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by stp-ip 3672 days ago
9 of the top 10 contributors in addition to the project founder and the lead security engineer are pushing this effort. Good foundation to fork and support users.

Let's hope this brings the transparency, openness and community awareness owncloud/nextcloud always needed.
2 comments
mhurron 3672 days ago
Why would they when they were (apparently) 90% of OwnCloud in the first place. What stopped them being open in the first place?
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stp-ip 3672 days ago
They were 90% of the top contributors. The company had a lot more sales people. The devs don't control decisions of the company. Only the code and that's why I assume there was this fork.
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mhurron 3672 days ago
Presumably they did control the company when they started. I don't know of a time when this complaint wasn't leveled against OwnCloud.
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stp-ip 3672 days ago
Control can be taken and views/visions can be different. That's the great thing about open source. The community or even other participants can fork and continue their own vision. Projects shouldn't make a habit out of it so.
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LionessLover 3672 days ago
Given the amount of negative voices I hear each time OwnCloud is mentioned - and that includes German tech websites where this German company is mentioned more frequently - I don't know why the departure of the original developers should necessarily be a bad thing. The amount of negativity of previous OC users was unusual, too much to put it down with a "you can't satisfy everybody". I'm not even talking about the "OMG they use PHP" comments.

I must say does seem to be at least partially the fault of developers, since they likely had much more responsibility than upper-level managers since it was a startup founded by techies for the longest time.

So if the company manages to leave some of that baggage behind this may be quite alright.

Having worked for another German software-heavy company I must admit I understood all those complaints, because our own products were similar: Pretty good in principle, but way, WAY too little attention to details that matters to customers. With each release the number of really stupid annoying little bugs never seemed to decrease (talking about "my" ex company, I only know OC from forum comments - but OC users' complaints sound like the ones we deservedly got to hear a lot).

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jancborchardt 3672 days ago
> since it was a startup founded by techies for the longest time

Well … we do have capable people who know how to properly design and develop products. We always work to make it easy to use for normal people and not only for techies. And I think the success proves that we did at least something right.

Disclaimer: I was the design lead for ownCloud and now moved on to Nextcloud.

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