Frank Karlitschek - ownCloud/nextCloud, why I forked my own project and my own company

Abstract

Frank founded ownCloud in 2010. After being the maintainer and CTO, he decided to leave his own project and company in 2016, to start Nextcloud. Most community people and a big part of the customers have followed him to Nextcloud. This talk covers the questions on why this happened and what other community maintainer and start-ups can learn.

This talk will tell the reasons why ownCloud was founded as an open source project, the good and bad things when it was turned into a venture capital funded company, the changes which Frank and the core team wanted for Nextcloud, and how that improved the business model, licensing and community relations.

This talk covers insights into different open source business models and how to create a win-win situation for a company and a community.

Biography

Frank Karlitschek started the ownCloud project in 2010 to return control over the storing and sharing of information to consumers. In 2016 he initiated the Nextcloud project to bring this idea to the next level.

He has been involved with a variety of Free Software projects including having been a board member for the KDE community. Frank has spoken at MIT, CERN and ETH and keynoted LinuxCon, Latinoware, Akademy, openSUSE Con and many other conferences. Frank is a fellow of Open Forum Europe.

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