The topic of self-hosted cloud software comes up often but I haven’t seen anyone mention owncloud infinite scale (the rewrite in Go).
I started my cloud experience with owncloud years ago. Then there was a schism and almost all the active devs left for the nextcloud fork.
I used nextcloud from it’s inception until last year but like many others it always felt brittle (easy to break something) and half baked (features always seemed to be at 75% of what you want).
As a result I decided to go with Seafile and stick to the Unix philosophy. Get an app that does one thing very well rather than a mega app that tries to do everything.
Seafile does this very well. Super fast, works with single sign on etc. No bloat etc.
Then just the other day I discovered that owncloud has a full rewrite. No php, no Apache etc. Check the github, multiple active devs with lots of activity over the last year etc. The project seems stronger than ever and aims to fix the primary issues of nextcloud/owncloud PHP. Also designed for cloud deployment so works well with docker, should be easy to configure via docker variables instead of config files mapped into the container etc.
Anyways, the point of this thread is:
- If you never heard of it like me then check it out
- If you have used it please post your experiences compared to NextCloud, Seafile etc.
What’s up with Owncloud? Why did devs leave for Nextcloud? And what happened to prevent that from happening again?
I too dislike that Nextcloud is in PHP, but if Owncloud went closed-source, then opened it up again (not saying that’s the story here), who’s to say it won’t happen again? Putting my eggs in that basket might seem quite dangerous as I don’t want my server to suddenly stop working and sit behind a paywall or something because management decided they want to make a quick euro.
I don’t remember all the details. They never went closed source, there was a difference in opinion between primary devs on the direction the project should take.
Its possible that was related to corporate funding but I don’t know that.
Regardless it was a fork where some devs stayed with owncloud and most went with NextCloud. I moved to NextCloud at this time as well.
OwnCloud now seems to have the resources to completely rewrite it from the ground up which seems like a great thing.
If the devs have a disagreement again then the code can just be forked again AFAIK just like any other open source project.
