And as Iāve said before, if you or others are very motivated to provide a free conferencing solution for large businesses, go ahead and build it. We always wanted to provide people with a private, self-hosted solution, thatās what motivates us, not helping companies save money. Free Software is about freedom, not āfree beerā. Freedom is something for people, not companies.
I personally would 10x rather spend time making Talk easier to install and adding features to it that help private users than stop doing that and building a back-end for big companies instead. I do not understand why you care so much about thatā¦
And with regards to strategy, what do you think our strategy is? Making software that costs no money for companies? Not exactly.
Our strategy is to make great software for private users
and make companies
pay for that work, so I have no tears
for companies that complain it costs money
How else could we make Nextcloud better? Eat air and drink angry user posts on our forums?
There are countless reasons why private and non-commercial users may want to use Nextcloudās features on a larger scale. Just one current example is here, where a user is trying to implement video conferencing with their daughterās schoolmates.
In my case (among other groups that I help with their I.T) I run a server for a large extended family, because Iām the only one with the experience. Of all the open source software I selected for this purpose, itās only Nextcloud where weāre bumping into this attitude. No-one expects you to provide for free those services you defined as your business model ā professional support, consultancy, and customisation ā but this position that anyone with a need for more than a couple of users must be businesses, and youāre not interested in helping them, is ridiculous.
Nextcloud is very keen to talk about how their mission is to allow people to host their own data, and reclaim their privacy. But, did it occur to you that only a small percentage of the population have the skills to set up and maintain their own servers, and therefore, if youāre serious about this reaching as many people as possible, it will be necessary for those few to provide setups for larger groups of people? And yet, when we go beyond a tiny number of users, you decree that this is not āindividual useā and that youāre not interested in helping us āget things for freeā. If you were genuinely concerned about maximizing the number of people defending their privacy from cloud providers, this clearly makes no sense.
(To the moderators: before you start locking or chopping up the thread, Nextcloud are defending their position in the context of this topic. For us to challenge that is no more off-topic than the defence itself.)