Proprietary Enterprise version

Back to the question read perhaps

And yes you can pay for support and additional software.

Yup. As I said - the difference is so minimal, it boils down to the theme :wink: Yes, we might increase the difference some day if there would be things that are bad for home users but good for businesses for example*, but it isnā€™t anything like fedora vs RHEL.

For example: Nextcloud Enterprise does NOT try to install ONLYOFFICE. if a customer wants that, they should at LEAST get the docker version :wink: Nobody should use this build in solution for more than 10-15 users, itā€™ll be slow. And our customers have sysadmins who can handle docker. This office integration is a typical example where we did something SOLELY for private users.

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Hum, sorry, what is HU/SBO? Small/medium enterprises? Yeah, our idea is that people like @Nemskiller should be able to get a partnership contract with us - for the small type of customers he has, we want to be very cheap or even free. Now at the moment, we donā€™t have a really good offer there. We DO have something better than ā€œbuy a 50 user contract for each of your customersā€, by the way, we let partners buy support per 500 users at a much lower rate. But at the moment our sales team just doesnā€™t have time to handle hundreds of these small partners and discuss with them, which I personally find very frustrating and sad but we have to make choices in where we spend our time. (it is also why we are hiring sales people including sales engineers, pls help us find people!) That is also why I would not want to be and did not mean to be negative about what he does, his business, and similar ones - and he should not expect an email from us about him abusing our trademarks or something like that.

And there are 100s of people like @Nemskiller who do a genuinely fair job at taking care of the Nextcloud of a local bakery for example. And with our focus on larger customers, we donā€™t even WANT to try and compete with such people. But for every 100 @Nemskiller people, there are 1 or 2 companies that with a straight face tell a 10.000 people company that they can set up and maintain a Nextcloud just as well as we could, and they donā€™t need to pay us. And if we contact them to discuss a partnership, they will straight up tell us what one of them said to our head of sales:

Look, we can solve most problems. And when we canā€™t, we just ask your engineers on github, and they often reply very fast. And if they donā€™t, we just tell the customer we canā€™t fix it. Yes, some walk away, but most donā€™t have such problems, and we donā€™t have to pay you anything.

Which is of course exactly the kind of dishonest business I was describing early, resulting in some of their customers coming to us asking if we can please please helpā€¦ Oh, and these companies - yes, they are cheaper than us. That is easy. They donā€™t actually employ developers, they donā€™t contribute to the product, they are sysadmins. And our partners are sysadmins too, customers need sysadmins. But they also need somebody who can actually fix the hard issuesā€¦

Anyway, Iā€™m now repeating myself :smiley:

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@jospoortvliet Thank you for this kind of insights :+1:

Makes it easier to understand some behaviour of people on github/this forum and Nextcloud GmbH.

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Wrong.

All of this is an evasion of the point, and an attempt to dismiss those pointing out the contradictions by inventing a tale about our motivations, entitlement, and ā€œdishonest companiesā€(!). In my case, your imaginary cynical narrative is very wide of the mark. As it happens, I am retired, but I do some voluntary work for a number of organisations, including helping them select and set up their open source software.

If we strip away the aspersions and PR spin, you actually confirm the point at hand ā€“ that Nextcloud now has a separate proprietary version, against your own ā€œValues Statementā€ and all the talk of the past.

Whatā€™s happened here now seems sadly obvious. At the time of splitting from Owncloud, the rhetoric was all about the evils of open core and proprietary versions. That played extremely well to those of us that believe itā€™s important to stick to truly open source software, and not get locked into open core solutions. But, now that position is no longer useful, there is a hard pivot to rhetoric defending those things, and denigrating anyone who calls this out as entitled leeches.

Sadly, I am not at all surprised by your suggested solution of banning me and shutting down the conversation. You may think you are helping the situation with your approach, but, FWIW, I can tell you that the people Iā€™ve shown your responses have been quite shocked. You can ban me if you wish, but Nextcloudā€™s recent conduct is now being discussed outside this forum. I think your attitude has been extremely unhelpful for Nextcloudā€™s reputation.

