all mine!

We recently did a post about the Nextcloud Mission and Principles we discussed at the previous Contributor Week. I guess it is mostly the easy-to-agree on stuff, so let me ruin the conversation a bit with the harder stuff. Warning: black and white don't exist beyond this point.

Open Source

In an internal conversation about some community pushback on something we did, I linked to islinuxaboutchoice.com - people often think that 'just' because a product is open source, it can't advertise to them, it has to be chock full of options, it has to be made by volunteers, it can't cost money and so on...

But if you want to build a successful product and change the world, you have to be different. You have to keep an eye on usability. You have to promote what you do - nobody sees the great work that isn't talked about. You have to try and build a business so you can pay people for their work and speed up development. Or at least make sure that people can build businesses around your project to push it forward.

I personally think this is a major difference between KDE and GNOME, with the former being far less friendly to 'business' and thus most entrepreneurial folks and the resources they bring go into GNOME. And I've had beers with people discussing SUSE's business and its relationship with openSUSE - just like Fedora folks must think about how they work with Red Hat, all the time. I think the openSUSE foundation is a good idea (I've pushed for it when I was community manager), but going forward I think the board should have a keen eye on how they can enable and support commercial efforts around openSUSE. In my humble opinion the KDE board has been far to little focused on that (I've ran for the board on this platform) and you also see the LibreOffice's Document Foundation having trouble in this area. To help the projects be successful, the boards on these organizations need to have people on them who understand business and its needs, just like they need to have community members who understand the needs of open source contributors.

But companies bring lots of complications to open source. When they compete (as in the LibreOffice ecosystem), when they advertise, when they push for changes in release cycles... Remember Mark Shuttleworth arguing KDE should adopt a 6-month release cycle? In hindsight, I think we should have!

Principles

So, going back to the list of Nextcloud's Mission and Principles, I say they are the easy stuff, because they are. They show we want to do the right thing, they show what our core motivation was behind starting this company: building a project that helps people regain control over their privacy. But, in day to day, I see myself focus almost exclusively on the needs of business. And you know what, businesses don't need privacy... That isn't why we do this.

Oh, I'm very proud we put in significant effort in home users when we can - our Simple Signup program has cost us a lot of effort and won't ever make us a dime. The Nextcloud Box was, similarly, purely associated with our goals, not a commercial project. Though you can argue both had marketing benefits - in the end, a bigger Nextcloud ecosystem helps us find customers.

I guess that's what keeps me motivated - customers help us improve Nextcloud, more Nextcloud users help us find more customers and so both benefit.

Pragmatism and the real hard questions

Personally, I'd add an item about 'pragmatism' to the list, though you can say it is inferred from our rather large ambitions. We want to make a difference, a real difference. That means you have to keep focused on the goal, put in the work and be pragmatic.

An example is the conversation about github. Would we prefer a more decentralized solution? Absolutely. Are we going to compromise our goals by moving away from the largest open source collaboration network to a platform which will result in less contributions? No.... As long as github isn't making our work actively harder, does not act unethically and its network provides the biggest benefits to our community by helping us reach our goals, we will stay...

More questions and the rabbit hole

Would you buy a list of email addresses to send them information about Nextcloud? No, because it harms those users' privacy and probably isn't even really legal. Would you work with a large network to reach its members, even if you don't like that network and its practices? Yes - that is why we're on Facebook and Twitter, even though we're not fans of either.

Let's make it even harder. How about the choice of who you sell to. Should we not sell to Company X even if that deal would allow us to hire 10 great developers on making Nextcloud better for the whole world and further our goals? Would you work with a company that builds rockets and bombs to earn money for Nextcloud development? We've decided 'nope' a few times already, we don't want that money. But what about their suppliers? And suppliers of suppliers? A company that makes screws might occasionally sell to Boeing which also makes money from army fighters... Hard choices, right?

And do you work with countries that are less than entirely awesome? Some would argue that would include Russia and China, others would say the USA should be on a black list, too... What about Brazil under its current president? The UK? You can't stop anyone from using an open source product anyway, of course... It gets political quick, we've decided to stick to EU export regulations but it's a tough set of questions. Mother Teresa took money from dictators. Should she have? No?

It might seem easy to say, in a very principled way, no to all the above questions, but then your project won't be successful. And your project wants to make the world better, does it not?

Conclusion?

We discuss these things internally and try to be both principled and pragmatic. That is difficult and I would absolutely appreciate thoughts, feedback, maybe links to how other organizations make these choices. Please, post them here, or in the comments section of the original blog. I can totally imagine you'd rather not comment here as this blog is hosted by blogger.com - yes, a Google company. For pragmatic reasons... I haven't had time to set up something else!

