see What happend to the Nextcloud foundation? as already posted above. Yes, there have been promises, yes, they werenât kept.
Hey,
Not in any way an official reply, just some thoughts of mine, in the tradition of "Iâm sorry, I did not have time to keep it short):
- Note that the foundation we wanted to setup would be a bit like the Free-QT foundation. Purely protecting the future, not doing any day-to-day stuff like development. The idea would be that it owns the trademark and if Nextcloud GmbH would go bankrupt or get sold or something, the foundation could give another company the trademark. Basically just to avoid what happened to ownCloud.
- Itâs true that there is a gap for support for home users and small businesses that self-host. Weâd love to help here, but we simply lack the capacity to do it and canât afford to hire people for it - weâre not venture-capital-funded, remember, we have to earn what we spend, first. And it would barely be profitable. I can recommend you get support from https://www.hanssonit.se/ for example - he offers this. And if somebody else wants to do that - go ahead, we wonât stop you (just like we never stopped him). Weâre actually aiming more and more for larger organizations as thatâs where we can give the most benefit, so we absolutely donât object to people providing support for home users or such!
- If youâd want to set up a foundation that does development, your biggest issue is going to be money - just setting it up and keeping it alive probably costs more than youâd get from donations, at least if I look at how much donations came in over bounty source over the years. And then doing actual development - good luck. Seriously, development is expensive. Just look at other open source projects like Krita - they are SUPER successful - and can pay, like, 1 or 2 full time developers and 1-2 interns. And again: that is SUPER successful and with everyone involved being OK with a very low salary. I see no reason to expect a Nextcloud foundation to get even 1% of what Krita is bringing in.
Oh and you donât want to set up something âlike the libreoffice foundationâ - at least not until youâve talked to some of the people involved. The sad truth is that it is terribly disfunctional, possibly doing more harm than good. Yeah, it doesnât make me happy either, but thatâs what I hear.
Now all that said, weâre absolutely aware there is more we can and should do for private users. That is why we do maintain things like SQLite support and simple sign-on - Iâm sure you all realize that those things provide very little benefit to our customers 
In general, we could probably earn more money if we wouldnât spend effort in keeping Nextcloud easy to install and run!
As was said above, our current approach is indeed to grow as quickly as we can so we gain the critical mass needed to really compete and be profitable. Weâre quite successful, even though thereâs still a long way to go, but the idea is that the bigger we get, the smaller (relatively speaking) the resources are we need to maintain Nextcloud - which means there is more room for doing âextraâ things. Like developing features our home users care for, for example.
It took our first 2 years to reliably break-even, and that was with working overtime by pretty much everyone on board. And with not exactly impressive salaries, either. Now weâre financially healthy and getting closer to normal, 40 hour work weeks, but we have to hire to keep the hundreds of new customers happy, support-wise. (If youâd be interested in a sales engineering role, shoot us a mail)So it still isnât easy, even if itâs better than in our first years.
If (and thatâs a big IF) we can keep our growth up, I think in about 2 years, weâll really get to a point where we can do feature development for home users, on top of the enterprise features and support we need. But that is only if we can find significantly more customers - and big ones. And if they donât decide they donât need to bother paying us as they get all they need for free. Which is probably the biggest thing holding back our growth. I donât want to complain too much - we decided to be a 100% open source company, and that comes with lots of potential customers not bothering to contribute anything. But it is important to understand that if, say, 30% of the companies >1000 employees that use Nextcloud for free would start to pay, weâd have an easy time developing all the cool stuff you lot would love to see. And more. So this isnât irrelevant.
Another thing to keep in mind - we started this entire thing to help people regain their privacy. Companies have no right to privacy - making them happy isnât what MOTIVATES is, itâs just what pays the bills. So we want to get to this point of being able to build a better Nextcloud for you all, really.
Maybe the way we do it isnât the best way, maybe it is. We obviously think about this all the time and we think we are going about it the best possible way, but feedback is always welcome - though, best delivered at a conference or something, itâs hard to discuss these things on a forum 
Please, continue your conversation - I donât think we block community pull requests and I wouldnât want us to block conversations from users who genuinely want to help Nextcloud be better.
I appreciate you care! And the work you do - helping fellow users, advocating for Nextcloud, it is motivating for us and it helps us do better, too. You all matter, a lot.
Have a good weekend and stay tuned for Tuesday!
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Thank you @jospoortvliet for your detailed reply!
