He was not happy with the balance between the interests of the ownCloud community and that of the company. Many core engineers followed suit, leaving ownCloud Inc.
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No matter who you talk to from SUSE to Red Hat to CoreOS…every company that built its business around open source values the community the most. The community is what creates their projects. They have to strike a very fine balance between business needs and community needs. And that balance seems to have been tipped at ownCloud.
Looks like history repeats itself. Owncloud (the company) started to behave like Oracle (see mysql and openoffice as examples that were killed by Oracle) and was only interested in money. Now the community took things in their own hands like happened with MariaDB and LibreOffice.
The major developers started nextcloud and I think nextcloud is the way to go for future implementations of private clouds.
However, I do hope that LOOL will be implemented for nextcloud too and not stick with owncloud.
Getting the balance right isn’t easy, transparency and openness cost! I mean, building a sustainable business around a symbiotic relationship with the community is not so straightforward and risk-free, At the beginning It seems to cost but at the end of the day, it’s worth it, definitely.
We can install both and see what happens to Nextcloud. If they’ll extend app store with for example libreoffice online or videoconferecing, it would be very interesting
Interesting discussion, looks like this is going to be a real issue for me personally on my ios device.
Gawd, I wish I could find a way to quickly and easily show others particular photos on my ios device without using some else’s cloud service… pics are such a nightmare, makes me not even want to take any photos.
But I do like to.
I have watched some interviews about the move to Nextcloud and it seems that the break ( like all others ) has the potential to be disruptive . Nextcloud should offer some enterprise features along with offering the community more requested features.
Hopefully both Owncloud and Nextcloud cloud can work together and Grow both solutions . Something like Fedora and Redhat.
In history, fork exist for technological reasons, like FreeBSD/OpenBSD or yet Debian/Devuan, to explore other fields of technology.
Fork exists for philisoficals reasons like Pfsense/OpenSense, to explore other way to do the same task.
Forks exist for financials reasons, like FreeNAS/NAS4Free, the second one come on because it was not possible to continue to use the FreeNAS name, bought by IXSystems.
Others forks combine these reasons like OpenOffice/LibreOffice
What is the reason for this fork?.. It’s financials reasons. Because the Owncloud Company goes in the wrong direction.
But further this reasons, I don’t understant why not to simply go with the Owncloud Fondation, Why the initials project fathers gone away? Why try rebranding the same project ( Owncloud 8/ NextCloud 9 ).
Are the project fathers only mercenaries?
In respect of the community, for eticals reasons, I think the Owncloud Fondation is right, and I don’t like the NextCloud project that actualy seem a rebranding, no more.
Well the way I read it was that the founding fathers (as you put it) did not agree with the direction the project was going as a whole. They felt that feature development was being stifled. They were no longer able to work on what they were passionate about. I feel that these are legitimate reasons to break away. The end result is that this my be a rebranding you really are still getting Owncloud even if it is under a different name. To me Owncloud appears to be dead, and the root cause is poor Human Resource management. Upper management cast a blind eye to employee morale and that came back to bite them.
In open source your developers are key. Since you can’t hold proprietary code and copy-right if you lose the developers you lose the support as well as your business edge. In this way, those who fund these projects need to realize that their developers need to have more say in these projects or they risk this kind of thing happening.
The large scale of the departure from OwnCloud indicates to me the validity of the reasons for this fork. It wouldn’t seem natural for that much of the core team leaving if there wasn’t major issues involved.
I assume the OwnCloud foundation has rights to the name, which means they would have to rebrand to continue working. As for mercenaries, that implies that the core team left because they could make more money developing as Nextcloud. Those aren’t the reasons they gave for leaving, and though they could be liars it doesn’t seem to me that doing another start up is a sure-fire way of getting a pay raise.
My understanding is that it was for technological, philosophical and financial reasons:
to get technological decision making less dependent on solely financial reasons.
a lot of ownCloud features were held back because developers had to convince investors in 30 seconds.
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often, with venture capital you have to limit yourself to doing things investors can understand rather than what users and customers ask or what could make money. This doesn’t always have to be an issue but it can be crippling. And it’s frustrating because management ends up forced to make short term decisions they know are bad.
strong believe in open source, community decisions and transparency, which does not need to clash with building a sustainable and profitable business around it.
Nextcloud will be reporting security issues upstream, and being open source both could end up retro-feeding each other in the long term …when things calm down.
There may be other personal reasons and some uncomfortability grown over time (the last owncloud foundation movements might have come a bit late), as these decisions are usually not taken from day to night. But often the true lays in the middle of what both sides say.