There's lots of grey areas in this, it isn't always easy, and sometimes you do something that makes a few people upset. As the Dutch say - **Waar gehakt wordt vallen spaanders**.



PS and if you, despite all the hard questions, still would want to work at a company that tries to make the world better, we're hiring! Personally, I need somebody in marketing to help me organize events like the Nextcloud Conference, design flyers and slide decks for sales and so on... Want to work with me? Shoot me an email!

I've been around in communities like KDE, openSUSE, Mandrake/Mandriva and others... and various open source and closed companies. Seen some do a good job. Seen others be mismanaged. This one: the most fun. Serious.

Working at Nextcloud is special. For one, we're a distributed company. Is it hard? Well, yes and no. Working from home is great with such a motivated team with very little management overhead and good communication. Our company is entirely built on it, that is why it works.

As an example, while our head of sales lives in Hannover, the rest of the sales people is spread over Berlin, Switzerland, Stuttgart... Engineers can be found in Germany, Netherlands, Spain, even Croatia and as far as Cape Verde. I'm sure I forgot some countries. Our biggest office in Stuttgart has less people than we have in Berlin!

But we connect in person: roughly every second month, at a company-wide meeting in a single place, usually Stuttgart, for a full week of coding and having a great time. And once a year we go to Berlin for our conference, happening the last week of August! All those meetings are open, with often lots of community members participating in the whole process of designing and deciding around our software.

And yes, the sales people join there, too. I have NEVER worked in a company where the sales people, the marketing team and the engineers were so good with each other. Respect between these three departments is extremely rare, as I'm sure every one of my readers knows from experience.



What else is crazy about Nextcloud? Here's another one: where lots of companies struggle to find good engineers, that is literally the LEAST of our problems. We drown in amazingly good CV's and have a big pool of enthusiastic, qualified engineers who contribute to Nextcloud and already know the code. I wish we could hire them all but growing more than 50-80% per year isn't really health for a company culture...

Also special: other companies struggle to get sales leads and pay lots of (advertising) money for them. We, we drown in leads... Even without marketing automation. Our biggest challenge, instead, is answering all the requests from companies that want to buy our product - we need more sales people!

Yes, we're a pretty unique company in how we approach open source business and we're successfully taking on much bigger companies. Yes, it works! Just check how we're doing on Google Trends. Love that!

If you want to work for us, especially in sales, or know somebody who should, tell me ;-)

Or first learn about us by meeting us - you're welcome at our conference! Or at one of our meetups, there's a monthly one in Berlin for example.

Berlin #nextcloud meetup had to spread out as we didn't fit at one table... https://t.co/hx9h1OMGKd pic.twitter.com/4TXoS89a87

— Jos Poortvliet (@jospoortvliet) June 20, 2018

August 22-29 we're organizing a conference to discuss and work on privacy, self-hosting, security and open source in Berlin: the Nextcloud Conference. We expect some 150-200 people to participate during a week of discussing and coding and, especially on the weekend, presenting and workshopping. So I thought I should blog about why should you be there and what can you expect?

If you care about protecting people from the all-pervasive surveillance, re-gain privacy and security of data and believe in self hosting and open source as solution for these issues, this is the place to be. Our event is special for two reasons:

The team that started ownCloud

We're doing it. And most of us have been, for a decade or more, in KDE, GNOME, SUSE, Ubuntu, phpBB and other earlier projects. The code we wrote has influenced millions of users already and we will go further and wider! Expect to meet people with a can-do attitude.

Second, Nextcloud has got a huge momentum, name recognition and has become one of the largest ecosystems in the open source privacy/self hosting area. It isn't just about us! Large companies, small startups and innovative individuals and small communities all over are building on and around Nextcloud. A few examples:

• Our keynote speaker is former Mozilla president Tristan Nitot, who is currently CTO of Cozycloud, another private, open source self-hosted cloud solution.
• We're working with the GNOME community on deeper Linux desktop integration (we hope we can bring those also to KDE's Plasma!) and lots of projects built on our technology, like the super cool Mail-in-a-box
• Many third party apps like the buttercup password manager, DAVdroid android app, PrivacyIdea 2FA and Gluu SSO, Collabora Online and the innovative open source Blockchain storage SIA provide Nextcloud integration. And more are coming, expect announcements at the Nextcloud conference!
• We have well over 70 different providers like CiviHosting
• You can find over 80 apps on our app store offering all kinds of additional capabilities and integrations, from Kanban or time planning apps to the mentioned authentication and external storages to music players to drawing apps to full text search to...
• One organization after another implements or moves to Nextcloud, with the TU Berlin  (where our conference takes place, like last year) and the capital of Albania merely the last in the long list.