Krita seems to receive $5k in donations per month. Recently the developer of the Android email app K9 started actively asking for donations. In December he only received ~âŹ350 per month (âŹ82 per week). A few months ago he wrote a blog asking for more donations which also got some traction on Hacker News. This relatively simple move resulted in K9 now receiving ~âŹ3.2k per month (âŹ744 per week). It is also a great way to improve the community as it makes people more attached to a project and lets the developer feel more valued.
Iâm no expert but I think that if Nextcloud opens a Liberapay account Iâd be surprised if it wouldnât receive at least 1k per month soon and I could see it become quite a bit more (the comparison to Bounty Source doesnât feel right because itâs quite cumbersome, at least my experience is that the issues I backed for several projects can take ages to be solved; I much rather donate structurally for general development than backing some specific issue one time).
I agree that a separate foundation probably is too much overhead. But maybe Nextcloud could use the money to hire an extra (part-time) Nextcloud core/server developer to work on issues that the home user community deem important. Or it could be used to justify current developers across all the different repositories to spend a bit of time on some home user relevant issues/feature requests.
I know that setting this up correctly probably isnât that easy. But I always thought that Nextcloud received enough money from their commercial (support) work to cover all the development that they and the community would like to see. Reading @jospoortvlietâs post this doesnât seem to the case. So setting up donations really feels like a logical way to get some more money and it could potentially become a significant source of funding.
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- when you receive money for your work in open source (as independent), you probably have to pay taxes and social security. If you already have your business that might be just another source of income
- when Nextcloud receives this money, they would have to go through all the administrative stuff to hire and manage these additional developers (and pay TVA for the âdonationsâ)
So âjustâ setting up things, if you donât think it through you might end up creating a lot of additional work.
Perhaps they could just provide a developer for 1 day/month for the community. And the community can decide on the project, if there is a 5-6 months release cycle, this would be a week of work. A lot of community work is hidden, and this part would be more visible.
There are plenty of ideas, visions and interests involved in this⌠Iâd say the two main ones are
a) Securing the trademark.
A âVereinâ is easily founded here in Germany, it could cover this aspect without a lot of costs.
Or why not consider an existing independent non-profit institution with common goals to be the warden?
b) Steering money & development to cover the interests of home users and small businesses
One way would be to crowdfund developers at Nextcloud GmbH and if there is enough transparency I think it could work. There are the advantages of using existing structures.
Another way would be to use another institution and it doesnât have to be a new one. I just found out about https://techcultivation.org/ and although there is no detail information, it seems as if it might fit. Meanwhile:
It will take us a while to build a platform to allow projects to easily interface with their budgets, and before we can manage individual donations to projects. Leave your e-mail address and we will get in touch as soon as weâre there!
Iâll get in contact with them to see if it would be a scenario for them to manage a âside structureâ (alongside Nextcloud GmbH) in order to support Nextcloud. Perhaps they have other ideas or recommendations.
In any case:
I guess we need to figure out about the âwillingness to payâ. And if every dime is dependent on a specific bug report/feature, we wonât come far. So reliable and continuous financial support is what is needed.
Another important aspect regarding taxes:
If an institution is gemeinnĂźtzig (charitable), it can receive donations without having to pay taxes for it and the donator can make the donation tax deductable. This applies to Germany, Iâm not sure how it is handled on an international level.
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I started a new thread in order to discuss a specific option:
Let me add a note - letâs say we bring in 1K/month. So that is about 20% of a developer salary, about 4 days of work per month. And Iâm assuming fairly little overhead and a cheap developer here, of course.
If Nextcloud signs one half-decent customer, they will contribute more money to improving Nextcloud - even if that isnât 100% aligned, much of that will of course still end up helping home users - think of something like https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-sync-2-0-brings-10x-faster-syncing/ - and itâs probably easier for the wider Nextcloud community to help us sign a bunch of customers by advocating in companies for Nextcloud, than that it is to bring in 1K/month in donations - which does very, very little.
Heck, if every Nextcloud user can bring one other person to become a user, that would double our community - and that would likely result in doubling the Nextcloud GmbH sales, in time, too. The impact of that is 100.000x bigger. I know I canât just say âletâs spend our energy on something elseâ, but - if you want to help Nextcloud, spending a day at an event with a booth or giving a talk will certainly have more impact than anything you can do gathering donations. Especially as asking for donations will have negative side-effects that, I worry, might even outweigh the in-any-case tiny benefits.
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thank you @jospoortvliet for attending this discussion as the only official face of Nextcloud GmbH.
You might be right regarding the payroll of additional devs but Iâm still missing any reaction to the most important part of this discussion (for me): there is almost no communication from the GmbH to community. Nextcloud GmbH places calls for testing in this forum, Nextcloud GmbH advertise this forum as the free support channel on LinkedIn all the time - but Nextcloud GmbH doesnât participate here - direct or indirect⌠this doesnât look fair in my eyes.
