I would love to have a council of Community Users that addresses whatās good in Nextcloud, what can be good as further development, what is wrong and to be listened by the Nextcloud inc.
In order to have a strong link together and to really know what is the main line Nextcloud inc. want to follow.
I get pretty sad by the lack of clear communication thoses months by the Nextcloud team. They faced (still) issues but they donāt really speak about them.
Like the problems with the disagreements between the community and the devs about the Nextcloud Virtual Drive Client.
The postpone of NC Virtual Drive Client and the lack of explaining about that
the so long bugs that had client v.2.5.X to v.2.6.3ā¦ Now everything is much better with v.2.6.4
the crisis with the solution of embrase OnlyOffice in Nextcloud Hub (18) and the entry of open core philosophy.
the New Photos App that replaced Gallery without a lot of features and broke some workflow of some clients. (Itās better now and should be totally repaired in 18.0.3)
We get some news times to times from @jospoortvliet, but his answer comes late most of the time or donāt start a dialogue between Nextcloud and the community.
I really love Nextcloud in his core function : Sync files ! It does it right. I love the Contacts / Calendars App using Dav.
Please be open to dialogue with the community. Github isnāt really the good place for that, and this Discorse also but we need to have more discussion between Ā« US Ā».
I have to thank @jospoortvliet for the like, yet I understand what @Nemskiller says about the communication problem.
I find ironic that, in my opinion, most of the point raised by him are secrets in plain sight.
Following a bit Github, even if I am not a programmer, I sort of knew that Nextcloud 18 was a bit revolutionary (and not evolutive). This both for the photo app and for the calendar app.
The photo app was a brand new app to replace an old (and tested) one.
Following the discussions in Github I can see that now you are thinking to realize features long asked in the gallery app and deemed impossible. It is clear that in the first version some important functionalities skipped; this should not happen and you @jospoortvliet explained the problem.
Yet maybe a better communication could be possible. I do understand that you need a bit of hype for marketing reasons, this is needed for you to get more clients and it translates to new features developed for my cloud. I also do understand that you try to maintain the right compromise between developing in plain sight and having material for the āhype effectā. Maybe a guideline in the forum on how to deal whit x.0 versions could help.
As a comparison (and @georgehrke can correct me if Iām wrong ) I have the impression that also calendar 2.0 was a revolution, both in the frontend and in the backend. Reading the forums it seems to me that it was a silk revolution. This means that if you are too good nobody notices but does not deny that better communication could maybe help.
I do not mean more communication. For example I have the impression that you gave a lot of information on the client but not in the right way. I understand that maybe it is simply a difficult problemā¦
I have the certainty that communication on Virtual Drive and encryption is lacking. You have issues, could you please let us know if we have to wait or notā¦?
I am lucky because I do not NEED one of those features, yet I can understand the frustrations of the users waiting for them.
Maybe, as you are trying to have your contributors week in remote, you could try to involve a selection of representative forum users for discussion and suggestionsā¦ This could lead to something useful. @jospoortvliet this is just a proposal and I myself understand some potential defects in it.
If you like, Iām open to brainstorm it.
I donāt think it is a good idea to point out people suggesting what they are doing without actually knowing it. But the way you appeared, you mainly participated in topics to criticize points of Nextcloud (or the part I got aware of recently, excuse me if I missed something), most users setting up different installations, mostly come around problems, submit bug reports, or do even pull request, improve documentation when they find errors.
Are there online office solution that are fully free? If not, what is the alternative, donāt provide anything until there is one?
The NC conference is a good connection point, Iāve been there with other community members and we are welcome there as well even though not many participate. Unfortunately, itās only once a year and not everybody can make it. Perhaps it we could establish something more regular. Normally, Iād say itās great to meet in person first but thatās a bit difficult at the momentā¦
As a general thought - NC is good enough to be (very) useful and can satisfy myriad of use cases.
What I really didnāt like is offering documentation (!) to enterprise customers only
and the lame explanation why this was done
Please note, this was done shortly after NC changed its authentication system and you canāt use an external one-time password system like privacyIDEA the old way anymoreā¦
But since I havenāt read about it on this forum, I guess Iām in minority paying attention to those thingsā¦
Why? Just use the standalone OO server! Give it as much resources as needed.
Both - Nextcloud and OO - as virtual machines, running on the same host (maybe more than one NC)ā¦ There are many more enterprises using virtualization technology than containers. Probably by an order of magnitudeā¦
Yes there is, it works with the collabora apps.