We are doers

So the Nextcloud conference is where you can find a wide range of individuals with interest, skills and ideas in the area of privacy and freedom activism, and they are doers! There is a reason we say "bring your laptop" on our conference page, though with that we don't mean we only want coders there!

Designers, activists and advocates are just as welcome. That is because Nextcloud is about more than technology. Frank is somebody who sometimes asks the hard questions and obviously it his vision is a strong diver, but we're all long time open source and/or privacy activists and deeply and personally motivated. Our entire community is built on drive, passion and a will to take on the challenges our society offers in the area of privacy, self determination, freedom.

That is the why you should be there. To help make a difference.

Now the what.

Getting Stuff Done

Our goal is to get work done; and facilitate communication and collaboration in our community. During the week, we simply provide space to talk and code (with wired and wireless network, Club Mate & other drinks, and free lunch). In the weekend, we have a program with talks & workshops. The setup is simple:

In the morning, everybody is in one room. First, we all hear from long time privacy activist and former Mozilla president Tristan Nitot. After that, community members working on a wide variety of interesting things around privacy/self hosting/open source and of course Nextcloud talk, shortly, about what they do. Just 3-8 minutes to give the audience an idea of their project, their plan, their idea, how to get involved, a call for action. Now again, everybody is in the room, so in the break, everybody has heard the same talks and has the same things to discuss! If you have something to add, be it about TOR, protests, encryption or anything else that is related: SUBMIT A TALK!

Collaboration & sharing ideas

Last year we announced the Nextcloud Box. This year - be there and find out!

People can look up the speakers, join the meetings proposed and so on, in the afternoon. Because after lunch we have 2 (or more, not sure yet) tracks of workshops as well as hacking, coding and meetings in the coding rooms. Unconference style, so to say.

We now have several dozen talks and workshops already submitted and well over 100 people have registered but we are looking for more input in all areas so consider to be a part of this event!

It is free and open, supported by the TU Berlin which offers us a free location; and Nextcloud GmbH which sponsors drinks & practical stuff; and SUSE Linux which sponsors the Saturday evening party!

Learn more and register!

On the Nextcloud blog I just published about the beta for Nextcloud 11. The release will deliver many improvements and is worth checking out in itself, plus I put a nice clickbait-style title and gave three reasons to test it.

But I actually have some more reasons to test. You see, Nextcloud is one of the tools we need to keep our democracy working. As Frank notes on his home page:

"Privacy is the foundation of democracy"

And he is completely right. So, here are three different reasons why you should test (and help improve) Nextcloud:

1. The USA is making a massive swing towards even more spying

Obama has done nothing to curb the growth of the NSA and the scope of its operations. Secret laws spiked under his watch. Many of the folks about to be put in power by President-elect Trump favor more spying, including on US citizens, expansion of the NSA, a crackdown on whistleblowers and more. Trump's pick for CIA director calls for Snowden's execution. For what I can only guess must be giving proof of illegal government spying to dangerous terrorists like the Washington Post and the Guardian, who proceeded to win a Pulitzer prize by disclosing this information irresponsibly to the US public.

In general, as somebody who changes his stance on hugely important and complicated issues like torture in under an hour, it is impossible to predict what Trump will do with the most powerful spying agency in the world under his control, but his appreciation for dictatorial figures like Kim Jong Il and Putin gives plenty cause for concern.

2. Britain isn't doing much better

I wrote about the Snoopers' charter just some days ago - this piece of legislation goes further than any earlier piece of spying law. It allows not only passive spying but also actively hacking devices from citizens.

3. Nor is Europe

The UK is not alone. Since Snowden, Europe has complained a bit about the NSA but seems to simply follow suit, rather than doing anything about it. Germany is even introducing a bill that will allow spying on foreign journalists.

Help out!

So, how can you help? Well, test Nextcloud 11 Beta, obviously. Help others to use it, get them involved. But it goes beyond Nextcloud - promote the use of and help improve tools like Tor, Signal and others, or democracy is screwed.

Edit: updated the blog 

A lot of people are coming to the Nextcloud conference to discuss ideas they have with others and I've been telling them to submit a lightning talk. As that is the idea of the lightning track on Saturday and Sunday: present yourself and the project you (want to) work on, inspire, share ideas. That way, others can then find you and talk to you afterward!

