Hi all!!!

I'm Jos Poortvliet, I hang quite a bit on these forums so you might have seen me around. I'm a technology fan but actually studied psychology and worked as 'business consultant' ("shuffling paperwork and making Excel sheets for management") for banks and telecom companies for a while. I've been doing volunteer work in open source since early 2000's and then got employed at SUSE to do a bit more of it

Been handling community and communication at openSUSE, then ownCloud-now-Nextcloud where I more formally do mostly marketing. Well, head of marketing, even, that is, I am allowed to tell myself what to do next

I live in berlin, love cooking but my wife and dog would say I work too much. Probably because so many people and companies and governments (!) still put their data at some random company and that scares me. I think we should control our data and I want to help citizens & organizations get there

@scottalanmiller well Eastern time, so that should be in 40 minutes, yes? 16:00/4pm Berlin time, I have in my calendar

fscking timezones, I know...

@JaredBusch Hmmm, the post was mostly meant to also try and help ppl coming from, say, ownCloud 5 - they will get in trouble with the apps, finding the old tarballs etcetera.

If you're on 8 or 9, there is not much news because it isn't, or rather- shouldn't be too hard. Would really like to know what problems you had as we have to fix those

Note that Nextcloud 11.0.2 comes early next week, Monday probably.

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.

Yeah, the only other explanation is that there was a change in the API from Google but I doubt they'd do that without telling people

The plan is to have Nextcloud (and before, ownCloud...) founder Frank Karlitschek, our security team lead Lukas Reschke and yours truly (just a lowly marketing dude) there to answer any questions you have!

If you want to share some questions here already which we should answer, go ahead!

edit: after thinking, I think this is better: I will create a thread with some background on us, where you can ask questions in advance. I'll do that Monday. OK?

Ofc if you happen to just ignore me and ask here, well... I just might not ignore that

@Minion-Queen ah yes. And that can use some promotion...

On it

Busy few days in #Nextcloud - 3000 students move to Nextcloud 11 and we had a blog about why Netcloud ag deploys our tech at their customers.

Bjoern blogged about the legal dangers of mixing proprietary with AGPL code (even got a reply from ownCloud COO Holger Dyroff), Swapnil wrote about how #Trump and #Brexit should be motivation to get your private cloud and I blogged about our team-of-11 ppl at FOSDEM and the other events we will be at the coming weeks and months: SCALE, FOSSAsia, Mobile World Congress and more.

I also wrote an extensive blog about upgrading to Nextcloud 11 from very old oC releases.

Oh and - #ilovefs of course!

https://pod.geraspora.de/uploads/images/scaled_full_48bdbe8eb515328ab3d1.jpg

@scottalanmiller said in You're all invited to the Nextcloud Conference 2017 in Berlin :

Better cold than being detained with an expired visa.

haha
amen, that I can only agree with

@jospoortvliet let me add that that is, of course, just MY opinion

@scottalanmiller Berlin is quite nice, indeed - but not in April. Sorry, but the hard reality is that the city is just not worth visiting during winter

It's a place that really blooms in summer.

The Nextcloud Conference starts on August 22 and runs until the 29th. The 26th and 27th we will have a program with talks, workshops and keynotes. The other days we'll be coding, designing, drinking beer, eating bratwurst and so on...

Registration is open, we'll announce a Call for Papers soon. Read the announcement for more details!

I know it isn't exactly next door for everybody but for those living in Europe, at least, it is totally worth a visit. Contributors that need it can also count on some travel support from the Nextcloud business.

BTW in other news:

• Last weekend was the international day of Privacy protection...
• and the Free Software Foundation published a list of challenges to people's control over computing and I blogged about that.

Take care!

I also did a private blog with some nice embarrassing pictures and details from back then

Hi all! Happy new year

We released Nextcloud 11.0.1 - go get it, security and stability updates FTW!

I also just published a blog about 7 years ownCloud - and the five people at that very first meetup!

I also invited those 5 on stage at our conference to talk about that sprint, long ago. Did you know it was a KDE hackathon? ownCloud started as KDE project, I was there when it was announced in 2010 in San Diego. That's right, ownCloud is a KDE project started in the USA

Youtube Video

@Romo said in Would you use public link editing' of documents?:

That's a feature available only if you have a GSuite account for work or education

ofc not in Nc, that feature is for everybody, we don't differentiate

Ah, thanks, I didn't know it was possible in G'docs. Well I guess they feel the pressure from the competition from MS so they're lowering the bar rather than forcing people to sign up to an account...

Still we're cooler

@DustinB3403 said in Would you use 'anonymous editing' of documents?:

What use cases were you guys considering when developing this?

Well, I have this so often... Want someone to edit a doc quickly with me but they're not a colleague so I would have to go to our sysadmin and ask them to create an account?!?! That is crazy, we're not going to give random people accounts on our infrastructure! With this I just share a link and - works. Get the doc written, un-share link done.

We just introduced public link editing of office documents in Nextcloud 11 - that is, you can share a folder with a public link and if you give it write permissions people can just click a document and edit it together with you, no accounts needed.

How useful is this, should I promote the bananas out of it or do you feel it's not worth much effort??

See my blog

and this yt video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iuSFKVl-xQ

EDIT: reworded "anonymous editing" to 'public link editing"... Same thing, different words

@Dashrender correct. To be totally honest I created this video 30 minutes before the release. I just had not had time earlier... It isn't super good but I thought it's better than nothing, so... Included.

I'm seriously excited to share the news with you all that Nextcloud 11 is released! Some of you have been test driving it already and seen some of the improvements. They are all over, but major areas of improvement include:

• security
• scalability
• full text search
• federation
• better updater
• and much more like:
  • kerberos authentication
  • UTF16 support on MySQL (emoticons in filenames won't break syncing anymore!)
  • Calendar can share public links
  • and more!

Watch a video of some of the more 'minor' improvements like scrolling in pdf previews, easily moving files, more complete theming and more here:
Youtube Video

I'd love to hear what my Mangolassi friends think of it, so comment