Today was about the features of Nextcloud Version 11, “the foundation” and the first Nextcloud conference.
Nextcloud Version 11
The first meeting was set up to collect and decide about features for the upcoming version 11 of Nextcloud. Each feature has it’s own history and story, e.g. 4 Byte support means, among other, Emojis support ;). Each feature has also it’s own difficulties or uncertainties, e.g. Sharepoint!
Some of the new features are a result of cool architectural ideas on one hand and are necessary (or super nice to have), but could affect on the other hand plenty of code, e.g. the improve federated sharing feature or the new Updater.
Some features are part of a bigger picture like the spreed.me integration.
The meeting was very efficient and tasks were assigned to participants. This doesn’t mean that they have to deliver as soon as possible. But it is a commitment to get things done with the help of others because it’s of course not easy impossible to assume how long it will take to finish some of the tasks. Here the meeting result on the whiteboard:
Afterwards Morris created the issue Nextcloud 11 overview #745 and tflidd the forum post Planned features for NC 11 . It’s remarkable for me to see the transparency, openness and speed of the whole process.
The Foundation
After lunch, we had the “foundation” meeting. How to organise the structure of an entity, involve the community, users, Nextcloud clients, partners, individuals in general? How to give them the possibility to get influence on roadmap, architectural changes and many more. How to handle the trademark in a fair way? How can Nextcloud GmbH help? How can the entity that will be formed help Nextcloud GmbH? How to create a win-win situation for all stakeholders and protect the trademark against “evil situations”. Answers to these questions are not easy in open source projects and depend also on national and international laws. It’s a complex topic and it’s handled differently in the three Content Management Systems I have some insights in. In Joomla for example the trademark is owned by Open Source Matters.
OSM has the roles to own and manage the assets of Joomla, such as the domains, trademarks and copyright
There is no big company behind Joomla.
In Drupal it belongs to the founder Dries Buytaert.
Any license granted under this policy, is legally granted as a sub-license by the company Dries Buytaert BVBA (company number 0893.231.032), which is mandated by Dries Buytaert to evaluate the applications and assign sub-licenses of the Drupal trademark on behalf of Dries Buytaert (http://drupal.com/trademark).
Dries ist also the CTO of Acquia, the company behind Drupal AND he serves as president of the Drupal association!
Automattic, the company behind WordPress registered the domain name in 2006 and gave the trademark 2010 to the WordPress foundation (A New Home for the WordPress Trademark). But beside the WordPress brand Automattic runs 10 other services (Automattic Services).
It’s a big decision and it takes time, considerations, a lot of feedback, consulting and discussions what’s the best solution in the current situation of Nextcloud GmbH in general and Frank Karlitschek in particular. To make it even worse it should has to be solved as soon as possible.
The Conference – Sept 16-22 – Berlin
The Nextcloud community will be meeting at the TU Berlin from September 16 to 22 for a week of talks and coding around the next generation private cloud technology.
Friday opens with a focus on scalability and federation, with special workshops and meetups around these subjects. Saturday and Sunday are kicked off with a keynote and lightning talks in the morning while we get together around various subjects in the afternoon in workshops, learning and sharing together.
The conference is focused on making Nextcloud better, through discussion, coding, packaging, designing, translating and more.
See you there and thanks again for the possibility to attend the Nextcloud Hackweek ;)
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