Nextcloud

Last night we had our first Nextcloud BBQ! Despite some rain it's a good start of something that should be a tradition. ;-)It was great to have conversations with the contributors who visited us as well as some downtime with the team. It's been a ... [More] busy time since we announced our new endeavor. And it continues to be awesome to get so many supportive comments and feedback on what we're up to! People are excited about our open strategy and appreciate the fact that there is a solid company behind it. The flood of incoming requests for information and support from customers presents a good problem. So let me point out, again, that we're hiring! [Less]

Yesterday we kicked off a meeting in Stuttgart to discuss Nextcloud and get work done. A first result is the establishment of the new Server repository on Github (and more repositories!) and we'll share other things on the forums and in Github issues ... [More] the coming days. The real important news however is that we decided to organize a BBQ!If you're in the area, we'd love to see you show up Wednesday at Egilolfstraße 31, Plieningen/Hohenheim close to Stuttgart Airport. Nearest public transport would be either U3 Plieningen or S2/3 Flughafen/Messe. Join us starting 6PM for the good times!View Larger MapWe'll have some alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, meat, fruits, veggie stuff and of course a BBQ. Give us a shout if you're coming on the forums! [Less]

In the past, the update experiences with ownCloud have been difficult. It was not always clear when updates would be released for the updater app or how to move to a new major release. Apps disappeared after an update or apps were updated to an ... [More] incompatible version (e.g. with a broken PHP dependency), or simply the updater had a bug and broke the whole instance. We hear you and in fact, we share the same concerns! Our goal has always been to get you the best possible update experience but there was and is room for improvement. With Nextcloud one of our primary goals is to allow people to easily and securely host their own data. Reliable updates are a key part of the user experience and we consider it a top priority at Nextcloud. While we can’t promise to magically have fixed all existing updater problems directly from the beginning we assure you that all update issues are of critical priority to us. We would like to share some of the changes that we’re planning for the updating process in Nextcloud. Please note that some of these are about being more open in the process, which means improvements depend on your help to be successful. Moreover, these are our thoughts and ideas and we are very open to constructive feedback, other ideas or practical help! 1. Open-sourcing all components related to the upgrade process Some key components like the “update-server” as used by ownCloud right now are closed-source components. This means that the community has no way to improve the update experience. A well-known example being https://github.com/owncloud/appstore-issues/issues/4, an issue open since 2014 which leads to the update server delivering wrong versions to the ownCloud server. Effectively, resulting in a broken instance. This issue has been fixed in February 2016. Two years after it broke hundreds, if not thousands of ownCloud servers. We believe that such critical components have to be open-sourced so more people can chip in and help out. 2. Make updater ready for shared hosting and low-end hardware The updater has in the past usually only been tested on dedicated machines. In such cases PHP has many additional functions such as executing Linux shell commands. In many shared hosting environments these additional functions are however not available which breaks the updating process. To make the updater compatible with such environments as well we want to devise tests for the updater which also cover those scenarios. 3. Perform maintenance tasks live in the background In the past the upgrading process executed most maintenance tasks while upgrading. This made upgrading in some scenarios an unnecessary slow experience. We’re aiming to move some of the maintenance tasks to background jobs. This is often possible, such as for example when a new filetype icon gets added to Nextcloud there is no need to have this one already appearing directly after the update. It doesn’t harm the user if it appears some hours after the upgrade. So instead of the upgrade taking a long time some not critical changes would just propagate later, while your Nextcloud is just working as normal. 4. Add the ability to skip releases We don’t consider it appropriate that users are not able to skip releases when updating. So for example when you want to update from Nextcloud 10 to Nextcloud 13 we want you to be able to directly go from 10 to 13 and not have to update to 11 and 12 as well. This will require some re-architecturing and, of course, more (automated) testing. We’re discussing our infrastructure and your thoughts are welcome on the forums! 5. Do not disable compatible apps Apps like Calendar or Contacts are what make your Nextcloud your very own! Nextcloud is not only about files but also about Calendar, Contacts and all the other apps you need to do your work. Right now on every minor updates these apps get disabled and have to be enabled by an administrator again. On the other hand, not only the Nextcloud dependency of an app should be considered when updating an app. They can specify dependencies on, for instance PHP version. If an app update requires a higher version than is installed on the server, an update should not be executed. Since the update may include security fixes though, the app should be disabled in this case and a warning sent out to the administrator. In short, this is a complicated subject but we think improving this is very important. 6. Provide the ability to easily use daily stable releases In many cases it’s totally okay to use the daily stable branches of one of our releases. They contain all the bug fixes but no new features. However, also bug fixes from time to time can contain bugs. We want to make it easier for people to catch bugs and easier for us to debug them. Find a bug and you can tell us on which date is has been added? Awesome. You just saved another contributor a lot of time! Another thing with daily stable releases is that they can help you test a fix that we developed or find out if a problem has already been fixed before reporting it. It’s important to add the ability to use daily branches and have updates of these running in an easy and uncomplicated way and this will be something we’ll work on. 7. Make it easier to subscribe to update notifications While administrators right now get a little update notification when they are logged-in into Nextcloud this can be improved. We’re thinking about adding notifications using the notifications API as well as other channels such as email. (for example by sending an Nextcloud administrator automatically emails about new releases). 8. Make updating apps a breeze Updating apps in ownCloud is something barely anybody has ever done since you manually would have to go to the admin menu, select each app and press “Update”. We believe that for many apps a kind of semi-automated or even completely automated approach is the way to go. 9. No more big delays until updates are available using the built-in updater Once we have at least partially implemented above mentioned changes we’re believing that we’re able to push updates using the updater app in a way quicker and more stable manner. And while we should always be careful and wait a bit with releasing automated updates, having the update server open source and managing it with pull requests allows users and other contributors to see what is going on, when a release comes or why not, and participate in the process and be part of the decision making. We’re looking forward to implementing changes in the Nextcloud updater and make it fit better with your needs. If you have any feedback leave it in your forums at help.nextcloud.com as, of course, we’re sharing OUR ideas here but we want and need YOUR input to make the result better than what we can come up with on our own! [Less]