You wrote multiple times already about cost of additional developer you could hire. Definitely businesses and home users have slightly different needs - but I think more focus and interaction with the community would improve your service paying customers. If you look through the topics you will see majority of the topics are mostly about same topics⌠I bet customers with support contract hit exactly same problems⌠I think there would be no or maybe only small overhead if you would pickup the problems in this forum and include this in your Q/AâŚ
Letâs talk about call for testing: definitely this community is the right place to ask enthusiasts with small installations to test new things - impact is limited if something brakes, people donât blame you if they test beta releases - sounds like win-win situation⌠but the vendor must support this effort with support/dev people responding to issues and help this leading edge users to understand and solve the problems. Current situation when you ask people to test and leave them alone in case of issues is not goodâŚ
I wouldnât say that itâs just like this: if you report your real issues over on Github, you will most likely get an answer/feedback about it from the devs. Thatâs at least my experience
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this is exactly the point. The company requests help from the community here and expects user to report problems in the completely different place, with another accounts and different expectations - Github is primary for reporting bugs - which might not be exactly the problem - maybe missing docs and explanations/discussions in the forum would help more at this stageâŚ
Yes thatâs right, but on the other hand most of the questions here break down to the same problems already answered a few times. Just because most users are too lazy to use the search function. So in my opinion itâs a waste of time if all devs came here to answer these questions over and over again. Btw some devs do indeed come here and answer the threads. 
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Well it makes sense to handle bugs at one place and not at github, the forum, twitter, facebook and so on. The code is at github as well.
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Above-linked post mostly describes official recognition (âbadgesâ for cover letters) for community participation of various kinds. Community tech professionals get, in addition, âopportunities to engage with our engineersâ:
Members of the ownCloud Professional Community Program are eligible to receive some benefits. These benefits include reference letters, workshops and opportunities to engage with our engineers. Members can request a Community Professional badge. With this program, we want to enable the transfer of knowledge to and from the technical community and show our appreciation by honoring the most active professional community members.
Itâs a recognition of services rather than a commitment to much of anything, but it does seem like a good move, and a step forward from when I last checked in on OC.
In the past Nextcloud conferences, community members were also invited (developers, people from the forum). It was less formal, no special community badges. Also for hackathons, and other events.
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Sounds a little like what Iâm looking for. Establishing some kind of two-way communication on every boundary between the core team, professionals, enthusiasts and enhanced users would allow everybody to better understand the product and requirements⌠on the other side discussing community benefits of ownCloud within Nextcloud thread which started with an idea to separate a part of community sounds really weird⌠the optimistic part in me trusts this might result in both communities to learn from each other and join their forces against âhyperscalersâ
I just posted a link. I am mostly pretty happy how the Nextcloud project is doing.
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We have the forum badges which are more detailed. No idea if thay are checked by the other forum users or by @jospoortvliet and other Nextcloud GmbH employees when answering in the forumâŚ
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I would not fit in the âwnCloud Professional Community Programâ
So in general, my thought is that if weâd want to change things, we should copy ideas from successful, growing communities instead 
⌠yeah, and we all miss that and we will certainly revive that as soon as we physically/covid-wise can.
We are, by the way, hiring in the âcommunityâ area, see Nextcloud is looking for people who want to join our team - but their job would be more in the developer community side, working on things like documentation and such.
@wwe You make good points, and some of our devs and people do contribute and answer questions in the forum, but many, if not most, are simply already too busy with github and customer support to have much time for that. I will and do encourage the team to do this, but keep also in mind that we donât manage our team by the hour or something like that - people have quite a bit of freedom at Nextcloud in how they spend their time.
We often hire people from the community - even directly from the forums - hi @szaimen
so that helps improve the connection, of course.
We are a bit wary of hiring a dedicated community manager who would interact with the community. We see it as a risk that people internally will feel like itâs that personâs job to interact with the community so they donât have to. And thatâs bad, everyone in our company should be open to collaboration and community Weâve seen this happen at some other companies, so it is certainly a real risk.
Also, please see https://help.nextcloud.com/about - and think about the number of questions being asked - 598 topics, 4.5k messages per month, 2.6K active users - it would be very hard for our still rather small team (we have about 35-40 engineers as of this month) to meaningfully interact with a large percentage of those conversations and people. So honestly, while we grow fast of course, Iâm not sure we will soon get to a level where we can really be super present, unless we put in a lot of effort we canât really afford.
So we simply depend on our community members who support others and collaborate here - we just canât do that, we need all of you to help out a bit.
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