Last year I wrote a longer article about that on opensource.com, but this is the gist of it: it is a conversation kickstarter! Our event is very hands-on (bring your laptop, we say!) and the program is mostly there to facilitate the natural flow of ideas and code.

So we have three kinds of sessions:

• Keynote = inspiration. Everyone joints to listen to a fascinating story! Our keynote speakers are Karen and Jane.
• Lightning talks = sharing. Everyone in one room listens to what others are thinking about, working on or inspired by. Then, after, you look each other up and start talking and doing! Think 'unconference'.
• Workshops = learning and collaborating. They're coding, interactive, either teaching/learning or more "let's work on X for an hour together".

The event starts in two weeks at the TU Berlin: September 16-23 so it is time to book your trip. If you care about open source, privacy-protecting cloud services it is a great place to find like-minded folks!

What's coming?

Besides the keynotes by Karen Sandler (Managing DIrector at SFC) and Jane Silber (CEO of Canonical) We have some 30 sessions already submitted, just a selection:

• Nextcloud Security by Lukas Reschke
• Enterprise grade two factor authentication with Nextcloud by Cornelius Kölbel
• Upcoming features of Android Nextcloud by Tobias Kaminsky
• Nextcloud Scalability with a concept design for 10.000 users by Dennis Pennings (Friday program!)
• Installing NextCloud with SSL/TLS in less than 5 minutes on UBOS by Johannes Ernst
• MySQL Database Scalability by Oli Sennhauser (Friday program!)
• Next generation of federation by Björn Schießle (Friday program!)
• Theming your Nextcloud by Julius Haertl
• Collabora Online by Michael Meeks
• Performance Testing at Nextcloud by Morris Jobke

More still coming, I know Cornelius Schumacher wanted to talk about the importance of privacy-protecting cloud services (if his family can miss him for the weekend...) and I still have some other talks to approve in the queue.
The gist of it is that we'll have a lot of technical people, the folks who wrote Nextcloud as well as many others who contributed and have been using it, from home users to enterprise and educational or government agencies - all together to discuss and work on where our technology is going.

Oh, and we have a surprise on Friday afternoon. ;-)

Check it out and see you there!

With the EU (in this case France and Germany) gearing up for another attack on privacy I'm quite happy and proud to have been part of the release of Nextcloud 10!

Privacy

It is the usual story: we should disallow companies from using perfect end to end encryption and force them to insert backdoors against terrorists.

Not that it would help - that's been discussed extensively already but in short:

• If you have nothing to hide, you'll use a backdoored app and you're vulnerable to foreign (and your own) governments, terrorists (!), criminals and others who can abuse your data in more ways than you can imagine.
• If you have something to hide, you can use 1000 different tools to do so and there is nothing government can do about that so you won't use a backdoored app.
• And note that government has failed to even use fully unencrypted information to stop terrorist attacks so perhaps we should first see if they can actually get their act together there.

Now yes, backdooring all commonly used encryption apps will help a BIT, essentially only with the low level, common crime. So you might catch the dude who broke into your house and bragged about it to his friends over Whatsapp. You won't catch the terrorists plotting with Al Qaida (or whatever the terrorist organization du-jour) to blow up a train because they can simply get one of the many solutions out there to protect themselves.

Nor will you catch corrupt politicians or big companies doing nasty stuff, though I am quite certain the laws will be written in such a way that you can use them to go after people who actually try to expose such politicians or companies.

And I'm also quite certain companies will use this as an excuse to not implement proper protection in their products so you can continue to stop pacemakers remotely or disable the brakes in cars over the internet.

Generally, laws targeting encryption and terrorism do more to harm whistleblowing than terrorism and are thus promoting corruption and bad, unsecure products.

These laws will literally cost lives. Not save any.

And it is exactly why Frank started ownCloud and why we continue to develop that vision at Nextcloud. And keep developing new features, like the File Access Control app which can provide an extra protective layer around your data. I for one certainly can use that app and exactly in the way described in that blog! So much for 'enterprise only features'.


Get it and migrate today. You and your data deserve it!

The nature of Open Source is, in a sense, dualistic. It encourages collaboration through the threat of not collaborating--a fork. When I was approached by Struktur AG to join them to work on ownCloud and Spreed, I loved the idea. I always wanted an ecosystem around ownCloud, which is why I pushed things forward like our collaboration with Western Digital Labs and Collabora, matters of no business interest to the company I worked for. I believe a stronger ecosystem benefits everybody.

Ecosystems and confidence

A major point which makes open source so beneficial for businesses is that it puts pressure on suppliers to offer great service and support. If they don't, another can enter the market and out-service them. Tight control over the community tough things like CLA and trademark makes it hard to grow such an ecosystem and negates some of the benefits of open source for customers.

