Enhancing digital sovereignty: XWiki SAS and Nextcloud forge closer ties

Nextcloud has been collaborating with XWiki over the last year, developing integrations that help users manage their internal information in XWiki, CryptPad and Nextcloud. To foster a stronger partnership with this fellow European, open-source company, Nextcloud founder and CEO Frank Karlitschek has made a symbolic investment in XWiki SAS.Moreover, Nextcloud GmbH and XWiki SAS have signed a mutual resellers’ agreement to provide their customers an easy way to purchase a complete solution from either vendor. Together, the two projects will continue to push against the dominant tech giants that try to gain control over the data of European businesses, organizations, and citizens.

Building on shared values

Nextcloud builds digitally sovereign, privacy respecting collaboration software in an open, transparent way. XWiki SAS follows the same model, aiming to create software that matters and makes a difference. Both XWiki SAS and Nextcloud advocate for the empowerment of individuals and organizations to reclaim their digital sovereignty through collaborative, transparent, and fully open-source platforms.

A recent conversation between Frank and Ludovic culminated in December 2023 with a modest investment by Frank in XWiki SAS, symbolizing a deepening of our business relationship. This fits with the trend of the growing relation between XWiki SAS and Nextcloud on some customer projects, in several formal alliances, but also in the political space with both organizations pushing together for an open and free European market. A good example here is XWiki’s support for Nextcloud’s antitrust complaint about Microsoft to the European Union.

What this means for the Nextcloud community

The XWiki and Nextcloud software are both rooted in community-driven open-source development and are committed to maintaining free, independent, and organically grown communities and products. Rejecting venture capital backing, we both prioritize long-term sustainability and community-building over short-term gains.

In alliance with Nextcloud, we share a common ethos centered on privacy and data control and we plan on working even closer together in the following years. This small investment is on one hand a sign of growing trust and partnership, and on another hand marks for us a significant step towards realizing our shared vision of digitally sovereign collaborative solutions in Europe. At the same time, both companies will continue to work independently as they did until now.

— Ludovic Dubost, Founder and CEO of XWiki SAS and CryptPad_

XWiki has been maturing for many years into the robust and versatile knowledge management platform that it is today. We have been cooperating in various areas for some time now, and I am glad that I am able to formalize our ties a little further with this investment.

— Frank Karlitschek, Founder and CEO of Nextcloud_

What’s next?

We believe there is a bright future for digitally sovereign collaboration solutions in Europe and this is a step forward in bringing two leading projects in this space closer together. Join us on the road towards a more digitally sovereign future by following XWiki SAS on Mastodon, LinkedIn, X, Facebook, or through their newsletter or read their blog about our collaboration. Meanwhile, you ca find Nextcloud on Mastodon, LinkedIn, X, Facebook, Instagram, or follow our newsletter.

About XWiki SAS and Nextcloud

XWiki SAS is the top sponsoring company for the XWiki and CryptPad open-source projects, and we also offer services on top of these two products.

XWiki is an open-source wiki platform that offers extensive customization features, collaborative editing, document and files management, integration capabilities, and granular rights management. It is a flexible and scalable solution, with features for creating, organizing, searching, and sharing knowledge within teams and organizations, on premise or in cloud.

CryptPad is an open-source online collaboration suite that provides secure and privacy-focused tools for document editing, real-time collaboration, and communication. CryptPad enables users to use and share rich text, spreadsheets, polls, presentations, whiteboard functions, forms, kanban, diagrams, and code/markdown without compromising the confidentiality of their data.

Nextcloud Hub is the leading open source, on premise content collaboration platform with a strong focus on data protection. It offers document sharing, real-time editing, video conferencing, calendaring, mail and more across mobile, web and desktop interfaces.

Frank Karlitschek is a long time open-source contributor and privacy activist. He is former board member of the KDE e.V. and has initiated several initiatives over the years to make the internet more secure and more federated like the open collaboration services and the user data manifesto. He is founder and CEO of Nextcloud.