Am I the only one who missed the Owncloud rewrite in Go?

Ya it was bought by kiteworks which provides document management services for corps (which explains why that mention traceable file access in their features a lot).

That being said, they bought them in 2014 it seems and it's been a decade now Correcting: they were bought very recently, they have been accepting corporate funding for more than a decade however. That's not bad in and of itself.

Nextcloud needs to port over some of the old OC Documentation. Their own docs make all kinds of references and it's always something esoteric.

Exactly, Seafile is the best I've found so far but a clean re write of the basic sync features would be great.

Seafile for example has full text search locked behind a paywall even though tools like Elasticsearch could be integrated into it for free. Even the android app as filename search locked behind a paywall. You have to log into the website on your phone if you need to search.

Pathetic state of affairs.

If you only need file syncing, there are better options than Nextcloud. But Nextcloud is the only real option if you want to create a full suite of replacements for office365 or google thanks to the large plugin ecosystem.

I know, I did as well.

The point of the post is that there is a very active full rewrite of the whole thing trying to ditch all the tech debt that NextCloud inherited from the OG owncloud (php, Apache etc)

It isn't perfect but it is better than everything else I tried. Also I've used it long enough to understand how to make it work

Why is that?

I personally will never use nextcloud, it is nice interface side but while I was researching the product I came across concerns with the security of the product. Those concerns have since then been fixed but the way they resolved the issue has made me lose all respect for them as a secure Cloud solution.

Basically when they first introduced encrypting folders, there was a bug in the encryption program, and the only thing that ever would be encrypted was The Parent Directory but any subfolder in that directory would proceed to not be encrypted. The issue with that is that unless you had server-side access to view the files you had no way of knowing that your files weren't actually being encrypted.

All this is fine it's a beta feature right? Except for when I read the GitHub issue on the report, they gaslit the reporter who reported the issue saying that despite the fact that it is advertised as feature on their stable branch, the feature was actually in beta status so therefore should not be used in a production environment, and then on top of , the feature was never removed from their features list, and proceeded to take another 3 months before anyone even started working on the issue report.

This might not seem like a big deal to a lot of people, but as someone who is paranoid over security features, the projects inaction over something as critical as that while trying to advertise themselves as being a business grade solution made me flee hardcore

That being said I fully agree with you out of the different Cloud platforms that I've had, nextCloud does seem to be the most refined and even has the ability to emulate an office suite which is really nice, I just can't trust them, I just ended up using syncthing and took the hit on the feature set

What's crazy is that I tried NC on my server, which is a HP Microserver G8 hosting 13 total services. And it ran like crap. Tried the standard and AIO versions. On a whim tried NextcloudPi on a Pi4 and it has been awesome! Web interface is still pretty sluggish but I use apps that sync to NC most of the time like:

• Quillpad for Google Keep type notes and checklists
• Floccus for bookmarks sync
• Deck for Kanban
• Gnome online accounts for desktop and laptop connection with documents

So far it's been flawless. I doubt it would run well with more than a few users though.

I had NextCloud on a Ryzen 3600 with NVME zfs array. While faster that my previous Intel atom with HDD + SSD cache, Seafile blows it away in terms of speed and resiliency. It feels much more reliable with updates etc.

Thank your for providing first hand perspective. I'll probably try to spin up a docker deployment for testing.

I don't really plan to use many of the plugins since I think that was the down fall of NextCloud. Trying to do everything instead of doing it's core job well.

Now, I admit, I'm not one to get carried by the drama in the FOSS sphere (still use Gitea)

This is a bit of a “bell curve meme” situation. I’m extremely about the drama, and I’m back to gitea. The forgejo guys are good at branding, but I’m not seeing great project stewardship. I’ll take my chances with the commercial guys for now.

That's indeed confusing. The wording linked below suggests the eula is for packages distributed by owncloud. so to my understanding the source itself and any third party packages don't need to care about it.

https://github.com/owncloud/ocis?tab=readme-ov-file#end-user-license-agreement

I only read the beginning but it says you can use it for private deployments but can't use it commercially. Seems reasonable. Any specific issues?

FYI there is an upcoming storage driver that can solve this issue

@JubilantJaguar I do similar but with syncthing. It’s treated me very well so far.

https://github.com/haiwen/seafile#license

Did not know this. Thanks!

Looks like Kiteworks invested in OwnCloud in 2014 and they still seems to be going strong with the OSS development which is a good sign.

This probably explains why there are so many active devs on the project and how they got a full rewrite into version 4 relatively quickly.

Already seems to have more features than Seafile.

I mean software that's actively being developed can't be called DOA. Even if it's garbage now (and I don't know if it is) doesn't mean it can't become useful at a future date.

Its not like a TV show where once released it can never be changed.

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.