Support Cycle / Number of maintained versions

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 isnā€™t 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 canā€™t 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 ā€˜enterprise editionā€™ (RHEL) and, indeed, 3rd level support. They donā€™t 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 ā€˜real dealā€™ - no guarantees.

So if we follow that model we stop publishing most of our documentation and support only for one release. We donā€™t 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 :wink:

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=ā€œtflidd, post:20, topic:2508ā€]
Another option could be crowd-funding: Letā€™s 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?
[/quote]
Well it of course doesnā€™t cost Eur 1000, it cost waaaay more. And again - factor in the cost of actual development.

Letā€™s just make a simplified calculation. We now have about 30 people on the payroll. Letā€™s 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 donā€™t :wink:

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 :frowning2:

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 :wink:

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Yeah I would join the assumption that private home users canā€™t pay the general ongoing development. But I indeed see a chance that privat users could participate in paying a certain wanted feature.

Letā€™s say there are some people that would love to see the possibility to adjust the personal page (client links, sharing and community links) via theming or a separate app/admin panel. And the priority of realising this is quite low, because of more urgent topics.
Some developer, on payroll and/or private ones that are willing to work on it, investing some additional development time on it could discuss with the community how to do it, give a realistic number of hours and a related price. On a crowd funding platform money could be gathered from private users and perhaps also the one or the other company that wanted the certain feature. And if the costs are covered in a certain time, the developers can start to realise it, otherwise it will be cancelled, so people do not pay for a feature that takes unlimited time until money is collected and development starts.

Of course that would be only possible for single more less simple features that donā€™t need too much ongoing updates/maintenance, so that the time effort is limited and roughly countable.

Yes, @Michalng - that is indeed a bit different and that is why we have bountysource!

But generally, it doesnā€™t pay for development. It pays ā€˜for a coffeeā€™ - real development of a feature quickly cost tens of thousands while most of the bounties go to a few hundred euroā€™s at best :frowning:

Ah nice, it is already there :slight_smile:. So far it is more a ā€œlift in priority a bidā€ of features, than an actual payment. I never saw this so far. I guess it could get some more response and higher payment numbers, if it is published a bid more here and there?
Okay, found it on https://nextcloud.com/contribute/. We could keep this in mind and link to it, when a certain low priority feature request appears here on the forum or on github :wink:.

I didnā€™t want to impose that the community will pay for the whole development, just a contribution to provide longer support cycles. From last versions you can see that the number of fixes drops a lot. If the consequence is that this prevents companies from subscribing to your services, then this isnā€™t worth it.

Unfortunately true. Too much money is spent on bad software.

The horrid reality to consider as well is just how ingrained Microsoft is in businesses, those that wouldnā€™t necessarily dream of running a Linux box to do file sharing and collaboration. I donā€™t see a ā€œWindows versionā€ of NC coming along soon (whether or not it can be made to work via WAMP or whatever isnā€™t the point) and so I imagine that has some impact on your enterprise penetration.

On the other hand, more and more businesses are going virtual. I donā€™t know if this is the case as I havenā€™t looked, but a fully NC-supported and developed enterprise virtual appliance (or hardware appliance) might help. I know we have the VM already, though it feels more consumer than enterprise at the moment, IMO. An iSO installer for ESX(i) screams ā€œIā€™m an enterprise applianceā€.

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What about start following the path of the big companies.
Government entities / dependencies contracts.

IMHO, creating service products, contracts and dedicated deployments programs for governments entities along with the respective lobbying to ensure those contracts would create the necessary revenue to function, and maybe enough profit to secure The Nextcloud Foundation, and community side.

I believe that Nextcloud has a leading industry product, now itā€™s time to design contracts strategies that meet itā€™s needs and start selling, because creating a great product is not enough to success on a globalized market now days, sales and legal contracts are necessary parts of the equation.

