There is a platform by a federal state in Germany for 1.8 million users which is one of oCIS’s largest production deployments. Millions of students. Thousands of schools. Real availability requirements. It’s been running on oCIS since before the Kiteworks acquisition — through versions 4, 5, 7, and now 8.
oCIS was designed for this. Go microservices. Zero external database dependency. Horizontal scaling. Federation across instances boundaries. OpenID Connect SSO infrastructure.
The important part: none of this required custom enterprise code. They runs on the same oCIS you can build from source. The scalability, the federation, the identity integration — all in the open source product.
The most common pattern in commercially-backed open source: the community edition is a demo. The real product, the one that works at scale, is behind a paywall. We did it differently!
The software running one of Europe’s largest EFSS deployments is the same software you can fork tomorrow.
Tomorrow: open source EFSS is not a stepping stone.
This is part 12 of this blog post series.
See the earlier posts:
- A (re)-introduction to the ownCloud community
- What happens when you fork twice, get acquired, and keep shipping anyway
- We killed our own CLA. Here’s why that’s a good thing
- PHP 8.3. Yes, for Classic. Yes, we heard you
- What 108 repositories taught us about open source hygiene
- I’m a script kid running an OSPO. That’s the point
- Your PR was written by an AI. We don’t care. (But we do have rules.)
- Stewardship is not the same as control: A governance charter for people who’ve been burned before.
- Twelve documents, zero marketing slop: anatomy of an open source manifesto
- What two forks and a Lessons Learned document can teach you about trust
- Digital sovereignty is not a label you buy from a hyperscaler