Luckily, in the end, the AGPL license protects the future of a project, even if its steward clings to power. From conversations with Niels early on, it was clear to me that he has a very different and very confident view on his ability to run a real open source company. His history at Red Hat results in frequent comparisons. And indeed, Red Hat runs things the right way, even supporting a project like CentOS which many other companies would consider an existential threat to their business model. Just as their investment in opensource.com shows: they aim to grow the pie, not grab a bigger slice.

former 'enterprise feature' done right (and open)

I'm super proud and happy that we could announce today, with our first release, that Nextcloud will not be doing proprietary code. No closed apps means no inherent conflict between sales and community management/developers within the company, but a full alignment in one simple direction: servicing the customer.

And if you wonder about the collaboration with Collabora/LibreOffice Online and with Western Digital: yes, of course, we'll go full steam ahead and will facilitate where we can! No, we're not afraid that either would 'compete' with us: both will complement and strengthen the ecosystem. So we will work together.

Why? Because the core contributors and founder shared an ambitious goal for Nextcloud: be THE solution for privacy and security.

Last night we had our first Nextcloud BBQ! Despite some rain it's a good start of something that should be a tradition. ;-)

It was great to have conversations with the contributors who visited us as well as some downtime with the team. It's been a busy time since we announced our new endeavor. And it continues to be awesome to get so many supportive comments and feedback on what we're up to! People are excited about our open strategy and appreciate the fact that there is a solid company behind it. The flood of incoming requests for information and support from customers presents a good problem. So let me point out, again, that we're hiring!

Yesterday we kicked off a meeting in Stuttgart to discuss Nextcloud and get work done. A first result is the establishment of the new Server repository on Github (and more repositories!) and we'll share other things on the forums and in Github issues the coming days. The real important news however is that we decided to organize a BBQ!

If you're in the area, we'd love to see you show up Wednesday at Egilolfstraße 31, Plieningen/Hohenheim close to Stuttgart Airport. Nearest public transport would be either U3 Plieningen or S2/3 Flughafen/Messe. Join us starting 6PM for the good times!


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We'll have some alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, meat, fruits, veggie stuff and of course a BBQ. Give us a shout if you're coming on the forums!

Cool stuff we want to do more with!

Based on feedback collected from many contributor members we've defined some plans and already made changes to how Nextcloud will be developed. Improved transparency and governance, focus on stability and architectural improvements and other improvements are covered in this blog. Much more is coming, you can join the conversation right now on our forums!

Community Input

January 2015, I ran a contributor survey to see what the ownCloud community thought about the processes, development focus and our work at the company. I shared the results by the end of April and pushed internally for the feedback to be taken serious. Some of the changes were implemented but many others were left for a future project to push forward. And Nextcloud will.

feedback and changes

Nextcloud aims to build a sustainable business, not limited by short-term, next-quarter thinking. The relationship with our community of contributors and users is central to our plans.

To quote Frank on this:

The company shouldn't be involving the community more in decision making; that's the wrong way of looking at it. There shouldn't be a fundamental separation to begin with!

And that's what we want. Saying "we're more open" just means being a more friendly ruler - Nextcloud aims to be a participant, not a king, benevolent or not! That is not to say that there should not be any direction but it shouldn't be dictated by a company anymore. Of course, people can decide what they work on, and the company gets to decide what it pays its employees to do. Now there are changes in how we manage our employees too, with far less micromanagement and more freedom. But that's for another blog.

Let's go over the specific pieces of feedback mentioned in the email and received from contributors in other ways and note how Nextcloud intends to address them.

Development

ownCloud is fun and relatively easy to contribute to, with a mostly well running review process and release cycle. There were some practical requests and suggestions as well as concerns about the strain the growth of our project has put on the core developers.

Dealing with Pull Requests

A major issue as detailed in many comments was that it often takes too long for pull requests to be merged. That is, contributions are not handled fast or at all. The result is that, with Core moving fast, contributions get out of sync, no longer apply and are effectively lost. As the graphs below show, the number of pull requests taking longer than 6 months to be merged is rising rapidly while the company is contributing less to development relative to volunteers. Don't get me wrong, it's great to have a growing community! But the support for development from the company needs to keep up with the pace.


Respecting contributions by being responsive and getting them merged will be our number one development priority at Nextcloud. As research by Mozilla has shown, reacting swiftly to contributions is crucial for growing community and we intend to grow and nurture our contributor base, recognizing outside input as a key driver of growth and success.

