of the license.
And second, non-AGPL code like GPL, MIT etc are allowed. The calendar and contacts are AGPL but some other parts are GPL or BSD/MIT etcetera.
This goes for all the apps on apps.owncloud.com, btw, you can’t mix any AGPL code with proprietary code and ‘distribute’ as in give anyone access to it to people from outside your organization (or household) without offering them the source of the whole server (including the proprietary code) under the AGPL if they ask - and that isn’t possible with the proprietary code, so you’d be in violation of the license. There are, sadly, copyright trolls out there who sue companies for this for profit. See for example this article on lwn.net