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@Semjel I have to tell you that I have one personal problem with what you write in the forum.

It is true that your repeated questions helped to clarify some aspects on the license and on the strategy of Nextcloud GmbH. Without those questions we possibly would have had less answers from them. This does not mean that I do not appreciate all the details that @jospoortvliet gave us and the time he spent in answering, yet I also acknowledge the value of the questions and the importance of principles.

At the same time it is also true that your tones make me less willing to read the forum and to log in.

For example I do not get the exact purpose of your last answer. I have the impression that now the positions of everyone are clear.
What are you looking for? Do you want repentanceā€¦?
You yourself say that you are actively talking in a negative way both inside and outside the forum. It is clearly your right, but it is not a situation that can last for a long time (clearly IMHO).

If the responses of Nextcloud do not/will not satisfy you maybe you could leave and try to find a better community.
If you still think that you can contribute to steer the community, than this has a meaningā€¦

Let me stress the fact that I am NOT at all involved with Nextcloud GmbH, I am just a simple member of the community.

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I would love to have a council of Community Users that addresses whatā€™s 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 :disappointed: by the lack of clear communication thoses months by the Nextcloud team. They faced (still) issues but they donā€™t 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. (Itā€™s 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 donā€™t 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 isnā€™t really the good place for that, and this Discorse also but we need to have more discussion between Ā« US Ā».

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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 ā€œhype 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 Iā€™m 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 :upside_down_face: 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, Iā€™m open to brainstorm it.

And now I stop. I do not want to be boring ā€¦ :wink:

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Good idea ! It could be a nice start

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I donā€™t 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, donā€™t provide anything until there is one?

The NC conference is a good connection point, Iā€™ve been there with other community members and we are welcome there as well even though not many participate. Unfortunately, itā€™s only once a year and not everybody can make it. Perhaps it we could establish something more regular. Normally, Iā€™d say itā€™s great to meet in person first but thatā€™s a bit difficult at the momentā€¦

LibreOffice Online the base of Collabora Online is totally free and open source.
You can compile it easily and remove the 10 simultaneous connections

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As a general thought - NC is good enough to be (very) useful and can satisfy myriad of use cases.
What I really didnā€™t 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 canā€™t use an external one-time password system like privacyIDEA the old way anymoreā€¦

But since I havenā€™t read about it on this forum, I guess Iā€™m 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€¦

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Cool. And there is no app or something like that for Nextcloud?

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.

Iā€™m just sad that NC didnā€™t team with LOOL and prefer work with Collabora (open core) and then OnlyOffice.

To be honest my client use OnlyOffice DocumentServer from docker because of the ease of dĆ©ploiement. They use the 20 users limitation. They never touch it because the app isnā€™t used so much.

Again iā€™m just thinking on FOSS point of view.

EDIT : now that i have more time to spend, i will give another look at LOOL. If it worth it i will share that with the community

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Well, if my tone has become harsher, thatā€™s because I find the responses Iā€™ve 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. Iā€™m not above getting annoyed by repeated mischaracterization, Iā€™m afraid, but I really donā€™t think anything Iā€™ve said rises to offenses in need of moderation.

In terms of negativity, I think thatā€™s 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 weā€™re 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 Iā€™m coming from.

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In this case, Iā€™m talking about Nextcloud itself (although the distinction is blurred now that open core software is part of Nextcloud hub). Itā€™s 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.

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Itā€™s NOT about people not getting what you are after. Itā€™s about people NOT willing to join in your crusade. There can be only one Richard Stallman. And if you donā€™t get it by now - you wonā€™tā€¦

Insisting that plugging external VoIP systems into Nextcloud is ā€œkey 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 didnā€™t like that either. However, many seem to like this Nextcloud-hub and the pre-built online office. Iā€™d prefer a fully open community version and @Nemskiller showed that there is an alternative, so letā€™s shut up and try to get it work.

Regarding the enterprise version, this proprietary marketing stuff doesnā€™t sound great but if there are no differences? And in the end, if they donā€™t violate the license, there is not much we can do. We should care what functions are available, how good they work, ā€¦

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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€¦

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