I stopped using it because of the difficulty to update it.
The road is long but the way is free with libreoffice online.
Iām just sad that NC didnāt team with LOOL and prefer work with Collabora (open core) and then OnlyOffice.
Well, if my tone has become harsher, thatās because I find the responses Iāve received pretty provocative - trying to twist away from the issue at hand by impugning the motives of those of us raising the problem, and attempting to reframe a commitment not to do proprietary versions by turning it into a narrative about entitled users wanting things for free. I find that highly cynical. I think calling for me to be blocked is pretty hostile, too! I understand they would like this to just go away, but that is not the way to do it, IMO. Iām not above getting annoyed by repeated mischaracterization, Iām afraid, but I really donāt think anything Iāve said rises to offenses in need of moderation.
In terms of negativity, I think thatās a misunderstanding. A negative response to a problematic development is not intended to be ultimately negative - very often companies (and people) need negative feedback in order to course-correct, which is the ultimate hope. That is probably a forlorn hope at this stage, but, many of us moved to using (and promoting) Nextcloud on the basis of the rhetoric and promises made at the time. At this point, it feels like something of a bait and switch, and when I see the disingenuous spin weāre given to justify it, I do want to challenge it.
Perhaps one positive change that could be made is to remove the commitment not to do proprietary versions and open core from the Values Statement, along with the claim that Nextcloud is 100% open source. At this point, that is clearly misleading, and may affect the choices of people comparing the various solutions out there.
I really do wish more people would watch that FOSDEM talk I linked to earlier, to get a better sense of where Iām coming from.
In this case, Iām talking about Nextcloud itself (although the distinction is blurred now that open core software is part of Nextcloud hub). Itās confirmed now that Nextcloud has a proprietary version that differs from the community version, and that may differ more in the future. Again, if we watch that FOSDEM talk from just 2018 (and for those of us that remember things said in the past), it is explicitly spelled out how this is a problem, how projects that do this differ from true community open source projects, and how this is something Nextcloud does not do.
Itās NOT about people not getting what you are after. Itās about people NOT willing to join in your crusade. There can be only one Richard Stallman. And if you donāt get it by now - you wonātā¦
Insisting that plugging external VoIP systems into Nextcloud is ākey functionalityā is simply lameā¦
I think there is some money reason that make Talk and OnlyOffice open core apps inside Nextcloud hub.
I saw recently that Jitsi is getting out of the wood because of the covid19. Maybe it could make better than Talk ? I have to investigate, does Jitsi really open source ? What technology it uses ? Can it be interfaced with Nextcloud ?
To be honest, I didnāt like that either. However, many seem to like this Nextcloud-hub and the pre-built online office. Iād prefer a fully open community version and @Nemskiller showed that there is an alternative, so letās shut up and try to get it work.
Regarding the enterprise version, this proprietary marketing stuff doesnāt sound great but if there are no differences? And in the end, if they donāt violate the license, there is not much we can do. We should care what functions are available, how good they work, ā¦
My understanding is, Nextcloud decided to play in the big boys league, Microsoft and Google.
And that means the whole stack including office apps and communication - messaging, audio, video-conferencing, etc. Maybe they get gobbled up by someone like IBMā¦
For example, Google Voice was free and allowed VoIP devices to plug in for years.
But in August 2019 the XMPP was killed and commercial GV services introducedā¦
The trouble is, they confirmed that there are differences, and there may be more going forward. I do think itās significant that there is now a different proprietary build, however great or small that difference is claimed to be. It seems to me that potential customers are led to believe that the difference is important, while the community is assured that the differences are trivial.
When you say that thereās nothing we can do, and we should just focus on the features that are permitted to the community, you may be right. But, we are then dealing with another self-hosted cloud software with a community version and a proprietary version, and there are several of those. Owncloud itself only restricts the features it deems to be for enterprise needs, and many of the arguments now made here would apply over there. If Nextcloud is to move in that direction, then it loses that (in my mind) huge advantage of being 100% open source, and I think we ought to be clear about that.
Just to be clear, we still support Collabora and work with it. It is just technically much, MUCH harder to integrate Collabora the same way as we now did with ONLYOFFICE. And believe me, everybody we talked to already told us that what we wanted (make one of these two office solutions just work out of the box without docker or reverse proxy stuff) was IMPOSSIBLE. Seriously, everybody said that, including the people at Collabora and ONLYOFFICE. And it did take a year of work, that is a significant investment for a small company like ours. Especially for something that makes us no money, and never will, because it is purely for home users. Again, I assume business users have the people, time and expertise to run a single docker container and set up a reverse proxyā¦ but a private user like myself does not, and for a private user this rocks.
