Yeah, that’s an interesting scenario for sure. And of course the enterprise argument is relevant - but that is a more complicated point, for simple reasons of motivation. Can I rant about that for a minute?
Our team, we, we care about privacy. Humans need privacy, it’s needed for freedom, democracy. We all started to do this to give people a way to take control over their data, because we’re unhappy about surveillance and so on. So we care about home users, a lot. As much as we can afford - it is why we keep Nextcloud super easy to install and use. Remember Spreed, the Go app? Home users don’t have time to figure out how to install that, so we rewrote it in PHP. Companies wouldn’t care anywhere near as much… They have people paid to spend time on this, after all.
For companies there is no ‘privacy’, privacy is a human thing. Of course companies need security and have to protect the privacy of users by law - but they make money and should be transparent otherwise, not have privacy.
It doesn’t mean we don’t care about enterprises: for Nextcloud to succeed, we need to make it better.We can do that in our free time, but it obviously goes faster if we can pay people. That is why we started the company in the first place, as a tool to make Nextcloud better, faster. Bring privacy to everybody. So we care about customers: they pay the bills to improve Nextcloud. We couldn’t do any of this without them.
And we want to hire more community members (we just hired Julius, the author of Deck, a few days ago, yay, btw). But companies that use Nextcloud, save or earn money with it, but don’t contribute - they are a lost opportunity to improve Nextcloud. If we spend time on them, they have less reason to become customer and we effectively make Nextcloud worse
Sorry for the long answer. And on a personal note: we’re all happy with EVERY Nextcloud user, also companies. But we’re also every day asking our finance guy if we can hire that community guy and that documentation writer and that great coder and if we can organize more events and support more students to come to FOSDEM and so on. We have a lot of good resume’s of people (many on this forum, and in github) who we’d LOVE to hire. And we can only do that with more customers…
EDIT: this was NOT meant to make anyone feel bad, really. We write open source code, and with that come rights for users. Including, of course, not paying us! We choose that for a reason, we believe in it, and we love all of you paying or not. It is just money… But we want to change the world, bring privacy to everybody - that ambition sometimes makes me post a bit more aggressive than I mean to Hope you can forgive me!