Sure it does. People need to eat. Iâd be happy if we could hire 100 more people and provide everything for free. But it is rather the opposite way - the more we provide for free, the less people we can hire and the less code we can write. Tell me a strategy that allows us to do everything, 100% free/gratis, yet grow our company 100X so we can actually compete with Microsoft et all in terms of capabilities while ALSO rewriting all products of all our partners that are proprietary, like ONLYOFFICE and the HPB. Iâm sure there are literally thousands of open source people who had to give up on their idea of getting paid to write open source and whoâd be super interested in that idea.
I promise you, if there was a way, weâd do it. So tell me.
Yeah, itâs a gap, donât think I donât see that, of course it is. And we even occasionally give free subscriptions and HPB to a few charities, for this reason. And big discounts (in the 90% area!) for education. Iâve been putting a lot of effort in finding a solution for SMB and charities, and to help private users who canât host themselves - that is why we did Simple Signup. And why several of our partners have offerings for such organizations and hopefully weâll be able to do more. But we want to make Nextcloud better, not stop paying people to work on it.
If you canât come up with a realistic way to do that then you, Alfred and others are just going to have to accept that we decided that the best way to make a great product is to get paid for doing it, even if that means, in a few cases, that weâd rather have had them use it for free. Arguing for the same thing without offering any real solution is a waste of everyoneâs time, that is why the admins shut it down.
EDIT: if you donât mind, Iâll go back to work now. Read my recent blog post, watch the talks I gave and read the upcoming article on opensource.com if you want to read more about this - but I really wonât have time to reply on the forums anymore, sorry.
Ok. You try to frame things as if I need to offer an alternative to your current approach, but all Iâm saying is that you should stick to what Nextcloud told us was the business model â working with the community to create fully open software without restrictions, and selling professional support, SLAs, and consultancy to large enterprises. I donât need to propose a new idea â I was quite happy with that one! Originally, it was specifically stated that the target customers were very large enterprises into the thousands of users, not small organisations. This idea that any installation with needs beyond the size of a family unit must be a business that should pay up (and the attitude towards them) is something thatâs crept in over time, and I think itâs detrimental to the project.
If you were looking for ways to monetize smaller organisations, I think you made a mistake by not offering your own hosted service. I realise that this might seem counter to the idea of a private cloud, but I donât really think that makes much sense. In the end, if people trust you to create the software that protects their privacy, they might as well trust you to provide a private hosting service, too. By using third-party hosts we have to trust two parties instead of just one. And, crucially, anyone that chooses not to exercise that trust still has the option of running their own server. To my mind, that is a very acceptable offer from the company to the community â you are free to expend your own resources on supporting your own installation, but we can offer good value on running it for you. I think that really is a win-win, with no need for shenanigans.
In terms of you trying to grow the company to the point where it can single-handedly take on Microsoft, Iâm certainly not harbouring that delusion, and I hope youâre not either. But the logic that whatever action is good for the companyâs profits is therefore good for the open source project is clearly flawed. One doesnât have to look very far around the open source landscape to see that. Thatâs what Owncloud was (allegedly) doing, and then it got forkedâŠ
The strategy that might actually make a difference (and the one many of us bought into), is to build up a healthy open source community that works together towards the stated goals, by keeping the needs of the community and the company in balance. I think very few people are going to be interested in contributing to Talk, when clearly the real action is in the HPB. Going down this road of embracing open core functionality, and trying to extract from smaller organisations, is very short-sighted - what you are actually doing is limiting yourself to being a relatively small player. IMO, this is not the way to build the sort of community project that attracts such wide buy-in that it disrupts the industry (and they do exist). I also think that the attitude youâve taken recently will actually work to limit the potential of Nextcloud in that larger sense, even if your balance sheet has seen a boost.
Iâm not suggesting that you rewrite the HPB and OnlyOffice, which is clearly infeasible. The limitations of both Talk and OO for community users have recently both been sharply highlighted. Resources spent on Talk and OnlyOffice could have been spent on integrating Jitsi and Libreoffice Online (which impose no proprietary restrictions) and helping to improve those projects. In terms of suggesting positive ideas, that would be one of them.
In the case of Talk, we must bear in mind that Nextcloud, Spreed, and Struktur AG cannot really be thought of as separate entities. If Struktur/Nextcloud really wanted to stay fully open, they have the option of open-sourcing the HPB tomorrow â no rewriting required. I doubt thatâs going to happen though, because itâs all about selling the proprietary product.
In terms of what Iâm saying not having any positive purpose or proposed solutions, thatâs entirely wrong. Iâm saying that there has been a clear change of direction and attitude in recent times, which I think are mistakes for the project, and I would like to see the course corrected to bring the needs of the company and community back into better balance. In particular, this attitude of suspicion and derision towards anyone with needs beyond those of a small household needs to stop.
Well, this user understands that perfectly well. The question at hand is about the strategy of the company in the context of a community/company open source partnership project, and how it affects that relationship and its future. And, also the integration of proprietary software into the mix. Please donât be simplistic.
Let open a real community driven experience and a call for donations and a bounty for features.
Dev will get paid, if not enough money comes in, it will be on the community dev to work on it because Nextcloud GmbH canât pay dev for that.
Yes. But you can also use a microsoft cloud, pay for it and downgrade your know how. And yes you must not read source code and you can never modify software or software packages.
Nextcloud Talk Backend As posted here is being coded in linked Gitlab.
Since the default internal signaling was not usable on my system and Nextcloudâs own High-Performance-Backend is not affordable by private users, I decided to take a shot and implement a signaling server based on what can be found in the source of Nextcloud Talk and the API documentation.
Signaling Server
The signaling server itself communicates over a WebSocket connection. For better performance it is recommended to use a separate MCU/SFU. I worked with Janus but I try to keep the interface abstract so it should be possible to expand the connectors for using other servers (Jitsi, etc.)
Hi thanks a lot for this.
I want to test IT.
Is it possible to share a little howto to get this running on Ubuntu 18.04 lts Server?
Best regards Patrick
In my school, we have big blue button and it works for more than 100 people !
And zoom is not a good solution : problem of security, they sold your data to FB, itâs an proprietary American application (patriot act)âŠ
Thank you so much for this effort! As Nextcloud is not keeping up with their promise to deliver 100% Open Source it is great to see that the community is willing to make up for that.
At the same time, it seems that Jitsi is where the larger communities rally around.
Unfortunately, I dont have admin access to the server BBB. So I cant connect Nextcloud of my school association on the BBB server.