 Good afternoon The next talk is a is by Frank college egg the founder of home cloud and net cloud have fun Thank you Thanks that for coming to my talk the topic is as you know why I forked my own company and project So this is probably the question that I've been asked the most that asked one and a half years So I'm really happy to talk about this here. It's also a story of like how open source communities works How over those licensing works? How we how we as an open source community are our paid and how this all ecosystem works So I'm really happy to talk about is here at foster because as you all know This is like the biggest completely community-driven open source event here So this totally fits the Fits the idea behind this story So my name is Frank college egg. I'm an open source guy for a long time. So I started to contribute 20 years ago Yes, I'm old I started to contribute first in the KDE project Where I got involved In all kinds of different roles and really learned how open source communities can work should work I found an open desktop org network a little bit later. It's all kinds of initiatives But I'm probably most well-known and also probably invited here as the founder of the own cloud project And also the next lot project Okay, I want to talk a little bit about the history Like my personal history and the history of this project because I think it's really important to have the right context To understand what what really happened here and what the reasons are and how to avoid it next time Then obviously a little bit about the history of own cloud then some of the issues that we had Not only me, but the community and other people Then obviously the fork next lot and then a little bit of a status where we are with next lot at the moment I'm at the end. I hope that we still have time for questions I try to be relatively quick with my talk and then have a discussion with all of you because I think this is the Can be the most interesting part because you're all also involved in open source. I'm looking forward to questions and feedback and ideas Okay, let's talk a little bit about the history So this is like in this case the first slide my personal history my personal history is with KDE as I said I got involved in KDE 20 years ago like the end of the 90s. This was When a friend of me of mine showed me KDE 1.0 better one or something or better, too I don't remember and I looked at it. Wow, this is like this really this looks like Windows 95. This is really awesome, right? Good old times And what what basically blew me away the most was that this was done in a collaborative way from community people over the internet Without a money without a company involved like a pure community project. It's really just really I find it so fascinating That is crowdsourced development thing could work. This was at least for me really new at the time Completely community driven like all the decision-making was done by the community. There was no real company involved There were some companies contributing pieces to KDE, but not really the overall picture Of course with KDE everybody can contribute, right? There wasn't really there was no like you have to be an elite developer to have commit rights or something with KDE You just like send a mail to an address say hey can I have an account you get an account and you commit This is how it works. I find it super super fascinating at the time. Obviously. It's all free software It's very important if you collaborate across Communities people's continents then it's important that you have an equal playing field You have some kind of agreement a contract like how this all works together in this case It's of course free software licenses which guarantee the rights of everybody really important And at a time this was really like this was like the high times of like the Linux desktop, right? So we all hoped that the year of the Linux desktop will be next year. I mean some of you remember still the discussion, right? So obviously we are so close right we have just one one tiny improvement and then we are there then we take over the world This was this Yeah, I agree maybe So this was there was a good old times of course There were also like problems that I and others saw with this approach is that we had a really fast turnaround with Contributors because the way this usually works is you have a student you contribute and at some point You're done with your studies and then you get a real job and maybe a family and kids And then you don't have time anymore to work on an open source free software Then you do something else and then new people come in So for me it was always like the dream if there's a way to somehow pay people to do free software It was always like Henry if you can do this Then we have this really senior people who know what they're doing They have like so much experience and then we can really push like the Linux desktop and everything else around the ecosystem forward And I can really like overtake Microsoft and all the others and this would be would be so nice But it was always the dream for me Then a little bit later in 2010 I found that own cloud So I was Still at a time a very briefly a KDE project under the KDE umbrella But then a little bit later independent of course when I when I did this I Basically applied all the patterns and the ideas that I learned from KDE to this Which means it also was of course completely free software HGPL in that case And then there was no real review process I mean we developed this over time of course, but everybody was welcome could contribute so really open really open community Then the community of contributors crew like really fast. We did the first meetings We released the first versions 1.0 1.1 1.2 2.0 and so on was really nice We were then work relatively quickly the most popular file sync and share solution Files in the chair is an interesting term because at the beginning I didn't know what this software is that I found that I was not named for it a little bit later Gardner this big analyst company in the US came up with this term enterprise file sync and share Which is now the category but at a time there was no real name for it But we were really relatively quickly the most popular ones in this space also very early So the press started to write about it even like companies called me and say hey We know that this is a sort of a hobby project, but can we use it to and can we pay you somehow? So