{"id":80046,"date":"2026-10-20T12:05:40","date_gmt":"2026-10-20T12:05:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/owncloud.com\/?p=80046"},"modified":"2026-10-20T13:05:03","modified_gmt":"2026-10-20T13:05:03","slug":"owncloud-at-oss-eu-2026-and-why-community-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/owncloud.com\/de\/blogs\/owncloud-at-oss-eu-2026-and-why-community-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"ownCloud at OSS EU 2026 and Why Community Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why community engagement is so important<\/h2>\n

We had the privilege of joining the Linux Foundation\u2019s Open Source Summit Europe<\/a> in Prague earlier this month (7 to 9 October) as a sponsor. First, a big thank you to everyone involved for a wonderful experience!<\/p>\n

We also weren\u2019t alone. The booth was staffed by a mix of folks from ownCloud and Kiteworks, plus people from our partners Collabora<\/a>, B1 Systems<\/a> and Cesnet<\/a>. Having everyone in one place meant almost any question, from \u201chow do I run this at home\u201d to \u201chow would this fit our infrastructure\u201d, could be answered by someone who actually works with it every day.<\/p>\n

Our main goals were to re-engage with the community, (re-)introduce people to oCIS and ownCloud, and to listen. And oh boy, were we not disappointed. \u201cI thought you were dead!\u201d and \u201cI\u2019m so glad you\u2019re still here!\u201d were some of the things we most often heard from folks at the conferences and meetups we\u2019ve attended this year, which makes sense, because unfortunately we dropped the ball in community engagement since the end of 2024, and we\u2019ve apologized to the community and our partners<\/a> for it. We let people down and working in a seemingly black box is the opposite of what Open Source stands for.<\/p>\n

So, for the record: yes, we\u2019re still alive. But \u201cnot dead\u201d is a pretty low bar, and being back in the same room as you reminded me why I fell for open source in the first place. But it only works well when people show up, talk to each other, and occasionally tell you you\u2019re doing it wrong. (We got a bit of all three – and we sincerely thank you for that!)
\nHere\u2019s how the week went, starting a day before the summit with a room full of fellow OSPO nerds – and I say that with love.<\/p>\n

Starting with OSPOlogy<\/h2>\n

Our week actually started the day before the summit, at OpenChain x OSPOlogy Prague<\/a>. It was a full-day community event for people who work on open source management, supply chain trust and OSPOs, and it was a great fit for us. We launched the Kiteworks\/ownCloud Open Source Program Office (OSPO)<\/a> earlier this year, so it felt like being among our own people.<\/p>\n

David Walter, who leads our OSPO, gave a session there called \u201cTwo Forks and a CLA-to-DCO Rewrite: What Actually Rebuilds Community Trust\u201d. Honest conversations about forks, governance and trust are rarely comfortable, but they\u2019re the ones that matter most for a project with our history.<\/p>\n

We enjoyed the rest of the day just as much. Nithya Ruff\u2019s keynote on OSPOs and open technology was a highlight, and so were the hands-on sessions. Dawn Foster\u2019s roundtable on improving your OSPO with CHAOSS made the case for \u201cstrategy before metrics\u201d, and one theme stuck with me: metrics need a narrator, because the same dashboard can lead two people to completely different conclusions. Ana Jim\u00e9nez\u2019s demo on using AI agents with CHAOSS security metrics gave us an interesting look into how she built AI tooling geared towards OSPOs.
\nIf you missed it, the presentations and roundtable notes<\/a> are collected in the OSPOlogy GitHub discussion (because of course they\u2019re open – the day was centered around OSPOs and our love of Open Source!)<\/p>\n

What we learned<\/h2>\n

A lot of people think we\u2019re a cloud hosting company.<\/strong>
\nGiven the name, that\u2019s understandable, and we heard it often enough that eventually we stopped being surprised. Many people assumed we\u2019d try to sell them a public cloud service and we need to fix that. One idea I\u2019m toying with is a tagline like \u201cBring your own storage, create your ownCloud\u201d.
\nNothing is final, so tell me what you think.<\/p>\n

