17 January, 2017

Happy Birthday ownCloud

Seven years ago at Camp KDE in San Diego, Frank announced a project to help people protect their privacy, building an alternative to Dropbox: ownCloud.

I was there, sharing a room with Frank at the infamous Banana Bungalow. Epic times, I can tell you that - there was lots of rum, lots of rain and loads of good conversations and making new friends.





Since then, a lot has changed. But the people who started building a self-hosted, privacy protecting alternative in 2010 and 2011 are still on it! In 2011, a first meetup was held, and the 5 participants at that meetup recently got on stage at the Nextcloud conference to recall some good memories:



Of course, today we continue the work at Nextcloud, that just yesterday published its latest bugfix- and security update. It is great to see so many people have stuck with us for all these years - just this month, the KDE sysadmins migrated their ownCloud instance to Nextcloud!

We'll keep up the good work and you're welcome to join, either if you're looking for a job or just want to code. In both cases I can promise you: working with such a motivated, dedicated, professional team is just plain amazing.

I also published a blog on our Nextcloud blog about this milestone.

EDIT: By the way - there's a meetup tonight in C-Base, B'lin, 19:00 - would be fun to drink a beer on ownCloud's birthday and talk about the future! Join! It will be at least until 10 or so, so if you can't be there before then - still come! ;-)