The Nextcloud mission and principles

Nextcloud is more than 3 years old. For the founding team, including myself, it was very important to create a company and open source project that has some principles, some moral standard and goals. This should not be just another company which only exists to generate money. We want to do the ‘right thing’ and have a positive effect on the world. After three years of mainly listening to our gut feeling, at the last contributor week we decided to formalize these values more and agreed on the following.

Our Mission

We develop software for decentralized and federated clouds as alternative to centralized cloud services.

It is short, but there is a lot packed in this. First of all, we believe that the world is better when data, applications and IT in general are decentralized and not controlled by a few big companies. It also says that we develop software. We don’t run a cloud service or host the data of users. This is not our business. We focus on creating the software to enable others to run a service, either for themselves or for others.

Our principles

• Sustainability
  We build a sustainable company, aiming for long term stability, not a short term sale. So no growth at all cost: protect people, society and the environment.
• Privacy and security
  We believe that privacy is a fundamental human right. Everyone has the right of secure communication. It’s the main motivation behind all our products
• User-centered design
  We honor people’s time and mental load. That is why we make Nextcloud easy to use.
• Trust
  We trust each other to have shared goals and make decisions based on it. This enables remote and flexible work and decentralized, collaborative decision making over most things.
• Open Source
  Everything we do is 100% open source. We do not do open core or proprietary extensions.
• Open Standards
  We use and support open standards as much as possible. We don’t lock people in to proprietary formats. You can import and export everything.
• Decentralisation
  We are building decentralized products as alternatives to centralized platforms. People can choose what they want and where they want it.
• Community
  Working in the open with a broad community leads to better results. We trust our community and empower them to take ownership over what they contribute to and have as much access to and control over as legally and practically possible.
• Inclusion and diversity
  Diverse teams and communities make us better and more innovative. We support people marginalized in open source to get involved and thrive.
• Accessibility
  Accessibility is a fundamental human right and technology should be accessible to everyone.

These are the goals and principles we want to follow at Nextcloud. Read our about page and let me know what you think! Feedback is very welcome.

— Frank Karlitschek, CEO of Nextcloud