Do we need a formal, democratic, non-profit Organization for organizing the Nextcloud community?

šŸ·ļø General
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I remember a similar discussion some time agoā€¦

I am not against a formal non-profit organization.
Sadly I remember some obstacles to it that emerged also previously.
Let me write them down just as a recap (and a tool to further the discussion).

Community "space"

In some other communities most community participants have a strong drive to participate. As an example I think to LibreOffice.org: the community members are in several cases representatives of firms that have an economic interest in it (Linux distributions or other software houses) or representatives of ā€œbig usersā€ (like the representatives of big government offices of Countries that picked that suite as the one that they use). My impression is that this creates a sufficiently big environment that allows enough room for other volunteers.
In addition, being a project with such visibility, and old enough, helps in attracting people with different motivations (like helping the existence of an office suite in some under-represented language)

Effort

Having a big enough ā€œspaceā€, with people that participate in the community for work-related reasons, helps in diminishing the effort to participate because it decreases the probability of having to do menial tasks, or legal ones.
While I see @marcelklehr perfectly fit to be one of the community representatives, I am fully aware that this would mean that the development of his apps would slow down a lot. He would have to face a lot of tasks in being one of the ones that set up such an organization.
Likewise, let us suppose just for the sake of discussion that I could be a community representative. I doubt Iā€™d have enough time and motivation to deal with the legal aspects of setting up a foundation for free and maybe under the laws of a foreign country. Would you?

A lot of differences

As @JimmyKater and @la00 rightly noted, given the characteristics of this software the community is really different.
App developers, home users, users of hosted instances, NGOs, small instances admins, installers,ā€¦ have really different point of views.
Even within the same group you find often really different point of view: for example if you are a passionate photographer, you probably hate the photos app. I have a lot of family photos on my Nextcloud instance and I struggle to understand the hate, even if I could appreciate some improvements.

A problem of scale

One of the other differences with e.g.: LibreOffice.Org is that us users are not a huge number.
Let us assume that 1% of the users take part in the foundation, paying an annual fee of 10 ā‚¬. From the money you have to pick the administrative and legal expenses (probably 5% or 10% of the foundation money). Would the foundation have enough money to pay for the development of a single featureā€¦ I think that the answer would be ā€œonly the small ones, maybeā€, also because I remember some of the numbers @jospoortvliet gave us in some other discussion.
Of course I could be wrong and I am just too negative on the total number of donations.

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@JimmyKater may by words are not very clear donā€™t get me wrong . there is no question Nextcloud Gmbh gives a lot to the community. The question is more who and how decides in which direction the software moves.

In my eyes the ā€œcommunityā€ we talk about is not related to big customers - in my eyes this part of the community has good chances to place their needs through support contracts they have with the Gmbh. My personal definition of ā€œcommunityā€ would be people who work and use Nextcloud software without support contract with Gmbh (and ideally participate in development, evangelism/marketing and support). I absolutely agree with @JimmyKater there is no monolithic community with single voice and clear ideas in which direction to move, but this fact remains the same if there will be another organization non-profit or commercial.

this definitely a good idea!

many different income channels could exist for the foundation like membership, paid support - as mentioned above, maybe bounty programs for specific features - Iā€™m not completely discouraged it would be enough for small features only.

But I think another organization like suggested could lead to some concurrency and competition between ā€œthe good foundationā€ and ā€œthe evil Gmbhā€. For this reason I donā€™t like the idea of another player and would prefer the points we expect the ā€œfoundationā€ would take care of are covered by the Gmbh - without additional complexity, legal issues and overhead related to the foundation.

I trust Gmbh makes efforts to hear the community voice but this efforts are not really visible now - there should be more communication about this. My suggestion is to setup more direct discussion. Maybe some Polls regarding new features and maybe pain points would be good starting point, some way to have ā€œopen discussionā€ with key players and decision makers, Nextcloud devs from time to time visiting this forum to feel the spirit of the base.

