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Let's be honest, if we did a release with only stabilization, it might get us more users. Not more customers. And it is customers who pay for the development.

Let's be honest, if we did a release with only stabilization, it might get us more users. Not more customers. And it is customers who pay for the development. Everyone asks us to focus "on the basics" and then claim their pet feature requests are, of course, basics. ACL's and user mgmt in your case, perfectly fine features, but features nonetheless. In the end, our development is guided by the community and customers. If you're not either, we might not do what you want... That's the reality of any open source project. And you're right, for a large installation, you should obviously get an onsite engineer, or, much better, a contract with us which is both cheaper and better. That's what most larger installations do, and that is how we earn the money to make Nextcloud better. WRT the E2E, that sadly took a whole lot longer to get working than we had expected. Of course, if you think it is important or need it, time and money can speed it up, we have only so much of those.

SJk7TAy 8y ago
Why do you say that a release with only stabilization brings you more users but not customers? Wouldn't the quality word-of-mouth convince more businesses to switch? And I assume they need professional support anyhow, don't they? Another Nextcloud enthusiast and (very small) contributor here. Thank you for the awesome work you and the team do :)
jchw 8y ago
GitLab seems to suffer from a similar conundrum, and they also seem to have gained a reputation for being unstable. Which is sad. In my experience, GitLab is very stable, nowadays, but it will probably never fully recover from its first impressions for some people.
- dsumenkovic 8y ago
  Thanks for your comment, we really appreciate your feedback about GitLab. Our team is working hard on improving the availability and stability of the platform. Our goal is currently to achieve 99.95% availability on GitLab.com. According to Pingdom, over the last year our availability has been 99.81%, although this includes the large (multi-hour) maintenance window on 11 August 2018 when we migrated GitLab.com from Microsoft Azure cloud to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Since the migration, our availability has improved greatly (caveat: we obviously have much less data than from Azure). There are multiple reasons for this improvement. We chose Google Cloud Platform because we believe that they offer the most reliable cloud platform for our workload, particularly as we move towards running GitLab.com in Kubernetes. It is worth pointing out that we also used the migration as an opportunity to improve our infrastructure, simplify some components and otherwise make things more stable and more observable. Finally, we've also been focusing on building the infrastructure team up, having hired many new team members over the past few months. This means that the team has been better able to balance the job of running GitLab.com with making it more stable.
kop316 8y ago
I use Nextcloud and it is an integral part of my life, but your current set up does not allow me to pay you, as it focuses only on enterprise use case. If I may make a suggestion, could you make a page for donation, and then you can have a "put your donation to Nextcloud to the following uses: - New features - Stablilty - Android Client development" I think you get the idea. I would very happily donate if I was given the option to.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  I like your 'vote with your wallet' idea for open source. Want to get that issue to the top of the ticket queue? Pay up! It makes perfect sense.
  - kop316 8y ago
    I want to say Ubuntu does that? Its a larger frustration with a lot of open source projects though. I'd love to throw some money to say thanks, but its either really hard or convoluted. The easiest way I have found so far is with android ones, I just buy the paid versions on there.
    - jospoortvliet 8y ago
      That's really a nice, sympathetic idea. The main issue with that is that it simply doesn't provide anywhere near enough money to pay a real team. Our forums, for example, have about 17.7k users according to help.nextcloud.com/about Let's say we get ALL those users to pay 10 bucks per year. Not going to happen, of course - but let's say we put in a lot of effort there. That can pay for 3-4 developers. We have 25. Should we really spend time on that? Or spend that energy on getting a few big customers who pay 100K each? We have explicitly chosen not to even TRY to monetize any installation under 50-100 users. That means we don't try to squeeze money out of small businesses and home users (for example by not fixing issues for those users to try and get them to sign a contract). Instead, our incentive is to make Nextcloud easy and good enough that anyone <100 users can just use it without needing us. Because then 1. they don't ask too many questions on our forums and github and twitter etc and 2. they advocate for how great Nextcloud is to our real potential customers: businesses with 500 to 50 million users. Of course, if community members want to donate or if contributors want to earn a cup of coffee, there's always https://www.bountysource.com/teams/nextcloud https://www.bountysource.com/teams/nextcloud But our employees aren't allowed to take money out of that, they have to donate it back to issues they/we care about.
nisa 8y ago
Thanks for your work on Nextcloud! I really appreciate what it does. Also thanks for taking the time to answer my rant ;) On a positive note: Just upgraded to Nextcloud 15 without any issues in a few minutes. I feel it's getting better with every release. You put in a lot of work and I recently logged into an Owncloud 8 install and it's a night and day difference. I'm also aware that you owe me nothing. I'm fine with that. It's a discussion forum here and I just wanted to write down my experience. I'm sure you'd rather see solid pull requests instead of unwanted advice. Mea culpa.
- guruz 8y ago
  It would be more fair to compare the LATEST Nextcloud with the LATEST ownCloud. Both projects are going strong! Nextcloud is more community-focused, ownCloud is more enterprisey.
  - jospoortvliet 8y ago
    Hi Markus, I'd argue the opposite, actually, ownCloud is betting on providing hosting for small and medium businesses, while Nextcloud targets large businesses. And that is what reality shows. Nextcloud has far larger customers than ownCloud, which breaks down at instances over 50K users. The only large-ish oC setup is actually a bunch of separate universities. Nextcloud is far more scalable. Thanks to Global Scale, our largest installation has tens of millions of users on a single instance, and customers like the German government (300K users) wouldn't be able to work with oC unless they split up their users and create silos.
    - hodyroff 8y ago
      Hello Jos, more facts less fiction please. The largest known and named deployment is still Digilocker with ownCloud, which has over 16 million users (https://digilocker.gov.in/ https://digilocker.gov.in/), and yes, it‘s a single instance. You claim the fork’s largest deployment has „over 20 million users“ umm „tens of millions of users“ which installation is that again? German government cloud is still in development, isn't it? Really 300k active users? If you have so many large customers, why don’t you put them on your website? Of course there are always some customers that don’t like to be mentioned, but all the once you seem to have?! ownCloud reference customers can be checked here: https://owncloud.com/customers/ https://owncloud.com/customers/ Those large customers are mostly enterprises, not universities. At the same time we are proud about our market leadership in the educational market worldwide! Obviously Nextcloud is more community-focused, ownCloud is more enterprise and focusing on file sync and share and content collaboration. The customer lists prove it and you proved it once again by releasing a non-enterprise ready but feature-focused alpha with a lack of quality assurance. Please see the comments above by your users and help those, instead of spreading FUD about ownCloud.