Certainly what weā€™re doing, my friend - see our https://nextcloud.com/enterprise pages. We are currently flooded with customers whom we have to sign up for support contracts. Once we get that going well we start looking for how to provide more value and invite another wave of customers to sign up :wink: right now our issue is scaling up quick enough with the demand, not having too little demand. So we have to focus on big customers (this sucks for people who want to buy a support contract for 30 users or so - I feel bad for that but we barely have time to reply to their requests).

Weā€™re still hiring btw :wink: https://nextcloud.com/jobs - we need especially sales people, especially German-speaking and knowledgeable about open source.

PS - thanks all for being so understanding! I can tell you it is frustrating sometimes not to be able to go faster faster faster and help everybody and hire 100 new developers etc etc :wink: But we hired 3 more people this month so weā€™ll get there.

FTR, the release schedule has been updated: https://github.com/nextcloud/server/wiki/Maintenance-and-Release-Schedule

Nextcloud 9 is EOL effective immediately, Nextcloud 10 will EOL in May 2017 (a few weeks).

While itā€™s perfectly understandable that the team needs to focus their attention, itā€™s sad news for everyone whoā€™s (for one reason or another) still running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS which comes with PHP 5.5 on which Nextcloud 11+ will not run (out of the box).

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Super good news, Jan! Thanks for the update! That helps us planning our updates :slight_smile: .

@jospoortvliet: Any official statement planned? People need to know as soon as possible especially if underlying software needs to be upgraded as well. 4 weeks is not very muchā€¦

Yeah, good point, we should announce this. And for 14.04 users we should consider offering a few more weeks or something like thatā€¦ I will discuss.

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Weā€™ve put it in various places like the changelog & release schedule on the wiki and the last update blog. Weā€™ll mention it also in other places (eg 12 release announcement) but donā€™t plan to do a separate blog.

FTR the release schedule has been updated again https://github.com/nextcloud/server/wiki/Maintenance-and-Release-Schedule reflecting the latest status/date on the NC11 EOL which is now set to the NC13 release date (which is probably somewhere close to end of 2017 - just a guess!)

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@jospoortvliet what about moving the EOL date for a release not to the next release but one but to the first minor version of that release.
Now the support looks like the following:
11 -> EOL Release date of 13

I would sugget the following:
11 -> EOL Release date of 13.0.1

With the current cycle we (and probably other users) would have to update roughly every 5 months because we try to never update to a major Release directly but to the first minor (bugfix/security) release of a major version. The first version of a major release has often some nasty issues which are only found, once the release has gone public (I canā€™t back prove this statement with facts right now. This is my personal overall experience with software. Please correct me if this is not the case with NC).

If the support lasts to the first minor release of a major release we would have the opportunity to stay with a release easily for (roughly) up two 10 months. Of course there may be important security issues or bugfixes affecting us which may force us to update to every minor release. But from my experience the first minor release often contains the most critical updates to a new major release and after that the issues are mostly not so urgent to update again so soon.

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Yeah, Tom, this is pretty much my thinking too and probably what weā€™re going to do :wink:

But we have to sit down and put dates on it, yes. That still has to be done, weā€™ve worked very feature-driven in the last months and we want a more time based schedule so we can make these promises. Will probably be a subject for our next hackweek in Stuttgartā€¦

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Help me understand v9 e.o.l please Jos, are we talking full loss of support and no further security patches, or just no further feature releases/backports?

Ending a prior version on the point release of the next is definitely the way to go. Looking at the state of 12 at the moment for example will likely have me waiting on 12.0.1 before updating, just to be sure my critical data is safe once the teething is over.

For nine we will certainly do no more updates at all, including security. Nobody should use it except customers. 10 will follow, probably after the 12.0.1 release yes.

Note that companies, which typically are the ones that want to stay on a specific release, can get extended life cycle support from us for a fee, up to 15 years. Maintaining old versions is boring, no volunteer wants to do it - so that has to be paid for by somebody :wink:

But patches and fixes that come as part of this support will never make it out to the community, regardless of severity.