Legal Masterthesis on Nextcloud as a service [ongoing thread]

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Hello everyone
A few years ago I was very happy to discover nextcloud, which provided all the functionalities I was looking for my organizations without fueling the big tech feudalism threatening our paths towards fully democratic societies.

Currently I am writing my disposition for my masterthesis about the legal qualification of Software as a Service contracts around the example of Nextcloud as a service.

Although I have some tech understanding I would be happy to find tech- and/or legal support and/or general inspiration for my thesis.

One thing I fear is, that through my work I unknowingly open / show loopholes (like the ASP-loophole), which doesn’t help the FLOSS project. So beside looking for inspiration and help I open this thread as well, so that people from the FLOSS community can criticise my blind-spots etc

The use cases I am focussing on are the following:
The nextcloud provider offers on the software side

  1. full access to nextcloud similar to self-hosted nextclouds (all apps can be installed)
  2. limited access but within that the user can freely un-install certain apps
  3. fixed acces. The provider lets freedom of choice to the user

On the hardware side one needs to differentiate as well

  • Who is the main responsible for saving the User data? User or Provider?
  • Server-Questions
  1. Does the Provider provide a “real” “physical” nextcloud server
  2. Or an Virtual Server
  3. Or does he “rent” his infrastructure from a third party as well via Plattform / Infrastructure as a service.

On the legal side I focus on “failure to perform”

  1. Non-performance due to a posterior impossibility egs. factual: Seizure of the server; legal: nextcloud is banned in a certain country
  2. Delay in performance egs. Up-Time questions
  3. Bad performance, in the form of bugs or corrupt user-data
  4. Maybe as well “theft” of user data. (but this might already be a secondary obligation and I will only focus on primary obligations)

Do you have any other suggestions for examination of nextcloud as a service use-cases or hardware cases or performance failure categories?

Hope that this thread is going to be interesting. If you think reddit or an other forum is more apt for such a discussion thread, please tell me as well.

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thank you. I finished it already by the time you responeded :slight_smile:

how can I delete this thread?

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You could mark it as solved and edit in some conclusions from your thesis if you’d be willing to share it, as I’m sure there are people that would love to read it.

Otherwise you should be able to delete the post by clicking the three dots in the bottom and select delete with the trash bin, edit and remove the content of the post itself and put in some text saying your thesis is already done or flag it and have a moderator remove it if the trash bin isn’t available to you.

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