The relaunch of the original open-source, self-hosted File Sync and Share platform brings a published governance charter, relicensing to Apache 2.0, a DCO-based contribution model, and an AI-assisted contribution policy—together with new releases of ownCloud Infinite Scale, ownCloud Classic on PHP 8.3, and a new MCP Server.
REGENSBURG, Germany — May 6, 2026 — Kiteworks, parent company of ownCloud, today announced the launch of a formal Open Source Program Office (OSPO) under the ownCloud brand. The OSPO establishes structured governance, contribution policies, and community engagement commitments for the ownCloud open-source ecosystem. Kiteworks empowers organizations to effectively manage risk in every send, share, receive, and use of private data.
As part of the launch, Kiteworks is relicensing over 100 projects to Apache 2.0, retiring the legacy Contributor License Agreement in favor of the Developer Certificate of Origin, and publishing a governance charter that defines contributor roles and decision-making processes. The company has also issued an AI-assisted contribution policy welcoming contributions developed with AI tools, upgraded ownCloud Classic to PHP 8.3, and released a migration tool to ownCloud Infinite Scale—the modern platform written as microservices in Go and fully cloud-native.
„Open source is a social contract, and we’re putting the terms of that contract in writing,“ said David Walter, VP of the Open Source Program Office at Kiteworks. „Harmonizing all projects under the permissive ‘Apache 2.0’ license, retiring the CLA, adopting DCO, publishing a governance charter, and welcoming AI-assisted contributions are not incremental changes. They redefine how contributors, customers, and the broader community engage with ownCloud. This is what it looks like when a commercially backed open-source project takes governance as seriously as it takes code.“
The launch reflects two years of engineering work carried out with limited public communication. During that period, ownCloud shipped quarterly releases, rebuilt its CI/CD pipeline on GitHub Actions, delivered a new desktop, Android, and iOS clients, and upgraded the Classic platform from PHP 7.4 to PHP 8.3. The OSPO formalizes the governance and communication commitments that accompany that engineering investment and signals a new posture of transparency toward the contributor community, commercial customers, and public-sector evaluators.
oCIS (ownCloud Infinite Scale), the current platform, is licensed under Apache 2.0 and deployed at scale in European public sector environments, including a German federal states official school cloud serving millions of users and the European Open Science Cloud serving cross-university research activities across Europe. It supports cross-organizational federation via Open Cloud Mesh, identity management via OpenID Connect, and can be operated entirely on sovereign infrastructures. ownCloud Classic, the Linux/Apache/SQL/PHP platform also known as ownCloud 10, remains under active maintenance on PHP 8.3 and continues to receive security and maintenance releases.
The AI-assisted contribution policy published with the launch sets out four requirements for AI-augmented contributions: disclosure of the tool used, contributor comprehension of all submitted code, adequate testing, and licensing compliance. Two oCIS web extensions have already been merged through this workflow, and the full developer methodology is published as a guide at https://owncloud.dev.
The quality bar is the same as for any other contribution; the tooling used to produce it is not a disqualifier. “It is important for us to be inclusive and not to limit the functional contribution to people who can code,” said Walter. “Prior to Vibe Coding, those community members were limited to create issues, participate in discussions, file bug reports, and work on the documentation. Now every creative person can build and ship. We believe this is true open-source inclusion and therefor do not want to block these contributions.”
The governance charter establishes a contributor-to-maintainer pathway, a Community Advisory Board, and a public roadmap. The charter is explicitly labeled as v0.1 and aspirational in parts, a degree of transparency unusual for commercially backed open-source projects. A first annual OSPO report is scheduled for Q1 2027, intended as a public accounting of governance activity, contribution volume, security program outputs, and progress against the charter’s commitments.
Relevant Links:
- GitHub: github.com/owncloud
- oCIS Developer docs: owncloud.dev
- Admin docs: doc.owncloud.com
- Manifesto: kiteworks.com/opensource
- Security: security.owncloud.com
- Docker Hub: hub.docker.com/r/owncloud
About ownCloud
ownCloud is the original open-source platform for self-hosted file synchronization, sharing, and collaboration. Since 2010, ownCloud has given users—from families exchanging memories to schools, research institutions, and sovereign governments—full possession of their data, infrastructure, and digital destiny. Built on open standards such as Open Cloud Mesh, WebDAV, and OpenID Connect, and designed for federation across organizational boundaries, ownCloud remains what it has always been: yours. ownCloud is a Kiteworks company.
About Kiteworks
Kiteworks’ mission is to empower organizations to effectively manage risk in every send, share, receive, and use of private data. The Kiteworks platform provides customers with a secure data exchange that delivers data governance, compliance, and protection in a unified control plane. Kiteworks unifies, tracks, controls, and secures sensitive data moving within, into, and out of their organization, significantly improving risk management and ensuring regulatory compliance on all private data exchanges. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Kiteworks protects over 100 million end-users and thousands of global enterprises and government agencies.
Media Contact: David Schutzman, PR Manager — moc.skrowetik@namztuhcs.divad
