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Itâs okay to discuss and share ideas about strategies and people will always have different opinions about which direction should be preferred (in general) for what reason, but it I am always septic if someone believes to know what is the right way for a specific organisation, especially when (s)he has no insights (is no internal member of). There is a team of professional employed people that discuss the direction and where to focus (development) resources on and that have the numbers and statistics about their users, free and paying customers and based on the numbers that I can see, Nextcloud is growing, so they obviously do a great job.
Of course, I hope their are controversies and different opinions, people inside the company who argue from the business and customer side and people who argue from the community/free user side and people who argue from a philosophical/ideological side that as well is an essential part of why Nextcloud and similar solutions have been founded, develop and grow, and each side has their legitimisation and reason and contributes to a healthy eco-system that Nextcloud is. @anon71540698 If you say that a specific person from within Nextcloud for whatever reason is not right, I say, it is interesting to read your arguments and opinion in general but in regards to Nextcloud specifically or even a specific person, you lack the insights to be able to know anything about that and itâs not your business!
Btw, about a general strategy and which somehow underlines to what I said before: https://youtu.be/H3vWeqrWnoQ?t=5059
You are right, Iâm no insider and know no more than you doâŚ
Have you been around the Nasdaq bust that started around March 2000?
That was essentially the âsobering-upâ after the âinternetâ rally that started with Netscape going publicâŚ
During those times Steve Case (AOL founder) for example said that companies donât need to be profitable to be successful, the internet changes everythingâŚ
We all know how it ended⌠Greenspan coined the phrase âexuberanceâ describing itâŚ
And judging by the âopticsâ, thatâs exactly what Nextcloud was the first few years. Time to grow up âŚ
I agree, I cannot wait for my server to start working.
Not sure what you base this judge on, as for my impression Nextcloud GmbH had profitability and a sustainable business model in mind right from the beginning. Based on what I can remember and find, profitability has been achieved since 2016 and employees number is constantly raising, not fast but in a sustainable healthy way, I would say. There also have been a few attempts to make money through new way, I remember the Nextcloud Box, failing because WDLabs was being closed , however, it shows that there is an agile marketing and sales team that is looking out of the box of the core business model by times .
For me itâs important that Nextcloud stays the same open-source, community project that it started as a few years ago at itâs heart. Iâm absolutely positive about marketing Nextcloud-as-a-service, custom features, custom release model or support contracts to companies that need the guarantee of an ever-running service with included support for their business. Exactly as they already do. What counts for me is only the fact that I can run nextcloud on my own box without a big company behind it thatâs interested in analyzing my data. Thatâs at least my anchor of trust. As soon as Nextcloud would move to a business model that only comes somewhat near to making profit out of userâs data on self-hosted instances, Iâd move away from Nextcloud. So I hope, and Iâm confident, that this will never be the case.
You know what I think would make Nextcloud absolutely KILLER as a groupware application?
Dedicated, first-party support for the External Websites application (done) and an effective kerberos implemenentation. That way, you could spin up other web applications and easily integrate them into Nextcloud with a transparent single-sign-on solution - user logs into Nextcloud, Nextcloud passes kerberos token to the applications piped in via the âexternal sitesâ plugin.
This would allow system administrators to give their teams the best versions of applications (your chat app is great, Nextcloud, but MatterMost, Rocket.Chat, and Zulip are better, etc) while having users essentially enjoy a fully-integrated, seamless experience.
I would suggest that many who choose Nextcloud do it in order to get AWAY from tech giants like Microsoft. âPlaying Ballâ with Microsoft is going to force many to find an alternative to NextCloud.
Remember Microsoftâs âTriple Eâ: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
So if youâre a NextCloud stockholder, this is a good development in the short run. But if you are a fan of open software, this is the first nail in the coffin.
James White, CEO
Xeata, Inc.
Toronto, Canada
my 2ct here:
I see NC being torn between 2 lovers⌠On one hand they NEEED some companies paying for professional support on the other hand, at least that was my impression through last 3 years here on the forum, they had never forgot about their community. Never.
And thus⌠this dance on two volcanos has the power of getting NC too diverse in the end. Like bigger companies or even governements with 10s of thousands of users have a different approach to a software like NC than the common home-user. Of course both want to get away from MS and Google and Apple and what not spying on their data, selling them.