Most people know ownCloud Classic, the PHP version.<\/strong>
\nPlenty of folks were still running it in their homelabs and were happy to find out the project is alive. Somewhere out there is a quietly humming box in a closet that has been faithfully syncing files this whole time, and I love that. But most of them had no idea oCIS exists – another thing to work on.<\/p>\n

oCIS is fully open source written in Go, with no gated features.<\/strong>
\nThis is the one that surprised people most. ownCloud Classic followed an open-core model, so many people assumed oCIS would too. It doesn\u2019t and everything is open and not gated. This is definitely something we need to put front and center, because this was the selling point for a lot of folks. (The fact that it is cloud-native and doesn’t need a database to run, also left quite a few people eager to try it)<\/p>\n

People were willing to try it.<\/strong>
\nMany of those who hadn\u2019t heard of oCIS were keen to spin it up and try it out. That was probably the most encouraging part of the week. (You can use the same ownCloud demo site <\/a>we used to try out ownCloud and Collabora right now)<\/p>\n

People want to know what\u2019s coming.<\/strong>
\nQuestions about the future of ownCloud Classic, where oCIS is headed, and where to find the public roadmap came up a lot. That\u2019s fair, and it\u2019s an area where we can and want to be more transparent.<\/p>\n

Lean or robust, your call<\/h3>\n

One question came up a lot: how big is this thing, really?
\noCIS is as lean as you want it to be, or as robust as you need.<\/strong> Its modular, extension-based architecture keeps the core simple, so a small setup stays small and an enterprise can build up from there without the core getting complicated. Think of it as a very well-organized toolbox rather than a Swiss Army knife that never closes properly.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s deliberate. ownCloud focuses on file sync and share, and we\u2019d rather pair that with best-in-class integrations (document editing with Collabora<\/a> is a good example) than try to build everything ourselves. Doing one thing well, and playing nicely with others who do the same, is pretty much the open source spirit.
\nIf you want to see how the extension side works, we wrote about the new ownCloud Marketplace, where Git is the app store<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo what\u2019s your business model?\u201d<\/h3>\n

Once people hear that nothing is gated, the next question is almost always the same, and I love it. If the software is fully open, how does this work?<\/p>\n

The project itself is not productized. Rather we have funding through organizations that need enterprise-level support that we maintain and build the features they need, which then land in the open codebase for everybody. These are ongoing contracts from the ownCloud Classic era who have now migrated to oCIS.
\nKiteworks also backs the project<\/a> as a corporate sponsor (they are our parent company now after all).
\nFor people with needs we can\u2019t serve directly, we point to our partner ecosystem, which is one more reason we were so glad to have partners like Collabora, B1 Systems and Cesnet at the booth.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a bigger reason I care about this, too: digital sovereignty. With an open license, organizations know the code can outlive any single vendor, whatever happens to that vendor. For a lot of people we know that matters a lot.<\/p>\n

If you want the longer story of how we got here (the forks, the acquisition, and what we\u2019re changing), I covered it in my FrOSCon talk, Bringing back the Open in Open Source: (Re-)Building Community after forks and acquisition<\/a>. It\u2019s a case study, and not always a flattering one (and that\u2019s maybe the point).<\/p>\n

ownCloud Contribution spotlight<\/h2>\n

Contributing doesn\u2019t mean only writing code. Documentation, tutorials, extensions, forum help, bug reports and feature requests all count, and you can bundle several smaller contributions into one entry (a lone typo fix is lovely, but it won\u2019t make the spotlight on its own. Typo fixers, we still love you).
\nThe ownCloud Contribution Spotlight<\/a> is our way of saying thank you to the people who make ownCloud better.
\nEntries for The Launch edition are open until December 1 and we\u2019ll announce the winner at the Monthly Public Community Sprint review<\/a> on December 18 who gets a ticket to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2027 in Barcelona. Afterwards, from January 2027, this will be a program where we feature and reward a new contribution\/contributor every month.
\nIf you\u2019ve contributed, or you know someone who has, join in.<\/p>\n

Highlights from the team<\/h2>\n

For all of us, the best part was getting to interact with the community: hearing how people use ownCloud, what they want more of, and what they honestly think of the company and the product. The keynote conversation between Linus Torvalds and Dirk Hohndel on the last morning was also great, as was the OSPOlogy day.<\/p>\n

A few other things the team took away:<\/p>\n