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well you may be right considering the outcome of the forum. but there are other ways to communicate with devs and NC GmbH. Donā€™t forget the live-meetings (pretty much online now under C-circumstances), Github, IRC, Twitter, Mastodon, etc. All of these are tools to communicate with the ā€œcommunityā€.

I havenā€™t read the discussion of the aims of NC-foundation I need to admit. But in general from my point of view aims of a foundations are different from those of a club or society. For me a foundation has more of a charity-aspect that a club.

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In general I would as well expect a foundation to be more charity-like but The Document Foundation doesnā€™t list charity in their Foundation Statutes. I would care about the naming and legal form as a second step after the idea is born (commited? - by whom?) and the focus is set.

in my eyes this are there too many channels. Github and Twitter are not suited for real open discussions. And the biggest issue (correct me if Iā€™m wrong) there is no clear definition of this is the preferred/official channel where ā€œthe communityā€ can talk to ā€œthe Gmbhā€. as frequent user I would appreciate this forum but Iā€™m open for other platforms (until this is Twitter or facebook).

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Personally, it would be enough for me if people can put bounties on issues again (bountysource is not used anymore, is there anything else we can use already?).

In my experience, Nextcloud GmbH is not opposed to ideas/feature requests that individual users want. The response is always: itā€™s open source, pull requests are welcome.

So if you canā€™t code, do bounties. Or pay soneone to do a specific pull request. Btw I tried that once ā€“ it was pretty hard finding freelancers that have the skills and the time. And if you find one, they are much more expensive than I thought.

If you want to influence the general direction Nextcloud is going, people could show up en masse at a NC conference and just discuss it.

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it is more or less expect-able - the want to pay their billsā€¦

this is not a solution as well as long employers of Nextcloud GmbH decide which pull requests finally enter the product. There are useful PRs not integrated into product for long time - exactly for the reason mentioned above - there is no ā€œbusiness caseā€ for itā€¦

but definitely the situation makes personal user sad and looking for alternatives/ideas how they could achieve the goals. Now communication is somewhat one-way they ask to help test! new shiny versionsā€¦ and donā€™t even participate in a discussion here.

Iā€™m still under impression best solution is when Nextcloud GmbH setup some kind of user voice and start talking to the personal users community - they are free choosing the format they wantā€¦ otherwise I see a risk another organization is founded and works in different direction or even forks the product splitting the user base rather focus the power into same direction.

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I canā€™t quite understand the opinions and thought processes of some here. Yes, in an ideal world some things would run better and more smoothly. But we live in our world and everyone has to set priorities and earn money. And although Nextcloud is not perfect, their business model is still the best compromise imho.

I doubt that a purely community-oriented developer community could successfully manage a project like this. Nextcloud is not a simple ToDo list app or a Markdown editor that you just fork and add a few features :wink: Sure, you could focus only on the core. But the core works mostly well as it is. Just uninstall everything else and you have far fewer problems, in my expirience.

Most users who have real problems here are those who want all kinds of bells and whistles on the level of commercial offers like MS365 or Google Workspaces. But at the same time they donā€™t want to pay anything. I also think that many users here in the forums who complain about this things are using the Community Edition of Nextcloud in their businesses and not strictly for personal use. Or even worse, they offer services to other businesses or provide Nextcloud hosting services, without knowing what exactly they are doing

Donā€™t get me wrong. Things could always be better. And yes, the community is maybe a little bit (ab)used as a beta tester here. However, you can avoid most major issues and bugs by not always using the newest shiny features immediately on day 1, not activating every app, not updating to the latest NC versions on day 1. Same goes for PHP versions, things like the HPE backend etcā€¦

My Nextcloud has been running for several years without any major issues. Iā€™m currently on NC20 with PHP 7.4 and use it for files, calendars, contacts, bookmarks. Of course, not everything runs as smooth as with the Google apps and some features of these commercial apps are missing or are not as refined. And for some things like chat and video conferencing I use other selfhosted services like Jitsi and XMPP to fit my needs. But all in all, Nextcloud was reliably doing everything, that I and my girlfriend were expecting to do it for us in our everyday life. And the best part is, that the data is stored on my own server. A few small incoviniences from time to time are an aceptable trade off for me, if I have full control over my data in return.

