Hi,

I'm running a few instances of OwnCloud 8.x on a couple of public Slackware servers. So far everything's running fine. Now I have a new client who wants OwnCloud on his server, and I'm wondering whether to go with what I know well or give the new kid on the block a spin. Each solution seems to have its pros and cons.

NextCloud has an appealing policy, in that the community app is no different from what they're shipping to enterprise customers. Plus, contact and calendar sync is already integrated, whereas OwnCloud ony provides this through third-party plugins. On the other hand, OwnCloud is the "established" solution that's been longer out there. Plus, the politics behind the fork are a bit questionable.

Any suggestions?

Niki

Owncloud is no longer the "established" solution. I think you would do better to switch to Nextcloud. Most of the original core team of the Owncloud project (not to be confused with the US based Owncloud, Inc.) are now working for Nextcloud.

The article you link to has a strong bias because it was written by a disgruntled ex- Owncloud Inc employee who was laid off when Owncloud Inc lost its funding (months after the Owncloud project founder left).

A more neutral article is this one: http://thenewstack.io/story-behind-nextcloud/ which compares the different business models of Owncloud and Nextcloud, which was the reason behind Frank Karlitschek leaving Owncloud.

4 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for the input, Eric. I guess I'll give NextCloud a spin at least. BTW, Carla is not any disgruntled ex-employee. She happens to be my favorite tech writer (check out her excellent O'Reilly books), so I value her opinions highly.

I also used to use Owncloud (with that mirall Owncloud client which required ocsync, check and iniparser as well as qtkeychain). When the fork to Nextcloud happened I got the impression that Owncloud was going nowhere so I decided to move to that instead of upgrading Owncloud to 9.whatever.

Unrelated, but probably relevant background info: Although the server is technically running Slack64 13.37, the packages running on it are much newer (including the toolchain) openssl-1.0.2, php-7.0.11, apache-2.4.23, mariadb-10.0.27 etc, so my experiences with it shouldn't be that different to someone installing Nextcloud on 14.2.

Installing Nextcloud was exactly the same as installing Owncloud before. I'm now using this client slackbuild with a newer source and it works great. I enforce the use of SSL (redirect in httpd-vhosts.conf) and I've had no issues with that or PHP7, although I've had issues with other packages using the old mysql_* functions.

1 members found this post helpful.

kind of reminds me of the whole Openoffice/ libreoffice fork. Sounds like I need to look at nextcloud too. I recently upgraded from OC7 to OC9