it is really when it basically there was a momentum there And again, there was the question to me Okay, great. I mean this is growing, but can we somehow pay people to do this full-time? This was the question So a little bit later end of 2011 I got in contact with some some people and where we discussed, okay, maybe we can find a company around this So this was this idea this vision. Hey, maybe we can have a community an open source Community project and an open source free software company and we all do this win-win situation, right? Great marketing work together have synergies and then do this together Got in contact with these people One wanted to have wanted to be the CEO to other sales in marketing and I took over the role of CTO Which was responsible for the other development technology side and then Well, 2011 and if we end of it, we really founded a company around it This was then called own cloud Inc the reason is that it's a company based in the US in Boston the reason for that is that Well, one of my co-founders lived there So this was convenient and also like the venture capital company that we got from day one also was based there so this was basically The idea of it and of course if you know something about the venture capital world the startup world in the US You know that this is all about speed and getting big really fast And then of course and selling it and make a big profit out of it. So this was the game basically here Of course, it's also meant that we couldn't like grew the company in the right organic way It was just hiring people and really fast and growing Which then also meant that some of the people were not really familiar with how open source and community development works The management some of the management were not really didn't really know how this what this thing is that just saw it as Hey, he's free code. Let's take it and do whatever you want Some of my friends from KDE were skeptical at the time. If this was a good idea Of course, they were right looking back but Yeah, for me it was like I Thought that this is a good idea to try this experiment to basically create this Synergy between a community project and the company and And of course as you can predict already here as you can see there were some issues that occurred over time So I don't want to go into too much detail here, right? It has always something to do with people and other thing. I really don't want to talk too much about Details, but I can give you a few examples so Overall, there was a really not a really good alignment between the interest of like the management and investor capital guys and the community One reason is that if you're open source contributor to a project and you really care about Building something that's sustainable that still exists in a few years. You also want to use it for whatever you want You really want to build something up That's useful for a lot of people for yourself or your friends and there's not going not going away Something has still exists and of course on the other side. There's the interest of making like quick money. I Think open source people. I think it's here to say it don't have a problem with making money I guess but the question is if it's sustainable or it's just like Yeah, in a very aggressive and not sustainable way of course then wants the tension between like some of the management and and the open source developers which didn't really spoke the same language Then some of the contributors started to leave the project because they felt like not really at home This was partly like just a feeling if you're dealing with people that speak a different language Really talk about I don't know Selling and quarterly numbers and stuff all the time But also like real-world problems. I will talk about this later And of course there were some other problems that led to a not so good solution Maybe I talk a little bit about a business model first to explain this so own cloud at a time decided to To go with and do a licensing business model. Some of you might know how this all works The idea is basically that everybody who contributes to the software Signs this contract a contributor license agreement which transfers the ownership of this piece of code or artwork or whatever It is to the company So that the company has done the right to do whatever they want with it For example, release it under different licenses that choose And and in this case also like release it partly under the htpl Or other licenses So this is what had to happen and then the company has the right to release it under different license in the case of own cloud On cloud the core of it is available under htpl still But it's also available under proprietary license So if you're a company and say hey, I don't want to have this deal with this evil free software stuff here Then the company can say no problem We have this great proprietary license for you do if you prefer that you can have it to cost your money, of course But you can do this The second business model this piece of business model is the open-core model that was chosen here Open-core means that only the basic functionality is available under free software license And the more advanced features are available under different license. So not open source not free software So in this usually means and also in this case that you have some sort of a community edition Which has some features? But more advanced features the real features are only available in enterprise edition and this is not free software This is something it's just normal proprietary software that you pay for and you buy but it's nothing to do with open source And this is also what is was chosen here The problem is that I think this open-core business model is inherently not stable Because you have this constant conflict between the community people and the company people because as a community contributor You basically want to have all the functionality for free. That's useful for you Right, that's usually how it works and if something is missing you just add the feature But the company has the interest to have certain advanced features only for themselves So basically the company wants to have like less features as open-source and more proprietary and the community the other way around So you have this constant fighting this constant discussion and you have like I don't know Some person might write a feature and then the company blocks it because this they have to