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Depending on the goals this may or may not be the best choiceā€¦

yes this is the case - one should remain realistic but wishes and dreams always follow best available solution. even me and my wife have different views - for some reason she likes MS Office much more then LibreOffice - for me the fact I can use classic menus in the last is the killer feature already.

This is the part of the business model you mentioned before. If the vendor wants everybody to pay for the software: OSS is not the right way. And I absolutely disagree people donā€™t want to pay - SOHO users just donā€™t fit into enterprise contract model of Nextcloud GmbH.

Most likely there are users who donā€™t fit into fair use model and expect premium support without a fee, but this is still part of the open source game. On the other hand there are people who would like raise a bounty or request (paid) support on demandā€¦ all this doesnā€™t exist now - so itā€™s wrong to blame people when they ask for support here. Or maybe they pay in different currency - by testing, promoting and supporting the softwareā€¦

at least a part of the community wants to participate, test beta software - and find the bugs which passed QA (if there is any QA at Nextcloud) - but they donā€™t want to do it for free. The bill could be paid in different ways:

  1. $
  2. honor
  3. open ear on the dev side

first is wrong as this is not part of the deal when using OSS. 2. exists here from time to timeā€¦ 3. is missing in my eyes - especially the community (people like you and me) who spend hundreds of hours in this forum doesnā€™t have a good way to file requests and provide feedback in term what they are looking for and which pains they feel (not exactly bugs but improvements and new features). this is exactly what @alexanderdd pointed out:

Iā€™m fully realistic about the the income and the need to pay bills. In my opinion the company still should pay more attention to open and free part of the OSS. What I REALLY hate is their enterprise support portal hidden behind a paywall - how this matches with open source ideals?

As I said already

My suggestion to improve the collaboration between the company and community would be they dedicate a small part of their resources to address issues raised by the community and we have a backlog (like a poll). This would immediately enlighten everybody about priorities on the community side and the company could transparently show what they (not) added in specific release. Other ways could work as well but this collaboration is what I donā€™t see now. They are fast when it comes to testing of beta versions but become silent when it comes to support and discussions.

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Yeah that is a bit of a problem. As a soho user youā€™re a bit left alone here. They could at least provide some kind of LTS release for a reasonable fee.

That is the biggest problem but not in the way many probably think it is. I think Nextcloud has way to many features. And with itā€™s app store concept it suggest people it is some kind of hosting platform that can replace their Windows AD, LDAP, Webhosting, Bookeeping Software, Google Maps. Hell there are people who use it as a replacement for Plex or as a music player. There is no way that one company can make all this things nearly on the same level as specialiced companys or even specialiest oss projects could do it. It has features that not even M365 or Google Workplaces has. And nobody would ask Google to integrate a music player to Google Workspaces or a Recipies management tool :wink:

Nextcloud should focus on the core functions and maybe even offer a paid subscription for home users or small businesses, wich offers some kind of LTS / stable version with limited support, like for example Proxmox does. Resulting from this they should call the current normal releases community edition or even beta. Then they should split up the appstore between core and community apps more clear with a warning who tells everybody, you are on your own, when you install this app. And they should make clearer more straight forward install instructions with clear prerequisits, maybe even provide install scripts and an official docker image, and then only ā€œsupportā€ these installation types. Otherwise it is nearly imposible to gain something from the community if you have feedback from home users with 10 diffrent installation types, on 30 diffrent OSs, 4 diffrent PHP versons, 1000 diffrent PHP configurations, 5 diffrent webservers and 10 diffrent reverse proxys, especially if it comes to weird beheivour or performance issues.

