Nuremberg, August 21, 2018: ownCloud and seven board members have officially established the ownCloud Foundation. The organization is dedicated to preserve a sustainable community ecosystem around ownCloud in order to accelerate technology development, improve open source collaboration and provide an open, manufacturer independent governance model. It provides developers, users and the entire global ecosystem with a set of shared resources to grow the footprint of public, private and enterprise ownClouds, producing the best decentralized cloud platform.
Like the software, the membership in the ownCloud Foundation is free and accessible to everyone. The ownCloud Foundation forms the basis for the continued existence of the ownCloud project as an open source solution operated and further developed by the community. At the same time, it acts as a mediator between the professional developer community, stakeholders and administrators who use ownCloud in daily operations. Development and operation also find a permanent platform in the foundation, which meets the DevOps idea in the best possible way. This gives the community more freedom for creativity, thus ensuring the guaranteed long-term independence of ownCloud.
“The huge community of contributors has made ownCloud the largest open source file sharing project in the world. It is in our best interest that all contributors find an open, developer-friendly atmosphere in order to promote the further development of ownCloud according to their ideas. The ownCloud Foundation guarantees this through independent governance and thus provides the necessary framework to ensure a thriving open source ecosystem focused on secure clouds with guaranteed data sovereignty,” says Christian Schmitz, Acting Chairman of the Board of the ownCloud Foundation, about the official launch of the foundation.
Governance is executed and ensured by a board of seven representatives of strategic stakeholders in the ecosystem, plus two community elected contributor members.
The Board of Directors had its inaugural meeting on August 14th, 2018. The voting process for the Contributor Members will be announced on the 1st of September with ballots being open for sixty days.
The activities of the ownCloud Foundation will focus on promoting and supporting the close collaboration of the developer community, the establishment of different working groups and any other developments related to ownCloud, including further technical improvement, knowledge exchange and any community related activities.
The Board of Directors consists of representatives of the following organizations:
- CERN
- Konica Minolta Business Solutions
- AARnet
- Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung Göttingen (GWDG)
- ownCloud
- GEANT
- ETH Zürich
“As an ownCloud distributor and service provider, we work every day to meet the high security and flexibility requirements of our customers and to simplify their file management significantly. The many positive impulses from the community have shown in the past, that the true strength of Open Source can only flourish if you offer the developers the right environment. With our participation in the ownCloud Foundation, we hope to be able to contribute an important part to this.”Daniel Schellhase, Senior Product Manager Platform & Technologies, Konica Minolta Business Solutions Europe GmbH
“The collection and intelligent usage of data is a key value in research and ownCloud is a major component of AARNet’s CloudStor storage service, which supports data sharing for more than 50,000 Australian researchers. Being actively involved in the further development of ownCloud enables us to contribute to the project and to meet the evolving needs of the global research community.”Guido Aben, Director, e-Infrastructure Partnerships, AARNet
“An independent, open source-based cloud solution means a significant increase in productivity for research and education. We are looking forward to initiating beneficial developments within the foundation and sharing our experience with the community.”Dr. Tilo Steiger, Head of Storage Team, ETH Zürich
“With the Academic Cloud, we were recently able to develop a central file sharing solution based on ownCloud for the universities of Lower Saxony. We are confident that an open source-based solution meets the academic idea of free knowledge exchange in the best way and we look forward to future developments within the ownCloud Foundation.”Prof. Dr. Ramin Yahyapour, Director, GWDG
“Since day one, governance by an independent foundation was the goal to ensure the continued existence of the ownCloud project in the long term. The official launch is an important step, because enterprise file sharing needs a strong open source solution to give users a real choice in designing their individual IT infrastructure.”Markus Rex, co-founder of ownCloud and acting Secretary of the ownCloud Foundation
Get involved in one of the largest open source communities around the world and learn how you can contribute:
or
