What's going on with OwnCloud?
The recent announcement of the OwnCloud Foundation followed by the announcement of fork of OwnCloud is bound to raise more than a few eyebrows. What happened? How did things get to this point?
Catching the Next Cloud
Earlier today, Frank Karlitschek, co-founder of #OwnCloud, made an announcement about the formation of a new project. Five weeks prior, he had left the company that he had helped start, and some of the core development team have followed him to their new project, NextCloud.
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Frank describes a vision for what he wants out of this new project and its respective community: a project that does development out in the open, without any contributor agreements or dual-licensing schemes, with a new trademark held by an independent foundation. A better company culture where shares are equally held by employees, with the hand of development decisions guided by the community-at-large rather than a disconnected small team.
To paraphrase Frank, the best parts of OwnCloud are to be extended to fully support what the community has been asking for: better apps, with features that previously only existed for enterprise customers. In his own words:
We will release a drop in replacement for ownCloud in a few weeks so that users and customers can easily upgrade to Nextcloud to benefit from the new bugfix and security improvements and features. Nextcloud GmbH will provide free support for all current ownCloud customers to simplify a transition.
The OwnCloud Foundation
"One of Frank’s criticisms concerned the need to strengthen the Community. In this regard, we have been working on the creation of the ownCloud Foundation, the formation of which we announced earlier this week."
Recently, the OwnCloud project announced that it was setting up a foundation. While this is a welcome event for any Free Software project, it immediately raised eyebrows. Some of the main criticisms were focused on the nature of the board itself (only 2 seats are elected by the community - the other four are coporate), whereas others have pointed out that only OwnCloud Inc itself appears to have any sponsorship in the foundation.
Meanwhile, a handful of developers of the OwnCloud platform announce that they are leaving their projects. Their announcements can be found on Planet KDE. The general theme appears to be that OwnCloud is putting its corporate needs above its community needs.
The OwnCloud Foundation's had this to say on the matter:
Today’s announcement by our former colleague Frank Karlitschek, that he intends to launch a competitive product to ownCloud into the market using recently poached developers, has both surprised us and – admittedly – disappointed us. In the past, Frank has made a wealth of contributions to the development of the ownCloud Community Edition. With today’s announcement, he is no longer related to the ownCloud project and has started a competing community.
This ends on a particularly strange note, as OwnCloud finally concludes that it has to close its doors after their main lenders cancelled their credit. 8 employee contracts were terminated in the process, and the company will be forced to close its doors. Paradoxically "The ownCloud GmbH is not directly affected by this and the growth of the ownCloud Foundation will remain a key priority."
#NextCloud