A VM or something like an Intel NUC with 4-8GB RAM, or maybe a Raspi4. Apache or NGINX with PHP-FPM, MariaDB, Redis, a little PHP tuning like OP cache and this thing runs like a champ. But people have all kinds of wierd configurations and setups, on cheap hosting platforms, Distros like Linux Mint or Arch, which are clearly not made for server usage, diffrent docker images, package repositories from diffrent distros without the necesarry configurations for PHP and Webserver etcā€¦

I realise that some see this as an advantage, when you can run things on everything. But supporting something like this is almost impossible. Againā€¦ There should be a few official installation types that are supported and well documented. This should not stop anyone from building appliances or using Nextcloud in other ways. But supporting this or pull relevant information out of the huge quantity of issues this generates sounds at least challenging to me :wink: And it certainly needs a lot of time and effort that would probably be better invested into the development and improvement of the core product.

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This!
Instead of discussing what features are missing, it should be discussed what features should be dumped (from the core)! Now, having said that, this is from yours and mine point of view, people using NC for free. From NC GmbH point of view, the opposite is much more interesting. Brainstorming is expensive; getting it for free from NC users is invaluableā€¦

When CERN started their MAlt (Microsoft Alternatives) project, they had this warning on their page: make sure you donā€™t fall in the trap of inferior (open source) copiesā€¦ BTW, they use a customized version of ownCloudā€¦

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Iā€™m not sure if they should dump features. But they probably should not add and advertise new features like PHP8.0 support, HPE, Whiteboard and things like that, when they clearly not ready for prime time. They should marked as Beta imho. I get that they want release often and early, and thus gather as much feedback as possible. Maybe that was the right strategy at the beginning, but in the meantime this strategy is rather counterproductive imho.

But I must also say that I personally have few problems with it. I donā€™t use every app, donā€™t always update to the latest versions on day one and usually find a way to deal with the issues that crop up from time to time. Overall I am still very happy with the product. But I donā€™t use all the functions. As already mentioned, I use other dedicated software for video conferencing, webmail, chat etcā€¦ The basic functions as I call them like Files, Collabora integration (Docker), Calendar, Contacts, work very well for me. and that allowed me to delete my Google account and switch to an AOSP Android without Google services. Well, I didnā€™t delete the account, but I donā€™t use it for these things anymore :wink:

But for users with less experience or those who use Nextcloud productively for their small business, the whole thing can be overwhelming and time consuming. I think a paid LTS version with a predefined installation procedure and fewer releases could help these people. And the money could be used for community work and support, maybe they could even hire someone full time for that. The current continues ā€œbetaā€ releseses :wink: could still be releasd like they do it know, for people who donā€™t want to pay or feel adventurous. :slight_smile:

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really cool how experienced community members nail the problem in two subsequent posts:

There is no visible direction Nextcloud is approachingā€¦ There are enterprise featuresā€¦ some free developed appsā€¦ few communitiy-driven pull-requests. but there is no idea what should happen with all this stuffā€¦

  • there is community willing to participate
  • there are private users willing to accept some draw-backs
  • there is a company overwhelmed with enterprise user requirements
  • there are enterprise users looking for o365/Google/AWS competitor

all this requirements are valid and need solid, bullet-proof validation before someone writes a line of codeā€¦ I donā€™t want to take @frankā€™s chair this times - not the easiest situationā€¦ on the other hand the are not on the dead end, lot of big customers join the track and trust the company to provide services for reasonable periodā€¦ this makes my soul happy in terms my beloved application is not going to disappear but I fear it doesnā€™t fit my measures anymore once the most powerful actor choose the way apart of the communityā€¦

Iā€™m open for discussions and proposals - hopefully Nextcloud GmbH ill stay in contact with us!

appreciate feedback from @jospoortvliet @nickvergessen @frank @system

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What I was really trying to say is: NC GmbH and the so-called non-profit NC have different goalsā€¦