More stability

A general point made was that it'd be good to focus more on stability and performance. Some of that has been implemented with the 8.x series and automated testing improvements done over the last year. An especially sore point in terms of stability is the upgrade process, as was very visible with the 9.0 release that is still not available for users of the built in updater app. We will soon blog about the Nextcloud plans with regard to the updater.

Architectural improvements

It was mentioned that some parts of ownCloud are in need of serious architectural love and refactoring. ownCloud has been traditionally rather restrained in this regard and people worried that this "impairs competent developers". While being conservative is important with regards to building a platform (stability and compatibility!) many improvements made their way into the 8 and 9 releases. To preserve a healthy balance, we want to introduce an Architecture team to make decisions that have a big impact on the code base. More details will follow.

Another area of improvement would be to communicate more about architectural changes. Frank has already done a series of blogs about Federation in the past and more will follow.

Apps: support for Calendar, Contacts and Spreed

Many pointed out that apps are extremely important for ownCloud and we should work more on that. Frank has always emphasized the importance of building a platform and for Nextcloud this will be a central goal.

Nextcloud will officially support the Calendar and Contacts apps and supercharge their development. The Spreed.ME app will bring fully supported audio and video chat to ownCloud. We'll also invest in growing and improving our API for these and other applications.

Process

Some smallish process improvements were requested. More logical labels and tags, for example, which have been pretty much cleaned up since then. Another thing was that big pull requests are often a pain in the ass to get merged and we should tell contributors to cut their work in smaller pieces. This was added to the documentation.

Decision making

Most people were positive about the technical direction of ownCloud - test-driven, stability, architectural work, those were great improvements. Decision making processes in the technical area were not considered very transparent. Comments were even more harsh about the project-wide decision making process.

People feel decisions are often done behind closeddoors. Nextcloud will address this, in part by a new architecture team and in another part by getting rid of most 'hidden' communication channels like internal IRC and mailing lists. We also plan on talking more about our goals and plans in blogs and such.

Longer term planning is a major sticking point: there is little of it public. We need to discuss, together, how to do longer term planning. This doesn't fit too well with github. Thoughts welcome!

Communication channels

Several people have noted that we've got too many, confusing and overlapping communication channels. We've already eliminated one: mailing lists. We still have a newsletter for those who want to follow us and the blog roll on nextcloud.com/news. For technical discussions we keep using github (which now links commits to pull requests so you can find the discussion behind code) and we'll discuss more general subjects on the forum. Speaking of which, it's now on discourse - a massive improvement I'd say. And email fans can use email to communicate with people on the forum!

Governance

It was already mentioned here and there but there are two other big changes. First, we want the Nextcloud trademarks to be owned by the community, like the ownCloud one should have been. So we will set up a foundation soon which will control the trademark (not have it sub-licensed!) and more in the future.

Second, we will get rid of the Contributor License Agreement. You don't need to sign anything to contribute to Nextcloud.
Third, without CLA there are no proprietary apps part of Nextcloud. We won't be artificially crippling Nextcloud just to get some checkmark on a feature list on the enterprise side. At the same time, of course much functionality is needed for companies, stuff that they need (and home users don't). We will provide that for sure, including migration path, but this time as stand-alone tools. No more exclusivity for a single company, allowing it to do things others can't for legal reason. Our power is in employing the people who write the code, so we can give the best support and develop the best features. If another comes and tops us, well, we should've done better.

Users

There will be improvements for users, too. Already mentioned were our plans to support the Calendar and Contacts apps, Mail too, perhaps more. And of course with Spreed.ME we will integrate open source, WebRTC based video conferencing. There is more coming - for a future blog!

That's all? Nope.

Now I know this is a long blog with lots of details. No surprise, it is based on things we've wanted to improve for many years but could not. Now we can and we will. This is not the end of it, other suggestions and thoughts are more than welcome. Get involved!

So today is the day: we announce that we're forking ownCloud at some point the coming weeks. We includes project founder Frank and the core ownCloud contributors who publicly quit ownCloud, Inc. over the last weeks - Lukas, Arthur, Morris, Bjoern, Jan-Christoph and quite a few others as well who can't talk about that yet. As of now, most of the top contributors to ownCloud core are joining and of course, we're very busy hiring and aim to leave no (wo)man behind.

'why' is the question everybody has and I hope you understand I don't want to talk too much about that. Instead, let me talk about what we are going to do.

