So it turns out all of these reports of developers at ownCloud, including the founder, have been leading up to the forking of ownCloud over to a new self-hosted Infrastructure as a Service solution called NextCloud. I had suspected there were major philosophical differences which drove this split, which I expect will be clarified as competition between these two solutions heat up. My guess was that this has something to do with the contributions from “the community”, including closed source vendors who had their hooks into the system one way or another. The founder of the project has said there will be improvements in NextCloud related to this allowing NextCloud to “focus again on an open process with less blockers like Contributor Licence Agreements or closed enterprise apps” where ownCloud cannot.

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