NC GmbH is still in the ā€œmove fast and break thingsā€ mode

A perfectly justifiable business modelā€¦ To build a critical mass of users, features, money flow, etc.
The goal is the latter; the means are the formerā€¦ The environment is ripe - everything GDPR related, the time is shortā€¦

Nothing to do with the goals of a ā€œnon-profit NCā€ā€¦ Hence, it wonā€™t happenā€¦

I also donā€™t think there ever will be a ā€œcommunity editionā€ (one-time payment for a supported edition) releasedā€¦ Just google on this forum for reaction on OnlyOffice $99 family edition releaseā€¦

Even today we regularly read incessant b!tching about why NC does not release a native client for the future of everything: Apple Silicon; and a few days later why they dropped Windows 8 32 bitā€¦

Now imagine those users would purchase the ā€œcommunity editionā€ā€¦ Now they feel entitled to be heardā€¦ And acted upon their requirementsā€¦ The cacophony on this forum would become unbearableā€¦

NC is a commercial enterprise-level product. Sold for a monthly fee.
To keep up the fast pace of development and harness users input the source code is open.
But not the know-how! Enterprise features documentation is not freely available!
Donā€™t expect ā€œpresentsā€ like Hansson VM with the signaling server built-in happen often!

I think this is a fair dealā€¦

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I donā€™t see it quite so negatively. And as @anon71540698 says, at the moment they are focusing on big customers. And thatā€™s where the big money is. As long as everything stays open source iā€™m fine with that.

The problem I see, is the gap in the SOHO area. There is no LTS version or any kind of support that you can buy as home user or small business owner. For experienced users this is certainly less of an issue. But most of this problems you mention, could be solved by offering an LTS - Home/Soho edition and distinguishing more clearly between officially supoorted apps and community apps, plus the other things I mentioned in my previous posts. And yes, if they go that route, some people will say, ā€œThis product is not for meā€. So what? Do you really have to make everyone happy? Beside of that, these people could still use the ā€œbetaā€ releases, like they do now :wink:

I get that some people want a democratic, ā€œeverybody can wish and decide non profit thingā€. Honestley as good as that sounds in theory, it would most likly lead to an even bigger mess. Just imho of course :wink:

Addition:
I really donā€™t think that Nextcloud must be everything form a office groupware collaboration platform, all the way down to multimedia or game platform or whatever some people here may want it to be. :wink: It should be quite the opposite and be more foccused on the office/groupware colaboration part. If someone wants to use it as media server or whatever, there are plenty off OSSs products out thereā€¦ I think people who want such things are mostly those, that can barley run nextcloud in reliable and secure way. And when they somehow manged to get that running, they see the appstore, and want to be able to do things with one click, for which others have to hire an armada of sysadmins. You have to stay realistic here.

Beside of that Nextcloud already does a relly good job, also if you see it from your perspective. Iā€™m still amazed what is possible on for example a Raspberry Pi nowdays. I see people in this forums who have nothing to do with IT, but manage to set up a file sharing and collaboration platform like Nextcloud. Something like this would have been unthinkable 10 - 20 years ago. There was Microsoft and Linux and professional UNIX systems. In some point of time the comercial NAS solutions like Synology grew popularity. But there was no OSS solution like NCP or a Nextcloud VM, that a home user could install relatively easy on a sunday afternoon and that offered a comparable functionality.

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@bb77 closest Iā€™ve seen to a community LTS is @nextcloudpi offering their own release schedule, which can be bypassed at any time by updating yourself. Their offering includes automatic updates of the base software, automatic updates of apps, and a webui / cli interface for occ maintenance. Since it includes these different moving parts, it requires thorough bug testing and a slower cycle, which is great! Basic tldr, resist the urge to update major versions until bugs are addressed in stable. This addresses the move fast approach to an extent, but remains specific to this project.

