ownCloud becomes part of Kiteworks

Moonrise2473@feddit.it to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 155 points –
ownCloud becomes part of Kiteworks - ownCloud
owncloud.com

I guess that means it's dead, as there's no way a corporation would pay millions to acquire a competitor just to continue developing a free alternative to their own product

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well fuck. now i need to move my stuff off my own owncloud instace.

Did you not switch to Nextcloud a while back?

You need to keep up that was so last year. The new hottnes is switching back to owncloud because it is so light weight. But now i am guessing the new new hotness is switch from owncloud to Nextcloud.

nop, i'm using owncloud infinity scale, the go version

Why? They didn't say they're shutting the open source project down.

You'll find a lot of pessimistic people here because there are few unicorns when a commercial company buying an open source project didn't go badly for the open source people. Most of the time after a sell-out the projects ends up under highly restrictive licensing, features behind paywalls, and many other problems making it a shadow of its former self.

The most notable recent examples I can think of is IBM buys Red Hat buys CentOS, and that ended with forks as AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux. Oracle buys MySQL ended up forked as MariaDB. Businesses love to push their commercial offerings on open source products, and it's not always in the form of plain old support agreements (like the people behind AlmaLinux). Often (this is common especially in databases) they'll tax features like SSO, backups, or literally simple the privilege of having stable software. Projects like CentOS and VyOS don't have stable OSS versions, and soooo many databases will put LDAP/Kerberos behind the commercial product, charging monthly or yearly operating costs.

Even GitHub (which to be clear was closed source to begin with, but is a haven for F/OSS so I'll give it an honorable mention here) started showing Microsoft-isms after M$ bought the platform.

Fair, but I would point out that OwnCloud kinda already went that direction years ago. There's already a very limited free version and a fully featured enterprise version. So it's not like we're losing something that the community built here.