As a company we use ownCloud at the moment. We want to migrate to Nextcloud soon.
At the moment Nextclouds Maintenance and Release-Schedule does not contain any EOL entries.
So I would like to second, that an up to date Maintenance and Release-Schedule like the one existing for ownCloud would be helpful to plan our updates and support.
Thanks.
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We donāt have a public plan yet but right now the plan is to offer support for 1 release plus some months to migrate. So we would soon drop support for Nextcloud 9. Again, preliminary plan.
Customers can of course purchase our promised up-to-15-year support and updates.
OK. Thanks for the answer. From what I can see on Maintenance and Release-Schedule the NC-Releases come out roughly every 4-5 months. Is that the planned cycle? That would mean that we would have to upgrade roughly every half year to have security support. That is quiet frequently looking at that we would have to test, inform users, maybe update documentation, have downtime, take risks that still after testing something breaks due to the update.
Is there a LTS-version planned and if so an ETA when it will be released?
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@TomFernandes every release is essentially LTS for customers - we offer 10 years support to business users. For home users, who donāt have a lot of users to inform and documentation to update, a faster cycle means features faster so for them it is fine. I guess weāll discuss details at the January hackathon, this is pretty much my opinion on how it should go - not decided at all!
To get things clear: you mean, that with a support contract we could (if it goes the the way you think it should go) stay on e.g. NC 11 and you (the company I purchased the support contract from) would provide us with security-updates for that release for e.g. 10 years?
That is correct. It is one of the main benefits of a support contract. It goes up to 15 year, I believe, though it depends a bit on platform/OS releases. Our goal is to maintain Nextcloud releases in alignment with RHEL and SLES releases, so you can pick a platform (RHEL 7) and a Nc release (eg 11, 12 etc) and stay on it until the end of the lifetime of the platform. As RHEL and SLES are typically supported for 5-15 year, we support Nc for that long, too.
Oh, thatās very interesting. Iād of course prefer some kind of free LTS-version 
but from a marketing point of view this makes very much sense. Thanks for clarification. Iād be grateful if the final decision from the hackathon will be pushed to this thread or to a newsletter or so.
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Note that FOR SURE we offer 10-15 year support to our customers, that was decided when we started the company. So if you need that you should contact sales anyhow 
The only open question is how long the support will be for free. There wonāt be an LTS release, 99% sure, but maybe we will support versions for longer than 6 months for free. Maybeā¦
That would be a huge drawback for me. I try to avoid all x.0 releases, there are usually bugs and 3rd-party apps need some time to release a suitable version. This effectively cuts the time down to 5 months. Currently, Iām doing major upgrades every 9-12 months (I updated through some major versions). Major versions come with a lot of changes, e.g. NC 11 removes php support for versions <5.6, in some cases you need to update the underlying operating system or even exchange devices (NAS boxes) or find other solutions.
The risk is that many people end up using unsupported nextcloud versions.
Sadly, weāve done statistics on usage a few times and you wonāt believe the number of people on a release like ownCloud 8.0.2 or something like that. Totally insecure and full of known and fixed bugsā¦
Our plan is to work towards an auto-updating Nextcloud. That would need a lot of testing and work and I suspect we will keep releases around a bit longer until we get there. Remember, weāre talking about proposals/thoughts here, not plans. Youāre right that there are serious drawbacks for some users and we want to avoid that, of course. Maybe a 9-12 month lifecycle is fine, if we offer customers 3-5-10 years.
The auto-updating in web browsers works really good. That was often a huge problem that people didnāt update their browser and plugins. But since they have this auto-update in place and they also disable extensions and plugin with security problems (e.g. flash), that is really a huge step forward.
For Nextcloud this would be a huge step. Updates were very problematic and first we need to make sure that the process works better and more reliable (the new updater app is a large improvement). I was hoping we get all the release cycles and update procedures (e.g. skip major upgrades) in such a way that Linux distributions can easily package Nextcloud. Then it would be very easy for all the Linux users to just use an apt-get/yum/whatever update which they are already used to run on a regular basis.
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apt-get/yum/whatever will be the best option.
@jospoortvliet Are there any news about the general (free) support period for a release? Maintenance-and-Release-Schedule still does not show an end-of-life date.
We donāt have a public plan yet but right now the plan is to offer support for 1 release plus some months to migrate. So we would soon drop support for Nextcloud 9. Again, preliminary plan.