Credit where credit is due, basically every major enterprise part of the software has been open sourced these last couple years: spreed high performance backend as an example. So, got to give them big kudos.

It does seem a bit of a bummer to see the employees always being called to join conversations both on the forum and githubā€¦ just see it happening all the time and I do feel bad for those people who are treated as always on-call because they actually do respond to most of these posts once people get heated. Just my .02, but Iā€™d love to hear more from the app maintainers who started this thread in a calm and collected mannerā€¦ @marcelklehr and @stefan-niedermann

Right now there is a definite lack of knowing which apps are community apps. Actually, only a small number of apps are ā€œofficialā€ and ā€œcoreā€ā€¦ the number is much smaller than most any of us realize. E2E is a community app, which I had no idea about until someone on the team said so [looking for the exact quote either on forum or gh]ā€¦ so there is no guarantee on it working across major version releases. Iā€™d love to see the ability for us to resist updates that break X and Y apps we depend on.

On the Github side it is really difficult to track what is happening in regards to community contributions. Requests on Github will be eventually be closed to limit the number of open issues the core team will not be able to implement, but there is no ā€œNice to Haveā€ label or similar that allows volunteer developers to track these github submissions the core team is not working on in the futureā€¦

Yes, it is a constant game of test for breakage and what is supportedā€¦ that is why the missing features thread was created in addition to these:

Any apps not yet compatible with version 21 and php 8?
Any apps not yet compatible with version 22?

I apologize as this is all a big deviation from the original question of this thread, but I do see it related to how the community could better contribute. Unsure of how the Foundation branch of the community will develop, but I do see that we could really use a greater focus on encouraging the community to contribute quality documentation similar to the Arch Wiki. My suggestion is adding a category to this forum in which every post is user editable by default. Common courtesy will still apply, but it is easy enough to revert edits.

Totally true. I completely acknowledge that we are a very small percentage of the user base, so that is certainly important to keep in mind regardless of future developments.

I would love for this to happen any time!

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@bb77 and @just in my opinion LTS release is not what people are looking forā€¦ in my eyes LTS is more an enterprise feature where one can keep working software unchanged for longer longer periods and donā€™t need to adopt docs, user training materials and so onā€¦ for a SOHO user I see no problem if the UI changes slightly - we see it everyday on our phones and even desktopsā€¦

the other side of tight Nextcloud release schedule - the admin must install updates to remain supported. this must is often let behindā€¦ I bet installing new major release is more sexy than just another security update for the 3y old LTS application. I donā€™t like the fast release cycle as well but I still prefer the first way as it puts more pressure on admins to keep the software updatedā€¦ in general I see no problem to perform a major update every 12-18 months - (3 major releases supported, release cycle every 6 months). you can always skip one release going from the x-2 to x (x-1) release and stay supported and secure. this is the reason I donā€™t see LTS or another distribution like NextcloudPi is the right answer for such issuesā€¦

The problem is

-if Nextcloud would talk to the community and accept feedback using some official process this would help everybody to understand the goals and priorities for the next time period. People may agree or not, they may keep using NC or change to different product - all this is part of open source culture

this is the result of missing official communication channel!

every user has itā€™s own preferences but here we donā€™t talk about why Github is better than Reddit vs Nextcloud forum - Nextcloud Gmbh is free to choose the best way to receive and respond to community needs, they could setup a forum/GH repo - name responsible employees as they preferā€¦ Iā€™m even open to say this channel is open to dedicated community members like ā€œcommunity leaderā€ only - but this must be defined, announced and lived exactly this way.

some conference or any other event is just single point in time - this may drive some change but this doesnā€™t lastā€¦ everyday work needs another format then just a horde of people at some random eventā€¦

If you consider the title of this discussion and the history of Owncloud/Nextcloud - if the authority isnā€™t accepted by the community a group can leave/fork and go itā€™s own wayā€¦ and then Nextclolud is nothing else then OwncloudV2 and there is another rising star on heaven called RealNextcloud or something like thisā€¦