SJk7TAy 8y ago

Why do you say that a release with only stabilization brings you more users but not customers? Wouldn't the quality word-of-mouth convince more businesses to switch? And I assume they need professional support anyhow, don't they? Another Nextcloud enthusiast and (very small) contributor here. Thank you for the awesome work you and the team do :)

jchw 8y ago

GitLab seems to suffer from a similar conundrum, and they also seem to have gained a reputation for being unstable. Which is sad. In my experience, GitLab is very stable, nowadays, but it will probably never fully recover from its first impressions for some people.

dsumenkovic 8y ago
Thanks for your comment, we really appreciate your feedback about GitLab. Our team is working hard on improving the availability and stability of the platform. Our goal is currently to achieve 99.95% availability on GitLab.com. According to Pingdom, over the last year our availability has been 99.81%, although this includes the large (multi-hour) maintenance window on 11 August 2018 when we migrated GitLab.com from Microsoft Azure cloud to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Since the migration, our availability has improved greatly (caveat: we obviously have much less data than from Azure). There are multiple reasons for this improvement. We chose Google Cloud Platform because we believe that they offer the most reliable cloud platform for our workload, particularly as we move towards running GitLab.com in Kubernetes. It is worth pointing out that we also used the migration as an opportunity to improve our infrastructure, simplify some components and otherwise make things more stable and more observable. Finally, we've also been focusing on building the infrastructure team up, having hired many new team members over the past few months. This means that the team has been better able to balance the job of running GitLab.com with making it more stable.

