The show’s just starting…
No, it is not. We’re NOT going to join the mud throwing party. Remember, the only ones who like mud are the pigs. Please, let’s just stay nice and professional and not play this personal. This leads to a very negative atmosphere with people scared for their future.
We all know… Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. And hate… dark side, mud throwing, death stars and so on. Let’s not go there.
We have said all we want to say about this in public and will now look forward. Most of us contributed to ownCloud before there was a trace of a company and care deeply about our core goals to put people back in control over their data. That is what we want to focus on here.
Nextcloud 10 is awesome and we’ve got great things in store. Just keep an eye on our repo’s the coming days and join the conversation about future features - stay tuned for a blog on Monday 
I will close this thread now.
EDIT: people said that by closing we’re just forcing conversation to other places. That is true, obviously. So I’ve opened this again. However, no bad things please. Not towards ownCloud and not towards Nextcloud.
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I’d just like to say I think it is a very good move to reopen the thread. Thank You.
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Thanks for handling this in a mature and adult way, Jos. To me, I admire and respect the great work that everyone did under the ownCloud banner to establish and grow a FOSS personal data hosting cloud solution, and I admire and respect Nextcloud’s dedication to opening all code and features to everyone. I wish both projects all the best.
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Meh. Noting but the rambleings of a buthurt and disgrunteled x-emplyee.
We all play to win. Those do can, do. Those who cannot, write whining blogposts about it.
Not interested in throwing mud around either, so i welcome the stand, as i welcome to re-open this thread, because discussions must bei open.
I am a completely new user to NextClound and/or owncloud and its really hard for me to find out if I should be starting on next- or owncloud since i do have to start a service now for a few users.
So I am watching this and other spaces anxiously to see where the train goes and what system I should be using to be on the safe side…
thanks
PS: all the interviews i read and watched by Frank and others where really very professional and definitely no laundering of dirty laundry or how would you say in english? everybody keep up enthusiasm. i think both projects will benefit each other.
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- Do you need some of the NC features which were previously closed source (enterprise only features)? → NC
- Do you need support for the contacts and calendar apps? → NC
- None of the above? Keep deliberating
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If NC hasn’t a unique feature you need, you can install OC 9.0 which is stable, still supported for some time (~1 year) and allows you to go either way. In a few months time, there will could be differences between the projects that are important for you.
oh the irony…Carla Schroder decrying “dirty business deals” and at the same time she is trolling viciously on Twitter against Bernie Sanders…
Thanks Jos, keeping the conversation open is the way to clear up things and keep things transparent.
I have been using OC for over two years and only found out about the fork last week. I am looking all over the place for a real report on what happened, because like many others, we only see this explosion from the outside, and can’t tell if there are “bad guys” and “good guys” in the story and if so, which is which. Problem is, that the cold facts don’t give a full narrative, so it’s down to a war of versions. OC gave theirs, but you guys seem to mainly answer with “They are just sore losers with no real claims”.
Well, your side lacks a very solid narrative, I’m sad to say. I think you will do the community a service (and thus yourselves) and be a bit more verbose is detailing your claims, or people will just fall to adopt OC’s narrative…
Just to be clear: on the tech side I made the bet and switched to NC. On the community/moral/ideological decision of this, I will still appreciate more info. This will decide whether your next year or two in the business gain you the favor of the community.
So to start the conversation, here are some leading questions: the narrative presented by Carla seems more solid. Frank said he’s leaving “for moral reasons”, but doesn’t list them, if it’s a step to give more attention to the community, then why the commercial move of starting a company? Why time it in a way that cost OC a major investment? All the “cold facts” of timing and incorporation as a GMBH do paint a story of a financial and managerial coup, nothing to do with morals,maybe quite the opposite. Your side of the story needs to be a bit more solid to contradict interpretation of this series of decisions as anything but a selfish financial move…
Why? A public discussion about the details won’t help anybody and it would consume a lot of time and threaten the development of both projects. If there is any serious wrong doing by either party, the other party can take legal actions.
That’s the right way to go, just look at the project, what they plan to do and even more important what they are actually doing.
Another interesting article about the role of ownCloud/Nextcloud in the file-sharing world: OwnCloud split threatens the future of cloud computing's open source option
A public discussion will make me and the rest of the users more informed. Waiting a year to retrospect, or wasting a million dollars in legal fees (and the time to get this to a conclusion) are very unoptimized ways to get to the facts.
Transparency is key in such a problematic case. see how forced transparency has now forced the entire leadership of the American DNC to resign once the people found out what the people in charge are doing in their name and why. Also see the 3 people fired from the Tor organization. I think Free Software, on the moral+social side of it, needs transparency to run correctly.