As I stated multiple times before I donā€™t appreciate this wayā€¦ but if the situation remains as it is the risk of community split growsā€¦

@bb77 @just your posts are mainly around money- I agree money is what drives the management of the companyā€¦ but this view is limited - I have spend hundreds of hours in this forum for free - so lot of others - this what drives OSS and community. I donā€™t expect and donā€™t even ask for flowers but I have to know if my work is worth to doā€¦ I donā€™t spend my effort for Nextcloud GmbH, I donā€™t do this for Frankā€¦ I do it for the community and because of my dream: every user can control of his data and nobody must save the data in o365. And I ask for qualified and reliable contact channel to do it in the future!

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I see your point. An maybe there is not the small business user or the home user. There are enthusiasts who always want the latest features and there are people who want stability. The people who always want the latest features are already well served.

But how should a ā€œnormalā€ user know which versions to skip? Nextcloud 21 for example is one release I would skip. I do actualy at my production instance. The most significant new features like PHP8 support, HPE, Whiteboard, are clearly not ready for prime time yet. So wait for NC22 if you want these featuresā€¦ And then maybe something elese will be added there, which is not yet readyā€¦ etc etc. The problem is that most releases are beta quality at best. This applies at least to the new features that are announced for the respective releases. And yes, I know that many of these new features are optional and the core is mostly stable. But then these new features should be clearly marked as beta within the App Store or in the documentation.

No for me it is not about money. (But I would pay a reasonable fee to support the project.) It was just an idea how they could offer a real end-user product for soho users. Currently they leave that job to 3rd parties like Hansson IT or NCP which is fine I guess and they do a great job with their appliances. But it is also difficult and confusing for many people not to have the one official way to install nextcloud. An official product with one or at most two official installation types would simplify matters. But again, these are just ideas and thoughts. Personally, I can live well with the current situation. As long as everything remains open source and is reasonably well documented, I will find my way around the quirks that can arise from time to time. :slight_smile:

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An these PR were reviewed and tested? If you test the new version, you could just merge a couple of these PR and report if that is breaking anything and open a report on the main repo and ask to merge them in the new version.

About the community-feedback being recognized, Nextcloud could give a certain amount of development time and then a few issues that fall within this time frame are put to a vote to the community.

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this is exactly what @alexanderdd complains about - not everybody is coder and can perform testing, knows github workflows and so on.

and this is related to my point:

if they would clear define a roadmap. Today I was buffed to recognize e2e app introduced with NC17(?) still missing essential features (no sharing, no key revokation). HPB is really cool feature and was driver to immediately move to NC21ā€¦ VFS in NC Client 3.2 is cool as well - today it removed contents of some folders :face_with_symbols_over_mouth: - this is bad but something you can expect with new features (unfortunately)ā€¦

but for me whole discussion is not about if there are too many or too less features, how is the quality and what is good and what is going wrong - nobody is perfect and everybody has room to improveā€¦ In my eyes itā€™s more about the fact people feel left behind by the Nextcloud GmbH as their communication is limited to announcements and calls to testā€¦ no discussion, no real feedback channelā€¦ I still prefer they wake up and improve the communication rather another entity is founded and puts more complexity to the groundā€¦

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Hey,
I think it is a great idea to establish a non-profit ommunity driven entity to support the Nextcloud development and its environment.

And I understand that there is a lot of motivation to do so out of disappointment about the GmbH.

I think itā€™s crucial to start anything like this with a positive attitude and vision.
What should be our aims? What do we want to make better? -And not only (nor mainly) based on (supposed) failures or wrong decisions of other people, including the Gmbh.

Constructive criticism is what is needed and I think itā€™s important to think about what we could achieve in a cooperation with the GmbH.

Instead of only letting grow this thread Iā€™d love to sketch a vision and some details of the ā€œNextcloud Foundationā€.

Whoā€™s in?

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