As Nextcloud advanced with progresses making it competitive in fully integrated government and corporate workflows, OpenCloud is getting more and more attention.

The fact, that both are collaborative cloud plattforms, designed to be selfhosted and mainly developed in/around Berlin from FOSS-Community-Surroundings, makes one ask about the differences.

The main difference I see, is the software stack

  • Nextcloud, as a fork of ownCloud, kept the PHP code base and is still mainly developing in PHP
  • OpenCloud, also a fork of ownCloud, did a complete rewrite in Go

Until know, Nextcloud is far more feature complete (yes I know, people complain, they should fix more bugs instead of bringing new features) than OpenCloud, if we compair it with comercial cometitors like MS Teams.

I like Nextcloud!

I deploy it for various groups, teams, associations, when ever they need something where they want to have fileshare, calendar, contacts and tasks in one place. Almost every time, when I show them the functionality of Nextcloud Groups an the sharing-possibilities, people are thrilled about it, because they didn’t expect such a feature rich tool. Although I sometimes wish it would be more performant and easier to maintain, so non-tech-people could care for their hosting themselves.

Why OpenCloud?

Now, with OpenCloud, I am asking my self, why not just contribute to the existing colab-cloud project Nextcloud. Why do your own thing?

Questions

So here I expect the Go as a somewhat game-changer (?). As you may have noticed, that I am not a developer or programmer, so maybe there are obvious advantages of that.

  • Will OpenCloud, at some point, outreach Nextclouds feature completeness and performance, thanks to a more modern approach with Go?
  • Will Nextcloud with their huge php stack run into problems in the future, because they cant compete with more modern architectures?
  • If you would have to deploy a selfhosted cloud environment for a ~500 people organization lasting long term: Would you stick to the goo old working php stack or see possible advantages in the future of the OpenCloud approach?

Thanks :)

  • ApplyingAutomation@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    2 days ago

    It is unclear to me what the license of OpenCloud is. Are they open source? They reference a “trial license” on their site.

    • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      Looks okay to me. Not sure how important the last two are to be honest, but I included them for completeness

      https://github.com/opencloud-eu/opencloud/blob/main/LICENSE

      https://github.com/opencloud-eu/web/blob/main/LICENSE

      https://github.com/opencloud-eu/web-extensions/blob/main/LICENSE

      https://github.com/opencloud-eu/desktop/blob/main/COPYING

      https://github.com/opencloud-eu/reva/blob/main/LICENSE

      https://github.com/opencloud-eu/rclone/blob/master/COPYING

      The marketing statements on the website say the right things too, but they are secondary to the above, obviously:

      Openness

      OpenCloud is and remains open source software. This means that you can download and use the source code free of charge and without obligation. We welcome and encourage any kind of participation in the work on OpenCloud in the spirit of open source collaboration.

      OpenCloud GmbH also offers paid builds of OpenCloud for use in environments where support, professional services and other services are required.

      Who are we?

      OpenCloud GmbH is a young company founded under the umbrella of the Heinlein Group and employs a team of developers who are familiar with the project code.

      The combination of the Heinlein Group’s many years of experience in the open source business and the unwavering enthusiasm of the developers, most of whom have many years of open source experience, provides the perfect foundation for an active project. And we warmly invite everyone to join us!

      The foundation

      The basis of the project is a fork of a widely used open source project whose components are co-developed by developers from the science organization CERN and other active participants. OpenCloud is now being continuously developed independently by the OpenCloud community and published under the Apache 2.0 and AGPL-3.0 licenses.

      In the spirit of reusability of code under free licenses, we are grateful for the strong foundation on which we are building.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        18 hours ago

        It would be nice if they had a page where they laid out all the components, what the licenses are, and how things fit together. Maybe that’s somewhere in the documentation pages they have, but I didn’t see it after a quick glance. Everything looks fine, and I guess the split happened a few months ago, so maybe they’re still scrambling to get everything set up.

        Anyway, it looks like a cool project, and I’ll certainly be watching it, if not switching from OCIS (had set up for testing recently).