But we would love to make this work with Collabora, too, believe me. We will put in effort, if we can, and weāve talked to them already about it - multiple times even. And weāre not done talking, so stay tuned
(and yes, they were our first choice. But technically, ONLYOFFICE was doable, Collabora really impossible. Maybe we can still change thatā¦)
Jos ! I hope you see the last post about that OnlyOffice donāt support anymore editing files from the Mobile NextCloud.
It disgusts me a lot.
You work a lot for this.
It worked
You advertise about this feature
And now they took it back form the standard users.
Do you have plan about that (sorry that off topic but we can continue here OnlyOffice removed mobile editing from version 5.5.0 of Community Document Server )
So you conflate a few things, which resulted in some grumpy replies from myself. Sorry for that.
First, open core in ONLYOFFICE. When we started working on the integration, the two releases (the community and enterprise version) were 100% the same, except for the 20 user limit in the build for the community. But their last release, which came after we released Hub, DOES have differences. And yes, that is open core. And I am not a fan of that.
But we canāt control that, they have the copyright and the right to do that. It does not make their community edition worse, and if they would make it worse anyone could submit patches and make it better - that community edition is still protected by the open source license. We would certainly look to see if we can integrate another office suite (see my reply before) and as community we can of course also consider a fork. Not sure if we, as in Nextcloud GmbH, would be happy to fork ONLYOFFICE - they are a partner, and friends, and it would be a LOT of work just to keep it working, let alone improve it. Any idea how much work it is to maintain an office suite? It is INSANE. But in principle, I agree with you it isnāt great that there is now a feature difference between enterprise and private version.
Then again, we didnāt know this was coming, we didnāt plan for it and we still deliver now a great office suite, the fact there there is a version of it available with some more features doensāt make what we deliver any worse. And if another office suite comes out that is open source and better, maybe we can integrate that.
You note that you think it would be better to not have something than to have this open core product integrated - that I personally disagree with, but I think we can agree to disagree on that one. It is a matter of pragmatism, and we at Nextcloud tend to be very pragmatic.
Second, about Nextcloud and open core - the code we build and everything else around it is not open core. That is NOT an opinon but a fact: it CAN NOT legally be open core. We donāt have the copyright on Nextcloud. Our employees keep their own copyright, so do contributors - without a CLA there is no open core. So please stop claiming that, it is nonsense. The AGPL sets the rules for how we play, and we follow those rules. That is 100% open source. The AGPL does not require us to do releases, it does not block anyone from making a special build like RHEL does with Fedora and we do with our enterprise version. The difference between open core and AGPL is that the playing field is level: YOU can make a special build of Nextcloud. And everyone else can. And everyone is allowed to do that. And you have no right to stop anyone from doing that, neither do we have that right.
That you donāt like it that some people and companies would want to make a special build which they only give to a subset of people (customers), well, sorry - but that is completely AGPL compatible. Sorry, you can disagree, but that just makes you wrong - go read on the FSF website for example, or watch the talk from myself at FOSS Backstage 2 weeks ago, I talk extensively about business models, open core and other things. Iāll put a link to that talk here as soon as I have found it
Well, the open core part relates to the Nextcloud fork of OnlyOffice. If you integrate a fork of the open part of some open core software into Nextcloud Hub (complete with the restrictions at their request), and then resell the proprietary version for those that want to lift those restrictions, I think it is quite fair to say that Nextcloud is engaging in open core for that part of the functionality ā itās just been sort of laundered through a third party.
I understand that you say this has been done as a gift for home users, but letās be honest ā it could be presented that way, but itās also a way to push people towards buying proprietary software from you. Youāve made it pretty clear that anyone needing needing more connections ought to pay up, and promoted the proprietary version.
As you do not own the copyright on the Nextcloud code, and are yourselves using it under the AGPL, are you not obliged to publish the code of the modified enterprise build you release, or is this only distributed to the customers themselves? If so, and the enterprise code is restricted to paying customers, then it seems that in practice it still the virtually the same effect as having a proprietary version (at least from the perspective of the wider community.)
by the lack of clear communication thoses months by the Nextcloud team. They faced (still) issues but they donāt really speak about them.
but does not deny that better communication could maybe help.
