The point that you are missing is that LTS versions of Debian are LTS from the day they are released.
Some businesses choose them because they consider that upgrades are a risk to business continuity.
Those businesses are not going to incorporate things like Sury, which brings in change on a frequent basis.
They are not impressed by new features over unchanging dependability.
They want to stick with systems that they are familiar with, know the foibles of and will be the same.
No updates breaking things a few days before a multi-million deliverable milestone (yes. Microsoft, Iâm referring to you).
You can argue that you donât agree. Thatâs fine, but unless this sort of customer sees that you get it, theyâre not going to want your product.
But these business can then not expect to run the latest and greatest software. You canât have it both ways.
Sure you can only upgrade youâre distro every five or even only every ten to twelve yeras if youâre using RHEL or Ubuintu Pro, but then you canât get the latest and greatest Nextcloud features, and you probably also shouldnât expose anything on such an old LAMP stack to the internet, despite those distros claiming to keep those old Apache/NGINX and PHP versions secure.
But since you donât seem to want new and shiny features anyway, you should probably get a Nextcloud Enterprise subscruiption, which would allow you to run the same Nextcloud version for 5-10 years as I already pointed out here
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Exactly and Sury is the plan B if your plan fails and your timetable collapses, as it can happen, when corporate reprioritizes tasks.
@hairydog are you just a contrarian? For corporate with non trivial applications, have a look at Nextcloud Enterprise for enterprises and organizations.
As you state, it doesnât matter as every supplier screws up and if I deploy to production, without testing in my environment, Iâm the problem. Gone it the time, where you can set stuff up and forget it, as you need to be able to deploy security fixes ASAP and weâre talking with testing and measure in hours.
Iâd like to add, that there are also many companies that actually do care about those ânew and shinyâ features, because they want to provide their employees with a modern work environment.
Letâs not forget that weâre talking about a file-sharing, collaboration and groupware platform here, something meant to compete with solutions like Google Workspace, M365, MS Teams and Slack, and so on.
Nextcloud isnât some backend system for payment processing or a custom-built business application where LTS periods are usually stretched to the limit, and often even exceeded. 
Iâm not saying Nextcloud shold not do ânew, shinyâ. Iâm saying they should keep suporting a stable release for the duration of LTS OS releases /as well/
Other software manages it.
If it is contratian to point out that the emperorâs new clothes are non-existent, yes, Iâm a contrarian.
Sadly, Owncloud is too far in one direction, Nextcloud too far in the other.
No, itâs contrarian to demand something and declare that a project will not succeed because of this.
You state that one canât run Nextcloud on Debian for the full support period. It looks like this is wrong with enterprise support or can be mitigated by a skilled administrator with a PHP update provided by Sury.
So, 5 years isnât enough to update a fast moving software and the slow pace and singular enterprise focus that caused the fork is also not good enough for you.
Quite contrarian in my opinion but if you think, youâre on to something, it could be time for you to fork or provide for support the niche you identified and profit from it.
My suspicion is, that if it would be a real customer need, Nextcloud would have identified it by loosing public invitations to tender or by customers demanding longer support.
They already do that for enterprise customers, so what youâre actually saying is that they should do it for free.
So the refusal to support LTS is a paywall scheme to bring in income. OK. thatâs a rationale of sorts.
The fact that the support is there for wealthy clients is more like an argument for making it available generally. It wouldnât cost a penny more.
Anyway I have made my point. I knew it would fall on deaf ears.
If I were still making IT decisions for a large corporate or charity, Iâd not choose Nextcloud. Others might take a different view.
You wanted to have the last word, but I would like to add that this is not true. The Nextcloud community is happy to take your penny, so actively support the project.
I use Virtualmin to select and build my preferred stack. They donât serve as a repository, but they make it very manageable to obtain the version needed for whatever CMS will live at the given domain. Each virtual server can run a different PHP version.
Yeah, but then there would be one less reason to pay for the product. And like any other company, Nextcloud GmbH has costs to cover and employees to pay.
I also highly doubt the project would have come this far, reaching a point where companies and government agencies are seriously considering it as an alternative to M365, if there werenât a company behind it, paying full-time developers to keep it moving forward.
That said, it is open source. So, in theory, if you can put together a team of developers with enough time and expertise, you could fork the project and backport security fixes and patches yourself.
And letâs not forget that the âFâ in FOSS stands for âfree as in freedomâ, not âfree as in beerâ. Although Iâd argue that Nextcloud offers both: the software itself is free to use, and they only charge for additional services such as support, consulting and long-term maintenance.
If you have fewer than 100 users, they also give away Nextcloud AIO completely free of charge, an appliance with all dependencies pre-installed and maintained for you. So, maybe you could give that a try, since it would take the burden of managing things like PHP away from you.
Letâs be clear here: this is not about me. I am thinking of the needs of a different sort of user. The sort of user this thread was about.
I have no interest in an AIO setup, and am perfectly able to manage the three or four Nextcloud instances I run.
If I were to choose to contribute to an open source development, Iâd choose one where I shared the ethos of the development team.
Well, why donât we just leave it to them, then?
I donât think large organisations that pay huge sums in licensing fees to companies like Microsoft expect everything to be free. And if they need LTS support, they can probably afford to pay for it as long as itâs reasonably priced.
Id have thought thatvwas obvious, but since you ask, I was responding to a post about getting corporates to move to Nextcloud.
Thereâs a huge gulf between corporates reaching out to Nextcloud to ask for what they want and Nextcloud proactively producing something that corporates want.
The fact that this isnât self-evident is symptomatic of the problem I was trying to address.
Well and thatâs where we fundamentaly disagree. Iâd argue that having to pay for LTS support isnât really an issue.
I donât have any inside knowledge, but Iâd assume (or at least hope) that Nextcloud GmbH has a team of product managers who understand the business well enough to know what they can charge for, and how much, in order to ensure long-term sustainability for both themselves and their customers.
Either way, Iâm pretty sure of one thingâŚ
Giving everything away for free wouldnât be sustainable for them in the long term. This would not only harm the company, but also affect the project itself and the wider community, and ultimately users like you and me.
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