kop316 8y ago

I use Nextcloud and it is an integral part of my life, but your current set up does not allow me to pay you, as it focuses only on enterprise use case. If I may make a suggestion, could you make a page for donation, and then you can have a "put your donation to Nextcloud to the following uses: - New features - Stablilty - Android Client development" I think you get the idea. I would very happily donate if I was given the option to.

jacquesm 8y ago
I like your 'vote with your wallet' idea for open source. Want to get that issue to the top of the ticket queue? Pay up! It makes perfect sense.
- kop316 8y ago
  I want to say Ubuntu does that? Its a larger frustration with a lot of open source projects though. I'd love to throw some money to say thanks, but its either really hard or convoluted. The easiest way I have found so far is with android ones, I just buy the paid versions on there.
  - jospoortvliet 8y ago
    That's really a nice, sympathetic idea. The main issue with that is that it simply doesn't provide anywhere near enough money to pay a real team. Our forums, for example, have about 17.7k users according to help.nextcloud.com/about Let's say we get ALL those users to pay 10 bucks per year. Not going to happen, of course - but let's say we put in a lot of effort there. That can pay for 3-4 developers. We have 25. Should we really spend time on that? Or spend that energy on getting a few big customers who pay 100K each? We have explicitly chosen not to even TRY to monetize any installation under 50-100 users. That means we don't try to squeeze money out of small businesses and home users (for example by not fixing issues for those users to try and get them to sign a contract). Instead, our incentive is to make Nextcloud easy and good enough that anyone <100 users can just use it without needing us. Because then 1. they don't ask too many questions on our forums and github and twitter etc and 2. they advocate for how great Nextcloud is to our real potential customers: businesses with 500 to 50 million users. Of course, if community members want to donate or if contributors want to earn a cup of coffee, there's always https://www.bountysource.com/teams/nextcloud https://www.bountysource.com/teams/nextcloud But our employees aren't allowed to take money out of that, they have to donate it back to issues they/we care about.

nisa 8y ago

Thanks for your work on Nextcloud! I really appreciate what it does. Also thanks for taking the time to answer my rant ;) On a positive note: Just upgraded to Nextcloud 15 without any issues in a few minutes. I feel it's getting better with every release. You put in a lot of work and I recently logged into an Owncloud 8 install and it's a night and day difference. I'm also aware that you owe me nothing. I'm fine with that. It's a discussion forum here and I just wanted to write down my experience. I'm sure you'd rather see solid pull requests instead of unwanted advice. Mea culpa.

guruz 8y ago
It would be more fair to compare the LATEST Nextcloud with the LATEST ownCloud. Both projects are going strong! Nextcloud is more community-focused, ownCloud is more enterprisey.
- jospoortvliet 8y ago
  Hi Markus, I'd argue the opposite, actually, ownCloud is betting on providing hosting for small and medium businesses, while Nextcloud targets large businesses. And that is what reality shows. Nextcloud has far larger customers than ownCloud, which breaks down at instances over 50K users. The only large-ish oC setup is actually a bunch of separate universities. Nextcloud is far more scalable. Thanks to Global Scale, our largest installation has tens of millions of users on a single instance, and customers like the German government (300K users) wouldn't be able to work with oC unless they split up their users and create silos.
  - hodyroff 8y ago
    Hello Jos, more facts less fiction please. The largest known and named deployment is still Digilocker with ownCloud, which has over 16 million users (https://digilocker.gov.in/ https://digilocker.gov.in/), and yes, it‘s a single instance. You claim the fork’s largest deployment has „over 20 million users“ umm „tens of millions of users“ which installation is that again? German government cloud is still in development, isn't it? Really 300k active users? If you have so many large customers, why don’t you put them on your website? Of course there are always some customers that don’t like to be mentioned, but all the once you seem to have?! ownCloud reference customers can be checked here: https://owncloud.com/customers/ https://owncloud.com/customers/ Those large customers are mostly enterprises, not universities. At the same time we are proud about our market leadership in the educational market worldwide! Obviously Nextcloud is more community-focused, ownCloud is more enterprise and focusing on file sync and share and content collaboration. The customer lists prove it and you proved it once again by releasing a non-enterprise ready but feature-focused alpha with a lack of quality assurance. Please see the comments above by your users and help those, instead of spreading FUD about ownCloud.