So, the main thing we wanted is a sustainable company. A company that doesn’t go away soon, that isn’t forced by a bad funding situation to make stupid decisions, or to limit itself and not work with partners as much as possible.
How can we ‘prove’ that we achieved that? Well, that’s kind’a hard, I guess, unless we ask Niels to show his bank account numbers 
You can see that spreed.com and Spreed.ME do run a very healthy business. That will continue and grow - they need engineers and note that the product already includes ownCloud. Which is great and can be improved by us! That’ll be fun and good for users.
We, together, will built a healthy, stable, long-term focused company. Or better, as Spreed.ME is already that, we continue one and add more expertise and development power to it. Together they are called Nextcloud. We are stable and healthy, financially, as healthy as it gets.
Now to your other questions.
- A similar fork? Well, if Frank and the rest of the engineers lose trust in Nextcloud, we won’t have to fork as this time, we will make sure the company won’t fully control trademark and code. No more CLA. Trademark in a foundation. So this is the first and last time a fork happens, unless of course ppl would disagree with the majority of the community. That is a different type of fork I suppose.
- About the future - my crystal ball isn’t too great. Of course, initially it will be easy to stay in sync. It depends a lot on the speed of development of both code bases and the direction. We will sure try to stay compatible, our team has experience with the code base (duh) but at some point, yeah.
- We want to avoid that. It also depends on where both projects go, though. It is true that for oC you need a CLA and you won’t need that for Nextcloud, but I think the main factor will be how quick they develop. At least for the next few months this won’t be a problem and I think that, before the end of the year, it will be clear where both projects are going. That was also with LibreOffice and OpenOffice (now at Apache), I think it won’t take too long on the developer side. For users it will be harder to decide, the old name is familiar. That will take more time.
Glad you like discourse!