Cool stuff we want to do more with! Based on feedback collected from many contributor members we've defined some plans and already made changes to how Nextcloud will be developed. Improved transparency and governance, focus on stability and ... [More] architectural improvements and other improvements are covered in this blog. Much more is coming, you can join the conversation right now on our forums!Community InputJanuary 2015, I ran a contributor survey to see what the ownCloud community thought about the processes, development focus and our work at the company. I shared the results by the end of April and pushed internally for the feedback to be taken serious. Some of the changes were implemented but many others were left for a future project to push forward. And Nextcloud will.feedback and changesNextcloud aims to build a sustainable business, not limited by short-term, next-quarter thinking. The relationship with our community of contributors and users is central to our plans. To quote Frank on this: The company shouldn't be involving the community more in decision making; that's the wrong way of looking at it. There shouldn't be a fundamental separation to begin with!And that's what we want. Saying "we're more open" just means being a more friendly ruler - Nextcloud aims to be a participant, not a king, benevolent or not! That is not to say that there should not be any direction but it shouldn't be dictated by a company anymore. Of course, people can decide what they work on, and the company gets to decide what it pays its employees to do. Now there are changes in how we manage our employees too, with far less micromanagement and more freedom. But that's for another blog.Let's go over the specific pieces of feedback mentioned in the email and received from contributors in other ways and note how Nextcloud intends to address them.DevelopmentownCloud is fun and relatively easy to contribute to, with a mostly well running review process and release cycle. There were some practical requests and suggestions as well as concerns about the strain the growth of our project has put on the core developers.Dealing with Pull RequestsA major issue as detailed in many comments was that it often takes too long for pull requests to be merged. That is, contributions are not handled fast or at all. The result is that, with Core moving fast, contributions get out of sync, no longer apply and are effectively lost. As the graphs below show, the number of pull requests taking longer than 6 months to be merged is rising rapidly while the company is contributing less to development relative to volunteers. Don't get me wrong, it's great to have a growing community! But the support for development from the company needs to keep up with the pace. Respecting contributions by being responsive and getting them merged will be our number one development priority at Nextcloud. As research by Mozilla has shown, reacting swiftly to contributions is crucial for growing community and we intend to grow and nurture our contributor base, recognizing outside input as a key driver of growth and success.More stabilityA general point made was that it'd be good to focus more on stability and performance. Some of that has been implemented with the 8.x series and automated testing improvements done over the last year. An especially sore point in terms of stability is the upgrade process, as was very visible with the 9.0 release that is still not available for users of the built in updater app. We will soon blog about the Nextcloud plans with regard to the updater.Architectural improvementsIt was mentioned that some parts of ownCloud are in need of serious architectural love and refactoring. ownCloud has been traditionally rather restrained in this regard and people worried that this "impairs competent developers". While being conservative is important with regards to building a platform (stability and compatibility!) many improvements made their way into the 8 and 9 releases. To preserve a healthy balance, we want to introduce an Architecture team to make decisions that have a big impact on the code base. More details will follow.Another area of improvement would be to communicate more about architectural changes. Frank has already done a series of blogs about Federation in the past and more will