Kiteworks and ownCloud join forces to underscore its commitment to the DACH market.
I guess that means it's dead, as there's no way a corporation would pay millions to acquire a competitor just to continue developing a free alternative to their own product
Since a couple years ago they abandoned the php version (=nextcloud) and they are in the process of a complete rewrite in go, which that means is faster and uses less resources but all existing plugins need to be rewritten too, and given the small user base nobody is going to do that.
Ooh interesting, never knew they started a rewrite!
The reports of poor performance with the PHP version was one of the things that pushed me towards using Syncthing instead when I was looking for a solution to view my documents and files from various devices
Badly. Nextcloud is a very active project with many plugins and integrations. You can even integrate a mail system and AI image tagging, chat and video calls.
Owncloud focussed more on the enterprise sector and less on fancy features. Definitely the more stable product (but not only in the positive sense).
I tried NC recently (like 2 weeks ago) and fuck me it's an awful piece of shit, full-stop. It broke completely 3x during initial setup, needing a container wipe and beginning from scratch each time, then I was following the official docs and the 'status / security' page of the admin area where it told me to do something that had no gui (so they are 100% aware anyone new has to do this but cba to throw it a fucking web page) and if you edit the config file on the machine directly, even if you stop the container, it breaks permissions (???) so you have to download it from your server, edit, and re-upload it (somehow doesn't break permissions???). This took an hour to figure out, the doc was useless.
Then you get to the plug-in page and fuck me could this be any worse. Pick one fucking category each, guys, I don't need to see 40% of the same available plug-ins on almost every fucking category, jesus fucking christ. Then you dive into these things and you realize how surface-level they are - a task/to-do list should have a fucking import/export function, as well as REPEATING OPTIONS fuck me sideways are you seriously taking the piss. You'll be setting up other plug-ins and they don't actually function at all even though they have been verified to work with your version (medical plug in, for example) and it just keeps crumbling around you the further you go. Shit, even the weather widget on the 'home page' will show C instead of F when you select a country during account setup that uses F, with NO OBVIOUS WAY TO CHANGE THAT. The fix? Go through your region options, pick a different country, then back to your actual. Does NOBODY EVEN TEST THIS SHIT? How are they on version SIX of their 'hub'?! This screams alpha, not multiple-stable-releases!
Has anything actually happened in ownClouds development?
The last I saw of them was FOSDEM a few years back, where NextCloud were handing out whitepapers and showing off their new Hub, chat, VoIP stack, group sharing system, and more. And ownCloud were sat somewhat opposite with two people and a screen showing a screenshot of a default ownCloud install, along with a big sign hanging from the ceiling saying "Join the winning team."
What happened to owncloud dev? I wish it would be the same at nextcloud! They fully get rid of PHP. Its called OCIS and is a single binary or docker container.
OCIS is in early stage and lacks some features, but it is really easy to install and works flawlessly on low resources.
It's great to hear that they're not just giving up. And it's also definitely good to hear that they're not sticking with PHP either, that language is a true bane to modern hosting - and especially Kubernetes.
I'll remain cautiously optimistic that they'll be able to stay relevant, and not go hard in again on cutting away core functionality in the name of enterprise offerings - what caused the NextCloud split in the first place.
Ooooor it will become a free vs corporate solution like RedHat and the likes do.
Portainer also does it for example. I think LDAP-Auth is paywalled but it makes sense that features like that are.
Yes! As soon as your homelab grows above a couple of services and especially if it's used by two or more people SSO becomes an absolute necessity! The tolerance of non-technical users for handling a bunch of passwords and having to enter them everywhere is understandably low.
The Home Assistant devs apparently also deal SSO as "a corporate feature that big-corp interests want to force onto us" whereas it's the exact opposite in many cases: If we want self hosted services to be a realistic alternative to the "big corpo offerings" then we have to consider convenience and security an important feature and SSO is one of the few things that improves both at the same time.
It might be, but in the history of that corp, they never had a free/community/oss project. It looks like the typical Embrace Extend Extinguish strategy, where you acquire competitors just to get their customer base instead of the real product. OC 10 it's already dead (no php 8 support) and ocis has almost no plugins.
Didn't know about their history.
If that was the case: Fun while it lasted. Havent used it thus far but I wasn't against the situation if it justified the use of it.
If you just want file storage Seafile. Idk about all the other crap it can do but id imagine there are plenty of good options for each one. Immich is great if your mostly concerned about pictures/videos for example
You need to keep up that was so last year. The new hottnes is switching back to owncloud because it is so light weight. But now i am guessing the new new hotness is switch from owncloud to Nextcloud.
You'll find a lot of pessimistic people here because there are few unicorns when a commercial company buying an open source project didn't go badly for the open source people. Most of the time after a sell-out the projects ends up under highly restrictive licensing, features behind paywalls, and many other problems making it a shadow of its former self.
The most notable recent examples I can think of is IBM buys Red Hat buys CentOS, and that ended with forks as AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux. Oracle buys MySQL ended up forked as MariaDB. Businesses love to push their commercial offerings on open source products, and it's not always in the form of plain old support agreements (like the people behind AlmaLinux). Often (this is common especially in databases) they'll tax features like SSO, backups, or literally simple the privilege of having stable software. Projects like CentOS and VyOS don't have stable OSS versions, and soooo many databases will put LDAP/Kerberos behind the commercial product, charging monthly or yearly operating costs.
Even GitHub (which to be clear was closed source to begin with, but is a haven for F/OSS so I'll give it an honorable mention here) started showing Microsoft-isms after M$ bought the platform.
I used nextcloud for a year or so, but found the web GUI/apps slow, bloated and sometimes way to buggy ! Switch to owncloud for the simplicity of only having a cloud system without to much bloat.
I just read through the seafile documentation and yeah this is also not going to happen. Maybe I should switch to a simple webdav server...