If I only look at the current state of the project(s), I see mainly github activity and about half the number of IRC users on #nextcloud then on #owncloud. It’s impossible to judge on that. I think that if the co-founder is stepping out “for moral reasons” he should list what those reasons are. “Getting richer than I would have if I stayed” doesn’t count as a moral stand, I think.
Hi @seefood, I’m Hagen. I’m attending the Nextcloud hack week that started on Monday in Stuttgart, Germany. On Monday Frank presented and discussed the vision and the ideas behind Nextcloud. He wrote the sentence: “Nextcloud gives people and organisations a secure and private way to control their data and communication” as a vision on a whiteboard. We had a discussion about this in the room and he added that the nextcloud project should make the world a better place. He hesitated to say that because it is such a big goal. Nevertheless I liked it because it is important to make the world a better place.
Carlas blog post is one more source in this puzzle, not more and not less.
In his blogpost (big changes: I am leaving ownCloud, Inc. today) he wrote
… I thought a lot about this situation. Without sharing too much, there are some moral questions popping up for me. Who owns the community? Who owns ownCloud itself? And what matters more, short term money or long term responsibility and growth? Is ownCloud just another company or do we also have to answer to the hundreds of volunteers who contribute and make it what it is today?
These questions brought me to the very tough decisions: I have decided to leave my own company today …
If he would be only interested in making money it would be far easier to stay at this company and make the money I mean, if you leave your own company it is a big step. It’s something like a divorce. Have you experienced a divorce in your life? The definition of truth becomes immediately complicate. No one on this planet has the full insights in a process like this. He thought a lot, he said. Yes of course, imagine you would be in that position. All he is saying and writing is all he is able to say and write. Whatever any of the involved party says, either Carla, or ownCloud, or Frank, or “Nextcloud”, you will never be able to tell apart truth from fiction. It will take time on all sides to deal with that.
But let’s have a look:
- There was no coup, just people leaving.
- Nextcloud GmbH is a spin-off of Struktur AG
- They took an open source, AGPL code base to built their product on.
As @tflidd also said - look at what happens now and in the future.
And last but not least a quote
“Evidence strongly suggests that humans in all cultures come to cast their own identity in some sort of narrative form. We are inveterate storytellers.”
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So, you have nothing to add, I guess? it’s all about the control of the project’s direction?
I didn’t say forking (A)GPL code is not legal or legitimate, I’m talking about causing a split in the community, starting a new fork instead of staying with the old community edition (and straight-out saying it will not stay compatible either), hurting his old company financially (either actively or as colleteral damage, depends on who you believe), and in the end have a much bigger share of the ownership of a new company, building on the IP, knowledge and even actual worker of the previous company.
If it’s not about the money, why start a new company?
If it’s not about the control, why fork the community and code?
When OpenOffice and MySQL split, there was a very clear reason. Free Software was subverted for corporate greed, development halted, etc. What sinister takeover happened for OC that justifies this split?
If it’s not about the money, why start a new company?
To sustain development. FOSS is nice but much more effective if people are actually paid to work on the things that no one wants to work on. Not everything revolves around greed. Do you want more bugs in Nextcloud?
If it’s not about the control, why fork the community and code?
Inc People previously did not invest a lot of time in merging community pull requests (check the 110 open pull requests in the core repo). Do you really want to invest a lot of time in creating pull requests that probably won’t be merged? AFAIK Nextcloud employees can work 50% on community stuff.
Apart from that ownCloud requires you to sign a CLA which gives them all rights to go closed source in a blink of an eye. Let’s say some company like Oracle would buy ownCloud, what do you think will happen with your code? Another thing: Do you think investors care about anything other than money? Things are sold to the highest bidder. The highest bidder is usually (not always) an entity which tries to squeeze the most money out of the company. As you can see from Oracle, being nice doesn’t pay.
There are also lots of other reasons why you want to fork something but I leave that up to your imagination.
PS: keep in mind that I’m neither working for ownCloud nor Nextcloud and I also don’t know more than the official statements
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Another thing: Do you think ownCloud will merge a pull request that adds Single Sign On to ownCloud which is featured in their enterprise edition ;)?
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@seefood I am also one of the core folks who moved from ownCloud to Nextcloud. Internals are of course nothing to talk publicly about, nor is it nice to badmouth former colleagues who are still friends – that should be very clear. I know that makes it difficult to understand the whole situation.
Let me just say that you should check which people left for Nextcloud. You’ll see that it’s most of the core development team, and most people of which are very active in free & open source software in general. I for example have been working on ownCloud since beginning of 2011, only joined the company full-time in late 2012 and volunteered the whole time before that. It’s similar for most other folks who moved. Of course it’s awesome when you can work full-time on free & open source software, but this is an ideological decision and has little to do with money.
Then lastly have a look at the activity graphs, for example of the server repo and android repo vs the old ones. You will see a significant increase. So even without any of the other factors, it’s clear that there’s more open source activity, which can only benefit people.
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