A healthy Nextcloud

Open source projects work best when they have a company behind them which aims to build a sustainable business around a symbiotic relationship with the community they are a part off. Make no mistake, I think it's great if people (investors, founders) can cash out big. They take a risk, put in blood, sweat and tears. But venture capital often leads to short term thinking and chasing of quarterly numbers resulting in bad decisions. Money, time and effort is wasted and growth isn't what it could be - and that's pretty much a best case scenario.

The good news is that we're starting a new company, Nextcloud, which will do things right: build a sustainable, durable business. We've got support from Niels Mache, long time open source entrepreneur and owner of the spreed video conferencing business. Nextcloud will integrate with spreed's successor, the open source, webRTC based spreed.me video conferencing software, kickstarting as a healthy, growing business with loads of customers while the integration provides a real valuable new feature to users.

What we will offer

This reboot of ownCloud is meant to be good for users, customers and contributors alike. So we'll be providing a drop-in replacement for users next month, which will bring them the stability and security updates they need as well as full spreed.ME video conferencing integration.

For customers, the drop-in replacement will be accompanied with a Enterprise Subscription which gives them all the support and features they are used to. Better, even: we will honor all contracts so nobody has to pay twice or get in trouble. On top of that we plan to support some of the most popular apps like Calendar and Contacts both for home users and enterprises. Our goal here is to ensure nobody is left without the support they need to be happy, successful own/Nextcloud users.

We're setting up infrastructure now for the wider contributor community to join us. We've got some improvements in store, including new forums (discourse based), no more Contributor License Agreement and a foundation that will hold trademarks (not have them sub-licensed; nor be under company control!). January last year we did a survey of what community contributors would like to see improved and, finally, we can implement many of those requests. I will blog more about that later today!

Future

I know that this is a surprise to everybody and it isn't that you should be joining RIGHT NOW or I'll hate you forever, on the contrary. ownCloud is a very important project and a rash decision makes no sense. We are in it for the long haul, our goal is a smooth transition and that means we will take some time to prepare things on our end. We've always been in close contact with our contributors and this new thing can only be open and public from now on so let's take our time to do this right. Over the coming days we'll blog about our plans and you can provide input and help us make the right decisions!

This endeavor will take some time and effort, but successful examples like LibreOffice and MariaDB have shown that, in the end, the community will find a way to get it right. I'm confident that we will be able to deliver even better solutions for our users and customers thanks to a redefined, more open community and company relationship!

Check out our announcement blog, our website and ping me or ask your questions in our Live Nextcloud Q&A Hangout with Frank and myself, moderated by Bryan Lunduke, today at 19:00 PM Berlin/Amsterdam/Paris time, 10:00 AM Pacific time.

And yes, if you want to join us, send an email, we're hiring!

No matter if you're GSoC student in openSUSE, KDE, ownCloud or anywhere else, you're community bonding period has started. This is not an easy time because starting something new is always hard and this is, in a sense, a new job.

And many students are still busy with exams and other things. You are ambitious, of course, so you make promises to your mentor and then--you might not be able to follow through on that. You're too busy studying or this family-and-friends thing gets in the way. Now what?

It is fine to make mistakes or miss a deadline...

Please understand that we get this! It is not a surprise and you're not alone. The key here is to communicate with your mentors. That way, they know why you're busy and when you will be back.

Not having time for something, even if you promised - really, that is OK. When you have a job in the future it will happen all the time that more urgent things come up and you can't meet a deadline. Key is that you TALK about it. Make sure people know.

Let me give you a short anecdote - something that didn't even happen that early in my career...

At some point early in my job at a new company, I was on on a business trip and I missed my train. It was quite stupid: I got out in the wrong station. The result was that I had to buy a new ticket, spending over USD 180. I was quite upset about it and afraid to tell my manager about my blunder. I did the easiest thing: just avoid talking to my boss at all. As he was in the US and I was in Europe, that was not hard at all... But, after three weeks of finding all kinds of excuses to get out of our regular calls, he gave me a direct call and said: "what the heck is going on?". I admitted the whole thing and, of course, he was quite upset. But not at the USD 180. That is nothing on the budget of his or any team in any company. The costs of me not talking to him, now that he was serious about and I had to promise to never do that, ever, again.

... if you communicate about it

So what can you learn from my mistake? The rule, especially in the beginning of your career, is to over-communicate. Especially when it comes to new employees, many managers are anxious and worried about what is going on. Telling them often, even every day, how things are going and what you're doing is something they will never complain about.

You can practice during GSOC: sending a daily ping about the state to your mentor, even if it is "hey, I had no time yesterday, and won't have any today". And a weekly, bigger report on what you worked on is also a very good thing to get going.

