My name is Jordana Fung and I’m the new Open Source and Community Manager for ownCloud at Kiteworks.
I will be posting a series of blog posts on behalf of the ownCloud community team.
Things have been quiet from our end for a while, and we sincerely apologize for that.
Open Source is built upon transparency and openness and is not supposed to be a black box, and we are so sorry that we failed you on that in the community front. My role is part of the effort to rectify this and once I got to know the team, the history, and especially their plan and the efforts they undertook, I was happy to join their cause in reinvesting in the community and in making ownCloud and its community the best it can be.

We’re continuously learning and improving. We’re committed to being transparent, clear, and communicative and to actively listening to your needs and expectations.
Our purpose is simple and clear: to empower the ownCloud community and to make ownCloud yours again.

We want your input and ideas and are thankful for you and for the chance to make things right with the community. Please connect with us as we want to hear from you.
You will be hearing more from us going forward, starting with this series of blogposts exploring some of the history, what is currently happening and what we are planning.
And since our last official blog post was a while ago, the first in this series has a very apt and fitting title:

We were silent. Not dead.

If you’ve been following ownCloud from the outside since the Kiteworks acquisition in late 2023, you’ve probably read the obituaries:
Acquired by a US company, community shrinking, sovereignty compromised, another open source casualty.

Here’s what actually happened:

• Since the acquisition, we shipped oCIS 5.0, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 8.0, and 8.0.1.
• A production release basically every quarter for over two years.
• We took ownCloud Classic from 10.13 through 10.14, and 10.15, and an upcoming release with PHP 8.3 support.
• We rebuilt our entire CI/CD pipeline from Drone to GitHub Actions (link).
• We shipped Desktop Client 5.3, then the completely new 6.0 line , almost ready to ship 7.1.
• We shipped new Android and iOS releases.

We were heads-down, building. Now we’re ready to talk.

Over the next 14 days, I’m going to show you what we’ve built, what’s changing, and where we’re going. On May 5th, we’re launching the Kiteworks Open Source Program Office under the ownCloud brand. This series is the substance behind that headline.

My name is David Walter. I’ve been in the ownCloud ecosystem since 2014. Community contributor, Chief eXperience Officer, now VP of the OSPO. For the next two weeks, I’m going to translate what’s been happening inside this project.

Tomorrow: what happens when you fork twice, get acquired, and keep shipping anyway.