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PHP 8.3. Yes, for Classic. Yes, we heard you.

PHP 7.4 went end-of-life. Your auditors noticed. You asked, so ownCloud Classic will now run on PHP 8.3, so you can stay compliant while you plan the migration to oCIS.

oCIS is the future. But the present is thousands of deployments running ownCloud 10, with real users and real data, in production environments that don’t get replatformed on a blog post’s timeline.

ownCloud Classic has been continuously maintained through the acquisition:

  • 10.14 shipped in Jun 2024,
  • 10.15 in Aug 2024
  • 10.16 in Feb 2026.

But PHP 7.4 reached end of life, and running a production system on an unsupported runtime is a compliance problem.
Especially in public sector. Especially in Germany, where auditors actually check.

The community kept asking for PHP 8.3 support.
So we built it. ownCloud Classic now runs on PHP 8.3 as pre-alpha. Check it out: https://hub.docker.com/layers/owncloud/server/11.0.0-prealpha

This isn’t a strategic pivot back to PHP. It’s a maintenance commitment to people who trusted us with their infrastructure. We’re not building major new features on the Classic codebase. We are keeping it secure, supported, and compliant while people plan their migration.

The migration story is the bridge. We’re building a migrator from OC10 to oCIS (in the pipeline, not shipped yet — I won’t oversell). Users, files, shares, spaces. When it’s ready, you’ll hear about it here.

Until then: PHP 8.3 is close. Your auditors can relax.

Tomorrow: what 108 repositories taught us about open source hygiene.

This is part 3 of this blog post series.
See the earlier posts:

  1. A (re)-introduction to the ownCloud community.
  2. What happens when you fork twice, get acquired, and keep shipping anyway
  3. We killed our own CLA. Here’s why that’s a good thing.

About the Author

David Walter is Vice President, Open Source Program Office & Special Projects at Kiteworks, where he stewards the open source projects and drives digital sovereignty strategy globally. He’s been part of the ownCloud ecosystem since 2014, holding roles from community contributor to Chief eXperience Officer before taking on large-scale government deployments and open source governance. At heart, he’s still a script kid who happens to translate between business, community, and engineering. He holds an B.A and an LL.M., is based in Berlin, and volunteers with Germany’s Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW).

David Walter

April 24, 2026

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