Hi all!
Today we kick off the AMA and it'd be cool to give you a chance to start asking questions already...
So, I thought I'd give you a few interesting tidbits of history & who we are to read through and then - ask below. We (Frank, Lukas and myself) will introduce ourselves at T=0 and I'll make sure we cover those questions during the AMA.
Now, HISTORY.
before the world was born
kidding, of course. So in 2010, Frank announced ownCloud: a project to built an alternative for Dropbox, Google Drive and similar. A bunch of folks joined, it was fun and some releases were made (ownCloud 1.0, 1.1, 2.0). Frank the met 2 guys, former SUSE exec's, who brought in investors and the three started a company. Many of the community members were hired and for about 5 years, lots of open source software was written.
Also some closed source, as ownCloud followed an Open Core model: you had to sign your copyright away to be able to contribute. Only customers got access to a subset of features.
Nothing horribly wrong in principle, but a model that is hard to keep in balance. And May 2016 Frank left because that balance wasn't going in the right direction. With him almost all engineers left and started a new company, with the founder of Red Hat Germany as co-founder and investor. This time no open core, but fully open source.
Today, Nextcloud is the biggest, most active open source file sync and share project and the business is profitable and growing fast.
Boxes & stuff
So we've been doing a bunch of cool things. Yes, that includes Nextcloud 9, 10 and 11. Also very exciting is our collaboration with Canonical and Western Digital, resulting in the Nextcloud Box, a Raspberry Pi based private cloud server.
And what else?
We're building Spreed, audio/video chat integrated in Nextcloud. We worked with Collabora to create a docker image so now all Nextcloud users (as well as users of Kolab, Seafile and even ownCloud) have access to a private online office. There are other, interesting apps in development like Passman, a password manager (with KeePass import), Nextant, a full text search tool (we hired its author earlier this month - if you built such a cool app, WE WANT YOU!), and there's Mail, Calendar, News, Contacts and two-factor authentication and more, all developed by contributors from our community, or employees, or both together.
Oh and I should mention...
- We organize the Nextcloud Conference, August 22-29 in Berlin
- We are present at loads of conferences like SCALE, MWC and more and organize our own meetups, see our events page
- If you read through all these boring details you deserve something. So, ask a question during the AMA involving bananas tomorrow and you have a chance to earn a Nextcloud Box.