Nextcloud crucial to help users protect their privacy and maintain control over their data

The Free Software Foundation, the organization started by GPL inventor Richard Stallman, has released a new list of ‚High Priority Free Software Projects‘. The committee, which includes self-proclaimed ‚cyborg lawyer‘ Karen Sandler, keynote speaker at the Nextcloud Conference 2016, did a major overhaul on the list, focusing more on general areas than specific projects. Major recent efforts by Nextcloud happen to overlap with two of the 11 focus area’s and we’re relevant in several others!

The list

The main focus areas the FSF mentioned include:

• Free phone operating system
• Decentralization, federation, and personal Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS) clouds
• Free drivers, firmware, and hardware designs
• Real-time voice and video chat
• Encourage contribution by people underrepresented in the community
• Free software and accessibility
• Internationalization of free software
• Security by and for free software
• Intelligent personal assistant
• Help GNU/Linux distributions be committed to freedom
• Free software adoption by governments

When reading, you’ll notice that the 2nd and 4th items are directly attacked by Nextcloud – with the real-time voice and video chat being quite recent with the spreed app. Several other focus areas are of great importance to us as well.

Collaboration and participation

We were proud to participate in Ladies that FOSS and hope to participate in Google’s Summer of Code for students all over the world. Getting new people involved in open source, especially from under represented groups is important to any project! Without fresh blood and fresh ideas, irrelevance comes quick. Another issue we care about deeply is security. We made it a major feature of our Nextcloud 11 release, going as far as having our security processes verified by an external party, the experts from the British NCC Group.

All in all, we’re happy and proud to play a significant role in giving home and enterprise users control over their digital life!