Technically, Onlyoffice wouldn’t be that bad, but their shady practices make it pretty unattractive actually. There is a 20 user limit already, why take away mobile editing?
Simply put, they were a closed source company not that long ago and probably thought “oh, we go OSS now (a little bit, at least) to have a new USP”, but seeing their non-interaction with any kind of community they have (or rather not) they are not really into OSS anyway.
Get rich or die trying
Regardless what it takes…
It seems like they want to sell their “Home Server” now for 99€ with 10 users included:
I fear that you are right. The commit I linked above was just the first one I found, but there are several others linked to the same change - and their code base is pretty big.
Right now, one can revert this merge here:
But as the commenters there state, maintaining a fork will be tough.
And that is the very reason why Frank says Nextcloud “nicht leisten konnen” - can’t afford - to develop Office from scratch (the document formats are specifically mentioned)…
Sure, I never challenged that.
I can’t imagine maintaining a full fork of OnlyOffice would be feasible, unless a very significant community got behind it. Very unlikely, IMO.
The thing I’m not clear on is why LibreOffice Online wasn’t a possibility. Their downloadable build has a warning when used with over 20 connections, but they state that this is only because the Document Foundation is not interested in getting into the business of setting up and maintaining a stack for larger deployments. They point out that anyone is welcome to remove that limitation though, and it’s fully FLOSS.
I would have thought that it would be less work for Nextcloud to maintain a fully free docker stack for LibreOffice Online (the code of the application itself would barely have to be touched), than their own implementation of the open core Onlyoffice.
It would be better to make Libreoffice (the core of both LOOL and Collabora) better at what Onlyoffice does (mainly having good OOXML compatibility) to have a more sustainable future.
Yes I would agree with that. Although I’m a big fan of open formats, the ODF format is not that widely adopted, and better handling of MS formats is important. Mind you, the MS document handling of Google Docs and friends wasn’t too stellar last time I tried it.
It was mentioned the other day that Nextcloud spent a whole year working on the OnlyOffice integration. I just wonder if those man hours might have better spent improving LOOL, even if the experience isn’t yet quite as good. We’d be far less likely to be jerked around by the Document Foundation, IMO.
Good point !
The Onlyoffice people surely know what the market needs: Well supported OOXML without Microsoft and Open Source somehow as a bonus. You have MS Office everywhere, and in schools they get it for free (as in beer) aka Vendor lock-in.
Libreoffice is pretty good at a number of things, but it just doesn’t cut the corner supporting OOXML sufficiently at this time. This is sad, but a reality.
Now we have the next “religious” discussion.
Please stay on topic (title of the topic) and wait for information from NC people talking to OnlyOffice. Thank you.
Ok, and could you please drop this “religion” meme?
Thanks
The Nextcloud project investigated the possibility of integrating an office solution. The whole thing must be easy to install (no docker or other VM) and has chosen OnlyOffice. A lot of developer time was invested in the implementation.
If it is now written here that it would be better to have chosen a different solution, the technical and project relevant decision of Nextcloud must be respected.
Now a word from me to the people who have been posting intensively, critically and sometimes negatively about the project direction of Nextcloud for days: Where is your contribution to Nextcloud? The project needs all the help it can get. Coding, Issue maintenance at GitHub, help users here, translate Nextcloud to your native language.
The current time is very serious and full of worries. Please don’t look at everything negatively, the project is something great, free and the competitors (closed source at all) are just too powerful.
I wish you all health, optimism and fun in life. I’m leaving this discussion here (and the other one as well) and do something positive for me.
Ok, well, if you’re posing questions to me on that front, I guess off-topic is OK again?
I’m not going to get into into this all over again, or all the attempts to make it about me, rather than the issues. If I’ve posted a lot over the last few days, that’s because of a couple of things - firstly another moderator took one of my posts and turned into a new thread. I then got loads of comments from several people, so I replied and rebutted quite a lot. Then Jos turned up and went on a bit of a posting spree, replying to a number of my past arguments, so those debates opened up again.
It’s not that I’ve suddenly gone on a mission.
In this thread, since people were talking about forks and other options, I just put my 2 cents in, because these are the sort of predictable problems you get with open core projects, and sort of underlined some of the points I’ve made. That’s all.
Happy to leave it there and to get back on topic.
I was on the starting blocks when you (Nextcloud GmbH) embrased Collabora among LibreOffice Online.
I wrote some HOW TO to export Collabora Docker, to stop the limitation, then thanks to @husisusi a script to auto compile LibreOffice Online without limitation. I help a lot of users to have Nc and OnlyOffice Docker on the same host.
I get critical about those choices but i always stand strong in my choice of freedom. I get very critical on the desktop client that were more buggy than the previous version, but i always help, always found solutions.
This nice move of OnlyOffice is just a new warning about the trust we can put in this choice.
We’re all in confinement, so lets make a better world. Lets look at LibreOffice Online again or a better solution. Lets open a funding for coding this feature (Office modification while in the Nextcloud iOS/Android app). Something that have a fair use. Like buying support if you are more than 30 simultaneous connections… i don’t know but : Community it’s time to be active, it’s time share what we would like.
EDIT : I also work on the Translation with Transiflex - Also on Github
I believe many others are in my situation which is that I don’t think I have the technical skills to give a significant push forward into the project. However, I would be willing to give my part and fund it to see it come to life.
Here is a quote from the github discussion about this last move (posted by @galegod)
If nothing else makes perfect financial sense.
And that bolded (by me) part means one thing: OO’s inclusion into NC 18 Hub did NOT come with any financial contributions to the OO project by NC.
In other words, OO sees the “deal” with NC the same way as NC sees its deal with NEC for example: the provider wants to be paid!
Therefore, either NC will “contribute” to the development of OO or its features will be “castrated”…
As a side note: Russian-run software companies are on a roll lately.
F5 acquired NGINX last year; Veeam sold to Insight Partners…
Both successful Russian software projects.
Based on the names of github contributors and PR people, OO is also Russian originated…
I think that’s misunderstanding what the bolded part is referring to. I think that’s a reference to people that wanted to exercise their open source rights, and remove the restrictions OnlyOffice creates for non-paying users. OnlyOffice doesn’t like this, because they want to be a freemium product, while also claiming to be open source.
I’m sure they’re not referring to Nextcloud, with whom this integration was done in partnership. Nextcloud resells their proprietary licenses, and they both profit from that. They’ve suddenly started responding on github, and taking a conciliatory tone, and I’m sure that’s in large part because of pressure applied by Nextcloud, who know this type of behaviour is not going to go down well with their community.
The more sad about that is that @jospoortvliet told this feature was a 1 year job to be done.
When reading the dev opinion about this issue, i get really upset.
For her it’s really normal what happened here. It’s like this feature didn’t meant to be community from the beginning. It was a mistake, now we corrected it. Sorry form the misleading you get, but editing inside the app is for the paid version. Oh and by the way we just release a some server version for 99$ only ! 10 connections, 1 year update, lifetime duration.
