First, I just want to start off by saying that Nextcloud is almost perfect for many different use cases of mine so thank you so much for making and developing this project.
As an avid user and a somewhat frequent contributor, I am obviously very interested in the health of the project, its community, and, by extension, the sustainability of the company backing it.
When the project first forked, one of the ideas proposed was to create a Nextcloud Foundation that would help to advocate and develop Nextcloud and ensure somewhat of a separation between the project and the company backing it. Any progress on that front?
There has been some changes recently such as the removal of the production update channel and the inclusion of “functionally-limited open core software” in the form of OnlyOffice Community Edition (and, while very small, the renaming of a release without community input) that has caused some worry for some people in the community including me. That combined with how there are no build instructions for Nextcloud final version releases (any chance we could get those?) means that while I feel confident about the sustainability of Nextcloud GmbH, I don’t feel the same confidence about Nextcloud, the project and community.
To be clear though, I think you (Frank) and Nextcloud GmbH have been great stewardesses of the project, but I also think there is room for improvement to ensure the long-term sustainability of the project and community, not just the company.
The project has given me numerous opportunities to learn while allowing me to add features and fix bugs that I or others run into without having to face a “you’re not in the company so we won’t accept a patch from you” mentality that exists too often in company backed/controlled open source projects so I’d like to really thank you for that. Thank you so much for not requiring a CLA.