 Lately, Nextcloud has been doing great. I mean, not just lately, but hear me out. Just a week ago, they managed to get Roundcube to join Nextcloud. And I am going to explain why Roundcube is such a big deal. Back in July-ish, they made a big event announcing Nextcloud Hub 6 with its own AI model. And just now, just today, now, hopefully, they released Nextcloud Hub 7 with some pretty cool stuff. But let's start with the Roundcube thing. So initially, I didn't quite understand what the big deal was. But hear me out. Roundcube is an imap, imap client with a web client that's used by Harvard, Harvard, Cambridge, the European Commission, Hostgator, GoDaddy, and so on. It's completely free and open-source, and it seems to be somewhat of a standard as far as free and open-source email services go. So the question is, how will the project benefit from this partnership? So remember that Nextcloud technically has a competing product, as in they have Nextcloud Mail. The focus seems to be on offering a wider range of services. Currently, there is no plan to make a direct merger between Nextcloud Mail and Roundcube. And neither product is supposed to replace the other one. However, there will be work to share the underlying libraries and tools. I think this will particularly benefit Nextcloud Mail, since Roundcube supports a very long list of features, and it will be much easier to actually get Nextcloud Mail to feature parity or close to it. However, this will also be beneficial to Roundcube. Nextcloud has immediately said that they're going to hire new team members from Roundcube, and they would also like to more generally support and grow the contributing community. Frank, the Nextcloud CEO, himself says that this type of merger is kinda unprecedented in the open-source world, and it's not yet clear how it will go. So the first priority is just to keep everything as it is now at Roundcube, and then hire people, as I've said, and then also set up more communication channels for internal organizations. I'm guessing that they also need communication between Nextcloud and Roundcube. Why is this all happening now, though? Well, the main maintainer for Roundcube is Thomas Bruderly, but still, he has to take a break. He says that he now has kids, and wants to spend his half-work time with his family, and has gradually stopped contributing and following its own project. Honestly, that happens. Apparently, Thomas was very well aware of Nextcloud work, and he decided that the company could be a good way to move the project forward. I would say, regardless of how you look at it, all of this is great news for the Nextcloud project. And it seems, though, this is, of course, harder to tell this soon, like this is going to be also great news for the wider open-source community as well. And then, barely a week later, we also have Nextcloud 7 to cover, so let's cover it. Firstly, they introduced something that I absolutely love in pretty much all projects that I use. So a unified, powerful search system that can search anywhere. So let me explain. You know how Nextcloud has multiple apps like email, calendar, to-do-you-and-son? Well, there's now a global search button that looks in all of those applications and allows you to select a certain date, a certain people who interacted with what you're searching for, or just certain applications and settings. And it will show you, app by app, all relevant matches. And since Nextcloud also supports integrations such as GitHub, GitLab, Streetmap, PureTube, Reddit, this unified search actually goes through all of those things. You can now search on Reddit on Nextcloud. That's cool. Then we've got the AI staff. I seriously believe that Nextcloud is doing one of the best jobs at integrating AI into an open-source project, mostly because they've been doing it carefully. So the initial release of anything AI actually included a system that categorizes the services depending on how safe and open-source they are, ranging from red, which is completely proprietary with no training data available, no model weights and so on, to green, which is model weights are available. You can have the training data and so on. Even when I went to their own announcement event for the Hub 6, they actually had an expert about AI safety lecture them on the dangers of using AI incorrectly, ranging from the obvious copyright issues to hallucination and so on, which is also why Nextcloud went ahead to offer their own tax-based model that again has the weights and training data available and so on. However, they still offer the competing AI services, such as OpenAI obviously, as an option. So now you have the ability to have a transcript of calls, to generate emails, to dictate text, to translate stuff, smart inboxing emails and so on and so on. So thanks to Hub 7, we now have a couple of more of those called smart integrations. The first one is called Aleph Alpha. It's a text-based model that's developed in Germany and can be used as an alternative to OpenAI services. It's still a remote service, meaning that you have to send your data away, but at least you have the certainty that they're being processed in Europe. Secondly, there's StableDiffusion, which generates images running locally. This way, you're actually certain that your data never leaves your server. Even cooler, you can now set usage limits on all of this stuff. We know how expensive they can be if abused, so you can go ahead and set a certain amount of token images or seconds of a text or images to be generated or audio to be transcribed. And then we've got the cool teaser for the future. NextCloud is collaborating with the German state of... Oh, no. Schleswig Holstein to deliver new features for the NextCloud Assistant. And then the first one is called ContextChat. This feature allows the NextCloud Assistant to go through your emails, files, chat messages and more to answer your questions about those items. This should work with most available large language models, both the remote options and the one that you can just self-host. I'm personally really looking forward to such a feature, which I think is kind of the whole point of this new wave of AI assistance, being able to go through your personal information on your own device so that everything is still private and safe to extract and deliver useful stuff that you need from them. Now, to be clear, I have barely scratched the surface here and the cool stuff NextCloud is doing is much more than that. It's actually a product that I use daily and I enjoy using it. The official announcement of Hub 7 is available on their website, so you can go through it and see it for yourself. But I did want to make a quick summary of why I think this company is doing some really beneficial work for the free and open source community as a whole. And yeah, I think that was everything I had to say, so see ya!