Who is Nextcloud

Nextcloud is an evolution of the project started by Frank Karlitschek 6 years ago to bring give people back control over their data. We believe that with this new endeavor, the open future of the project has been secured. Nextcloud kicks off as a healthy company, combining the booming Spreed.ME open source video conferencing business with Nextcloud. Top contributors to Franks’ former project are participating in our efforts and we invite the wider community to join us in bringing open, self-hosted private cloud technology to a new level!

History

In 2010, Frank Karlitschek kicked off the a project to liberate user data with a keynote in San Diego. In 2011 he co-founded a company with the goal to accelerate development, pay the bills of the open source file sync and share contributors and provide services to large organizations in need of support and enterprise capabilities. This has worked tremendously well: the community has grown to 80-90 regular contributors and the project claims millions of users.

company vs community contributions

What is next

As the plot on the right shows, since 2014 the balance between volunteer and company contributions has shifted away from the business. With the company retreating from community work, the number of pull requests that lingered grew a lot, with over 100 PR’s open more than 6 months despite a recent push to get them down. Nextcloud aims to significantly accelerate development, focus again on an open process with less blockers like Contributor Licence Agreements or closed enterprise apps. Over the coming days and weeks, we gather input from community members and share our own ideas for improvements.

What for me

For home and enterprise users of the existing product, Nextcloud will provide a drop-in replacement as well as service and support from the people who wrote the code. We will employ the domain experts around its functionality, allowing us to deliver better support than anybody else. Nextcloud 9 will be based on the latest release and will enable easy upgrades to future Nextcloud releases and allow enterprises to smoothly transition from the Enterprise Edition to the supported Nextcloud version. We will provide an Enterprise Subscription which will provide the functionality enterprise users are used to.

Our goal is to ensure no user or customer falls behind. Community members can already find new, modern forums with helpful members at help.nextcloud.com. We will offer downloads on our install page within a few weeks.
Customers can contact us with a form on our enterprise page to learn about our support and product options.

Who is next

Nextcloud officially started yesterday and our team is growing fast! If you’re interested in joining, send an email to jobs at nextcloud.com!

Most importantly, you want to know what comes now. Follow us on social media to get all the good stuff first and subscribe to our newsletter!!!

Ask your questions in our Live Nextcloud Q&A Hangout with Frank and Jos, moderated by Bryan Lunduke at 19:00 PM Berlin/Amsterdam/Paris time, 10:00 AM Pacific time.