But the usecases for those two user-groups are very different. While bigger companies usually wonât hesitate to buy more hardware and manpower (if needed) to make their systems run like butter in the sun the common homeuser might think twice about buying new hardware âŚ
So right now NC tries to be both⌠made for big companies and made for homeusers.
So for me NC20 and what I got from it so far is another step towards homeusers (they might outnumber companie which bought support from NC GmbH by far but usually they wonât gain NC any income). Why? Easy⌠because they just try to be the missing link between several existing services⌠Which could be important. For homeusers. They even opened a new API (or better: defined it better) for being ready for more community(-driven) apps.
No company would need the dashboard since all of them would have their own and NC being jusdt one shark in a sea of different fishes.
So for me itâs resonable to say that NC spends money and effort on trying to stay relevant for homeusers as well.
Someone (@rakekniven) asked in the beginning: where do you see NC in 2025? I wouldnât be surprised to see NC going the way of becoming more and more like an own operating system (the new dashboard for me hints into that direction⌠since it was made as being a new daily landing page for every (home-)user. Easy to install, easy to maintain, being the missing link between several internet-services, being focussed on privacy and safe sharing.
Of course thatâs a long road to go. And if they only manage to go there half way it would be pretty much, already.
I am ready for it.
NB: I donât really understand why some of you seem to have cramps about NC trying to get MS-Office users? NC doesnât want ppl to buy MS-licences⌠not at all⌠but they are acknowledging that there is a world outside driven by MS-products. So why not integrated them in a way that ppl could communicate with each other and make the most of both worlds?
NB2: Pls take into consideration that Iâm no insider to and am not working for NC GmbH.
I donât see it this wayâŚ
The only successful anti-Microsoft company is Apple.
If you plan to do everything in-house, from nuts to bolts, âmany will find an alternative to NextCloudâ the moment their offices move out of the basementâŚ
I originally deleted this because I realized I replied to a post that wasnât active but seeing at this became active again, Iâll post it again:
Glad that youâre happy with this release.
That implementation began when I added Nextcloud Talk support to Matterbridge and we realized that we could integrate that into Talk to get chat integration with many other platforms.
The dashboard was started because Nextcloud had grown beyond being just a file storage system so we wanted an interface that reflected that. There are longer term plans to make large changes but they are pretty much never secret (it does happen rarely).
If we have a longer term plan, you will most likely find that entire plan either on the Nextcloud org on GitHub or on this forum. For example, you can see everything we went through in designing and developing the dashboard on GitHub: Dashboard overview ¡ Issue #20930 ¡ nextcloud/server ¡ GitHub
@MichaIng is very correct when they say that Nextcloud development is very community driven. Out of the stuff that was announced in Nextcloud 20, Iâd say around 15-30% of the new features were developed by people not employed by Nextcloud GmbH. Yes, most of the most active contributors are employees, but youâll notice very quick that some of the really active members are not employees.
To be clear, I am not employed by Nextcloud GmbH.
I am. Despite many posters thinking otherwiseâŚ
I have nothing against new functionality, community driven development etc.
I just donât want to see all of that being part of the base install (core)⌠Thatâs itâŚ
Iâm not sure if supporting both commercial users and home users means to âdance on two volcanoesâ. In my eyes, thatâs a perfectly doable situation - because of modularity. Companies that have computing power to run all the features they need in the cloud can add them through apps. Home users who just want to have a decent file sharing service that runs on their Raspberry Pi will just go for the core install. It has been this way so far, and I donât see why this should change.
I hope, Nextcloud wonât become their own operating system. In that case Iâd need to stop using it. Because thatâs what makes Nextcloud so great - it integrates with other services, it does not try to replace them to become a fully-contained ecosystem that can only be used completely or not used at all. E.g. Iâm glad I can install Nextcloud as just another app in my Apache server, next to other apps Iâm hosting and other apps Iâm using on my PC. Of course itâs great that Nextcloud is already capable of so much more than just file sharing - but itâs even better that I donât have to use it for everything and rather decide on my own.
Here is a good summary about whatâs at stake with regards to EU-US âdigital relationshipâ
There are more differences than similarities at the moment when talking about strategy, but considering the pandemic hole the world economy is finding itself in, it would be in both partiesâ interest to find a resolution to this stand-offâŚ
Going to the wireâŚ
Note: âPass new lawsâ, not âStop collecting dataââŚ
The famous Henry Kissinger quote comes to mind:
âThe illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.â