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 :)

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.caEnglish
    17·
    2 days ago

    So really your only reason for possibly not liking next cloud is that it’s PHP, correct?

    What is the problem with PHP? I keep asking it and until now every response has been near me worthy. “Don’t like PHP because some function calls are not consistent.”, “don’t like PHP because 20 years ago it had Manu unsafe practices!”, that sort of nonsense.

    What is the problem with PHP, for you?

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      21 hours ago

      I’m not OP, but here are my reasons:

      • needs a webserver to be configured properly, in addition to the application itself - most other projects handle the server itself, so I can simply reverse proxy to it
      • recent security audit found a variety of vulnerabilities - PHP has been known to have a lot of security vulnerabilities, and it’s commonly targeted due to popularity and the prevalence of these vulnerabilities; using literally anything else reduces the likelihood that you’ll be targeted by script kiddies
      • since it doesn’t run an active server, things like WebSockets are wonky - AFAICT, Nextcloud solves this by using a separate Rust binary, which is weird
      • using the templating feature (i.e. the whole point of PHP) takes a lot of resources vs client-side rendering, so the main sell of PHP is architecturally suspect
      • I don’t use it, so if I needed to fix a bug, it would be a lot of work; I’m a lot more familiar with other languages, like Go, Rust, and Python

      There are a bunch of other reasons I strongly dislike PHP, but hopefully this is enough to show why I generally prefer to avoid it. In fact, Nextcloud is my only PHP-based app, and I’m testing out OCIS now (will probably try OpenCloud soon).