follow.Apps: support for Calendar, Contacts and SpreedMany pointed out that apps are extremely important for ownCloud and we should work more on that. Frank has always emphasized the importance of building a platform and for Nextcloud this will be a central goal.Nextcloud will officially support the Calendar and Contacts apps and supercharge their development. The Spreed.ME app will bring fully supported audio and video chat to ownCloud. We'll also invest in growing and improving our API for these and other applications.ProcessSome smallish process improvements were requested. More logical labels and tags, for example, which have been pretty much cleaned up since then. Another thing was that big pull requests are often a pain in the ass to get merged and we should tell contributors to cut their work in smaller pieces. This was added to the documentation.Decision makingMost people were positive about the technical direction of ownCloud - test-driven, stability, architectural work, those were great improvements. Decision making processes in the technical area were not considered very transparent. Comments were even more harsh about the project-wide decision making process.People feel decisions are often done behind closeddoors. Nextcloud will address this, in part by a new architecture team and in another part by getting rid of most 'hidden' communication channels like internal IRC and mailing lists. We also plan on talking more about our goals and plans in blogs and such.Longer term planning is a major sticking point: there is little of it public. We need to discuss, together, how to do longer term planning. This doesn't fit too well with github. Thoughts welcome!Communication channelsSeveral people have noted that we've got too many, confusing and overlapping communication channels. We've already eliminated one: mailing lists. We still have a newsletter for those who want to follow us and the blog roll on nextcloud.com/news. For technical discussions we keep using github (which now links commits to pull requests so you can find the discussion behind code) and we'll discuss more general subjects on the forum. Speaking of which, it's now on discourse - a massive improvement I'd say. And email fans can use email to communicate with people on the forum!GovernanceIt was already mentioned here and there but there are two other big changes. First, we want the Nextcloud trademarks to be owned by the community, like the ownCloud one should have been. So we will set up a foundation soon which will control the trademark (not have it sub-licensed!) and more in the future.Second, we will get rid of the Contributor License Agreement. You don't need to sign anything to contribute to Nextcloud.Third, without CLA there are no proprietary apps part of Nextcloud. We won't be artificially crippling Nextcloud just to get some checkmark on a feature list on the enterprise side. At the same time, of course much functionality is needed for companies, stuff that they need (and home users don't). We will provide that for sure, including migration path, but this time as stand-alone tools. No more exclusivity for a single company, allowing it to do things others can't for legal reason. Our power is in employing the people who write the code, so we can give the best support and develop the best features. If another comes and tops us, well, we should've done better.UsersThere will be improvements for users, too. Already mentioned were our plans to support the Calendar and Contacts apps, Mail too, perhaps more. And of course with Spreed.ME we will integrate open source, WebRTC based video conferencing. There is more coming - for a future blog!That's all? Nope.Now I know this is a long blog with lots of details. No surprise, it is based on things we've wanted to improve for many years but could not. Now we can and we will. This is not the end of it, other suggestions and thoughts are more than welcome. Get involved! [Less]

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 … Continued

You should have full control over your data. We help you achieve that: a safe home for all your data. Secure, under your control and developed in an open, transparent and trustworthy way. We are Nextcloud. Started by well known open source file sync and share project founder Frank Karlitschek … Continued