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Blog | Community | opensource | ownCloud

Tomorrow, we put it all in writing. See you on the other side.

Founded 2010. Forked 2016. Acquired 2023. Forked 2025. Shipped throughout. Now: governance, a manifesto, and a codebase that's yours. The Kiteworks OSPO for ownCloud launches May 5.

Fourteen days ago: “We were silent. Not dead.”

Tomorrow we prove it.

On May 5th, the Kiteworks Open Source Program Office goes live for Open Source activities under the ownCloud brand. Everything ships:

Documents.
Twelve-document manifesto suite, including:

  • Governance Charter v0.1.
  • AI-Assisted Contribution Policy.
  • Contribution Guide.
  • All public. All open to feedback.

CLA (Contributor License Agreement) retired. DCO adopted.
All contributions go through the Developer Certificate of Origin. Sign off your commits, keep your copyright.

ownCloud 10 on PHP 8.3.
Three years of continued maintenance since the acquisition, and now we are upgrading ownClould Classic to PHP 8.3 and call it ownCloud 11. And we provide a migration path to oCIS.

ownCloud Infinite Scale
Seven production releases since the acquisition. Now with a Web Client in Apache 2.0 to prevent the oCIS to fall into the trap of the domino effect of AGPL 2.0. Federation-native. The same software running a large-scale public-sector deployments

GitHub.
New org profile with complete repository map covering all 108 repos. Org-wide defaults in .github. Discussions enabled across key repos.

Community.
Matrix at #ocis:matrix.org. GitHub Discussions. An active proposal on central.owncloud.org about the forum migration (your input still welcome).

Security.
Vulnerability Disclosure Program (VDP) at security.owncloud.com. Bug bounty on YesWeHack.,

What’s coming after launch:

  • partnership announcements,
  • restructured partner pricing,
  • oCIS roadmap details,
  • Classic-to-oCIS migration tooling.

ownCloud was founded in 2010. Forked in 2016. Acquired in 2023. Forked again in 2025. Shipped continuously throughout all of it.
Now: governance, a manifesto, and a codebase that’s yours.

  • GitHub: github.com/owncloud
  • Developer docs: owncloud.dev
  • Admin docs: doc.owncloud.com/ocis
  • Chat: Matrix #ocis:matrix.org – matrix.to/#ocis:matrix.org
  • Docker Hub: hub.docker.com/r/owncloud
  • Security: security.owncloud.com
  • OSPO: moc.skrowetik@opso

See you on the other side.

— David

This is part 14 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
  4. PHP 8.3. Yes, for Classic. Yes, we heard you
  5. What 108 repositories taught us about open source hygiene
  6. I’m a script kid running an OSPO. That’s the point
  7. Your PR was written by an AI. We don’t care. (But we do have rules.)
  8. Stewardship is not the same as control: A governance charter for people who’ve been burned before.
  9. Twelve documents, zero marketing slop: anatomy of an open source manifesto
  10. What two forks and a Lessons Learned document can teach you about trust
  11. Digital sovereignty is not a label you buy from a hyperscaler
  12. How a school cloud with millions of users runs on software you can fork tomorrow
  13. Open source EFSS is not a stepping stone to a sales call

Read about the Kiteworks ownCloud Open Source Program Office on our blog or visit our OSPO page.

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).

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David Walter

May 4, 2026

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