This is not an alternative as it only covers files. Mind what is in the article: "I like what Nextcloud offers with its feature set and how easily it replaces a bunch of services under one roof (files, calendar, contacts, notes, to-do lists, photos etc.), but ".
For us Nextcloud AIO is the best thing under the sun. It works reasonably well for our small company (about 10 ppl) and saves us from Microsoft. I'm very grateful to the developers.
Hopefully they are able to act upon such findings or rewrite it with go :-). Mmh, if Berlin (Germany) wouldn't waste so much money in ill-advised ideology-driven and long-term state-destroying actions and "NGOs" they had enough money to fund 100s of such rewrites. Alas...
Why should Germany be wasting public money on a private company who keeps shoveling more and more restrictions on their open-source-washed "community" offering, and whose "enterprise" pricing comes in at twice* the price MS365 does for fewer features, worse integration, and with added costs for hosting, storage, and maintenance?
* or same, if excluding nextcloud talk, but then missing a chat feature
It makes a lot of sense for Germany to keep some independance from foreign proprietary cloud providers (Microsoft, Google); Money very well invested imo. It helps the local industry and data stays under German sovereignity.
I find your "open-source-washed" remark deplaced and quite deragoraty. Nextcloud is, imo, totally right to (try to) monetize. They have to, they must further improve the technical backbone to stay competitive with the big boys.
Could you expand on what restrictions they have placed on the community version?
At the very least their app store, which is pretty much required for OIDC, most 2FA methods, and some other features, stops working at 500 users. AFAIK you can still manually install addons, it's just the integration that's gone, though I'm not 100% sure. Same with their notification push service (which is apparently closed source?[0]), which wouldn't be as much of an issue if there were proper docs on how to stand up your own instance of that.
IIRC they also display a banner on the login screen to all users advertising the enterprise license, and start emailing enterprise ads to all admin users.
Their "fair use policy"[1] also includes some "and more" wording.
[0] https://github.com/nextcloud/notifications/issues/82
[1] https://nextcloud.com/fairusepolicy/
> their app store, which is pretty much required for OIDC, most 2FA methods, and some other features, stops working at 500 users
How dare they. I just want to share photos and calendar with the 502 people in my immediate family.
This may come as a surprise to you, but there are organizations, for example German municipalities, that have more than 500 users but can't afford to start pumping tens or hundreds of thousands per year into a file sharing service. Nextcloud themselves recognize this and offer 95%+ discounts to edu, similar to what Adobe, Microsoft, and Git[Hub,Lab] are doing.
There is no way it’s going to be completely rewritten from scratch in Go, and none of whatever Germany is or isn’t doing affects that in any way shape or form.
Actually, it's already been done by the former Nextcloud fork/predecessor. OwnCloud shared a big percentage of the Nextcloud codebase, but they decided to rewrite everything under the name OCIS (OwnCloud Infinite Scale) a couple of years ago. Recently, OwnCloud got acquired by Kiteworks and it seemed like they got in a fight with most of the staff. So big parts of the team left to start "OpenCloud", which is a fork of OCIS and is now a great competitor to Nextcloud. It's much more stable and uses less resources, but it also does a lot less than Nextcloud (namely only File sharing so far. No Apps, no Groupware.)
https://github.com/opencloud-eu
Thanks for sharing this, I've been wanting to look at private cloud stuff but it was all written in PHP. It looks like OpenCloud is majority Go with some php and gherkin, which is a step in the right direction.
I have OpenCloud working on my home server, and it features integration with the Collabora suite of software for office apps. Draw.io is also already supported.
They offer a Docker compose file that sets up Collabora for you, but I can't find anything info on other apps, let alone integration. Where can I see what they support?
You're right, it was my mistake. The docker compose file can set up Collabora for you and allows you to open documents from inside OpenCloud by opening the file in an embedded Collabora view. Likewise, Draw.io works in a similar fashion, opening a view to embed.diagrams.net. Underneath it's just hosting the files and offloads the operations to other apps. It's convenient, but not particularly sophisticated.
There are no "Apps". It's not a universal App platform like Nextcloud. It's just file sharing (and optionally a Radicale calender server via Environment Variable but without UI). There's optional plugins to open vendor specific files right in the browser.
OCIS does only a small part of why people deploy NextCloud. I have run it, it’s great, but it’s not a replacement for the full suite nor is it trying to be.
It makes perfect sense to me that nextcloud is a good fit for a small company.
My biggest gripe with having used it for far longer than I should have was always that it expected far too much maintenance (4 month release cadence) to make sense for individual use.
Doing that kind of regular upkeep on a tool meant for a whole team of people is a far more reasonable cost-benefit analysis. Especially since it only needs one technically savvy person working behind the scenes, and is very intuitive and familiar on its front-end. Making for great savings overall.
Hetzner‘s storage share product line offers a managed Nextcloud instance. I‘m using them as I didn‘t want to care about updating it myself.
The only downside is you can‘t use apps/plugins which require additional local tools (e.g. ocrmypdf) but others can be used just fine.
Calling remotely hosted services works (e.g. if you have elasticsearch on an vps and setup the Nextcloud fulltext search app accordingly)
Germany does fund and work on a couple of serious OSS projects. Look for Opencode. They are also actively working on the matrix spec.
I think what you described is basically ownCloud Infinite Scale (ocis). I haven't tested it myself but it's something I've been considering. I run normal owncloud right now over nextcloud as it avoided a few hiccups that I had.
OCIS seems to have lost most of their team. They now work on a fork called OpenCloud. https://github.com/opencloud-eu