Understand that it is not unprofessional to miss a deadline or make a mistake, but it IS unprofessional if it comes as a surprise to others when they find out later on!

Especially if there's some kind of issue or you got stuck: you don't have to ask for help right away, though you should not wait to long--topic for another blog. But it is important that management knows. It makes them feel in control and believe me, the nightmare of every manager is to not be in control! If you do these things when you start working I promise you: it will score you points with your boss and help your career.

Coming Thursday I'll be talking and workshopping at the Open Tech Summit about getting your ownCloud up and running, either on a laptop, desktop or server or on a Pi(like) device like a Raspberry or Banana Pi. I will bring a few devices to play with, it will be fun!

If you'd like to join, there's a number of free tickets available. Go to this website to register and use the code WELOVEOWNCLOUD.

See you there!

I've been asked recently why ownCloud zipps its files instead of tarring them. .tar preserves file permissions, for one, and with tar.gz or tar.bz2 you have compression too.

Good question. Let me start by noting that we actually have both: zip and tar.bz2. But why zip?

A long time ago and far, far away

In the beginning, we used tar.bz2. As ownCloud gained Windows Server support, we added zip. Once we dropped Windows support, we could have killed the zip files. But we had reasons not to: tar is, sadly, not perfect.

Issues with Tar

You see, tar isn't a single format or a 'real' standard. If you have a platform other than plain, modern Linux, think BSD or Solaris, or the weird things you can find on NAS devices, tar files can get you in trouble. Unlike zip, tar files also can have issues with character format support or deep folders. We've had situations where upgrades went wrong and during debugging we found that moving to zip solved the problem miraculously... And, as ownCloud, we're squarely focused on the practical user experience so we keep zip, alongside tar.bz2.

See also the GNU tar manual if you want to know more about the various tar formats and limitations.

Sadly, sometimes it is impossible to find one thing that works for everyone and in every situation.


Tarred turtle pic from wikimedia, Creative Commons license. Yes, that's a different tar, I know. But - save the turtles!

ownCloud Mail, a great newcomer

What's simpler than downloading a zip file, extracting it and running a command in the resulting folder to get an ownCloud server up on localhost?

Yes, it can be that simple, though it might require a few minor tweaks and you have to make sure to have all ownCloud dependencies installed.

Note that this is useful if you want to develop an ownCloud app. If you want to develop on the ownCloud core, a git checkout is the way to go, get started here. Feedback on this process is highly appreciated, especially if it comes with a pull request for our documentation of course ;-)

Step 1 and Two: Dependencies

• Install PHP and the modules mentioned here
  Your distro should make the installation easy. Try these:
  
  • openSUSE: zypper in php5 php5-ctype php5-curl php5-dom php5-fileinfo php5-gd php5-iconv php5-json php5-ldap php5-mbstring php5-openssl php5-pdo php5-pear php5-posix php5-sqlite php5-tokenizer php5-xmlreader php5-xmlwriter php5-zip php5-zlib
  • Debian: apt-get install php5 php5-json php5-gd php5-sqlite curl libcurl3 libcurl3-dev php5-curl php5-common php-xml-parser php5-ldap bzip2
• Make ownCloud session management work under your own user account.
  Either change the path of php session files or chmod 777 the folder they are in, usually something like /var/lib/php (debian/SUSE) or /var/lib/php/session (Red Hat).

The Final Four Steps

• Download the latest ownCloud zip file.
• Extract it in a folder where you want to get going.
• Enter the folder and execute: php -S localhost:5000
• Visit http://localhost:5000 in your browser

ownCloud should present you with its installation steps! Give your username and password and you're up and running with SQLite.

Alternative with OCDev

An alternative is to use OCDev which you can grab here. After installation, you run
ocdev setup core

See the app development tutorial here.

Start with the app

Now you create a subfolder in the owncloud/apps with the name of your app and put in a skeleton. With OCDev:
ocdev startapp MyApp

By hand, you can copy an existing app and hack that up ;-)

It's probably wise to now get going with the app development tutorial here. Be sure to check out the changelog, we try to make sure the latest changes are noted there so even if we didn't manage to fully update the tutorial, you can find out what will and won't work in the changelog. Also, be sure to update the links to get the latest dev doc - this all links to 9.0, once that is out it is probably better to directly target 9.1 and so on.

Your input is very much welcome! If you run through these steps and get stuck somewhere, let me know and I'll update the documentation. Or, of course better still, do a pull request on the documentation right in github. You don't even have to do a full checkout, smaller fixes can easily be done in the web interface on github.

Thanks, good luck, and have fun building ownCloud apps!