[ā¦]
The only open question is how long the support will be for free. There wonāt be an LTS release, 99% sure, but maybe we will support versions for longer than 6 months for free. Maybeā¦
Version 9 is supported for year now, NC 10 for 7 months now and NC 12 is approaching (which is all great!).
But not being clear about when support will be dropped creates uncertainty, as one is not able to plan/predict upgrades well.
It would be helpful if the project would have the same clarity about the EOL like it has about the release schedule 
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Found this thread while doing some research on how we can migrate Mail-in-a-Box from ownCloud to Nextcloud which is what many users in that community suggested.
The situation with MIAB for instance is that itās running on Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS which is still officially supported by Ubuntu until April 2019. 14.04 however only ships PHP 5.5 which makes it unsuitable for Nextcloud 11+ unless PHP is upgraded manually.
I agree that it would be great to have an official commitment by the Nextcloud team on EOL policy. Even if itās āwe will only support the current release for non-paying usersā that would be much better than no info.
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Yeah, I know we should bring some clarity in this. We simply havenāt discussed it extensively - but I would expect that Nc 9 will not be supported long after 12 is out. How it goes in the future I really canāt say. It in part depends on if businesses are willing to pay for support or if many/most donāt want to. If companies donāt contribute it becomes hard to keep everything free, of course.
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Makes sense. Thanks for the update!
If a company decides to pay for support of a version, will the support updates only provided for this company or to everybody?
Another option could be crowd-funding: Letās suppose that NC provides a 12 month support, then each additional year costs e.g. $1000 (cheapest subscription is 1900 ā¬). Would there be enough people that the contribution of everyone is acceptable?
Thanks for the update, @jospoortvliet.
Re paid support: Think about affordable voluntary subscriptions for individuals, too. You might be surprised by how many users would be happy to pay 5-10 ā¬/$/Ā£ per month for a good cause and in sum it could make a difference. </off-topic>
Well it isnāt about just paying one guy to do security fixes. It is about providing a model to earn for Nextcloud so we can pay people to improve itā¦
We want to develop Nextcloud, add features, make it better. But nobody will ever pay for that directly because what we do is open source. Nobody pays us for the features we add, that requires licensing. That would be consulting and we canāt develop a product that way (nobody can). Instead, we need a model like Red Hat has: you pay for support (patches, LTS etc) and services (3rd level help desk, essentially). That then pays for development. RH keeps a lot of the documentation behind closed doors and has a āenterprise editionā (RHEL) and, indeed, 3rd level support. They donāt support Fedora for more than 6 monthsā¦ Of course you can get longer support via CentOS but that is never as official or secure as the āreal dealā - no guarantees.
So if we follow that model we stop publishing most of our documentation and support only for one release. We donāt really want that - would make a lot of people unhappy, including us. But we will have to see if it is possible to keep not doing that. I know quite a few companies, universities etc that simply tell us: I have no need to pay you, your forums and documentation are excellent! Well, thanks for the compliment, but we have to stop developing software if everyone does that 
Hey, no disaster, we are still hiring etcetera, but we want to grow to a 500 people company so we have to find ways to for example get an average of 80% of the companies with more than 500 users that use our product to pay, ideally in a way that is nice, not evil. Because if we only get 10% to pay we can not develop Nextcloud anywhere near as fast as we could with 80%ā¦
I [quote=ātflidd, post:20, topic:2508ā]
Another option could be crowd-funding: Letās suppose that NC provides a 12 month support, then each additional year costs e.g. $1000 (cheapest subscription is 1900 ā¬). Would there be enough people that the contribution of everyone is acceptable?
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Well it of course doesnāt cost Eur 1000, it cost waaaay more. And again - factor in the cost of actual development.
Letās just make a simplified calculation. We now have about 30 people on the payroll. Letās assume they earn 60K/year. So we need 1.8 million per year right now to break even. And that is not including travel for meetings, going to conferences, sponsoring community members, doing marketing or sales, paying for our servers or anything elseā¦ A more realistic number is closer to 3 million. And remember, we want to grow, hire more people and speed up development.
You see any way to get to that amount of money with home users? I donāt
Just calculate. 6K newsletter subscribers we have. Say each pays 100 euro each year (not that that will ever happen, right?). How much is that? A tiny start at best 
Fact is - we need to focus on businesses, as they can afford to pay for development. After all, they sponsor Microsoft and Apple and many others
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