feature two and they want to sell it So having it available for free is not good. So you have this constant Constant fighting here. So this is a bit of a challenge You have this whole area of product management which is a challenge because as I said in the example of KDE It usually works that every contributor can just write whatever feature they want You just send the pull request and if it's working and it's good then it's merged in and that's it Of course, if you are a company or this kind of company Then you need some kind of predictability of the roadmap because you have to promise your customer Look, this is how the next release will look like But if you have this community process, you don't really exactly know how it looks like it's more agile, right? That's just a pull request comes in. You don't even You don't even know that exists But it's just a nice feature and then suddenly we have a nice feature totally unplanned, which is great You have this feature, but it's not how some of the companies think Predictability that's a thing. So one time maybe a small story one time we had the challenge that Some of our guys Promised our investors that a certain feature. I think it was and was the server side encryption is available in own cloud 5 Unfortunately at a time the feature was not really stable and was not ready. So it wasn't ready for the next release So but because of that we had to name the next release after 4 not 5 But we had to really name it 4.5 Because I was just promised and so the features in 5 and the features not there can't be called 5. So it's all kinds of stupid stuff like that So it's just different way of thinking And of course some community members their road like features basically duplicating enterprise features And then you had to block it because You want to have be paid for this. That's a problem The investors of course are in the US based investors and I don't have no problem at all with when the capital and investment It's it's it's can work in certain cases, but it has to be aligned between all the people In this case, we had US based investors And they really wanted to have a US based company because hey only in the US You can do a real IT company in Europe. You don't know what it is. So it has to be a real US company and Also you want to have like a real US customers Which was a bit of a problem for us because the way your own cloud works is that it really basically secures your data and protects your data, but this whole Privacy and data protection stuff is really strong outside the US but not really inside the US So actually we attracted a lot of customers outside the US But they were considered like bad customers because you really want to grow inside the US. So it's this whole This whole bullshit And the next problem is that as I mentioned before this whole Category that we had here was called by Gardner enterprise file sync and share So at the beginning when I started on cloud, I wasn't not even a name for it But later was called enterprise file sync and share defined So because of that we had to do everything that was in this box and the price file sync and share But if there are other features for example our community They contribute an awesome calendar and contacts and and and notes and RSS reader and all these nice features that are really popular in the community But the company always like blocked is because that's not our product category. We don't need that that's group where that's whatever something else So this was this whole conflict of what are we really and because as a community person you don't care, right? You do what you want and if it's useful and other people like it too Then you have a nice feature in this case a calendar, but it's not the interest here so at the end We had a situation where we had really an unhappy community like I said a lot of people actually left Said hey, I'm don't don't play this game here anymore This is I want to have a real project not like work for a big VC funded company We had not happy employees because they thought that they're working in an open-source company, but then had to it develop proper tariff features And then I'm also not happy customers because the customers thought that they're actually using an open-source solution but once they talk to the Company and say hey, I want to have this they say yeah, no problem get this enterprise edition just pay here and Use is under this license, which is a proper tarry license And if they stop paying they're not allowed to use a software anymore one minute later Which is just a complete proper tarry software model is nothing to do with open source So open source is used as a marketing tool here the community edition, but companies don't really use it So it's a real like interesting situation here So I tried to fix that But I failed So I couldn't really the setup of this whole thing was not really done in a way that Me and others could steer this into a working direction There was alignment between the open source principles on this this other setup didn't really work out and at the end It really it really didn't work And now we have an interesting situation because this is not unusual. This is just how startups works Sometimes you try something Sometimes it works sometimes it fails and if it fails you just shut it down and you do something else that's how all the startups work most startups fail anyways and that's not a problem and Of course in this situation It's like the customers would have lost their products and Employees and the community and so on but yeah, we try it down do something else But of course because the core of it was still HGPL open source there actually was the opportunity to fork it and to reboot it And that's something that's unique and that's only possible because of the free software licensing model And because usually this just would be dead and I don't know the software would be owned by the bank or I don't know But in this case I was actually the opportunity to to reboot it and then this led to the to the next lot fork So the situation is that like in May 2016 like one and a half years ago 12 of the core people basically left and Decided to hey, let's start over Let's learn from the mistakes. Maybe we can do this better and Yeah Started over the first thing we did was the that we all locked ourselves into a Into a house in Stuttgart and Germany for a week. So we all basically Locked ourselves down and talked for a full week about hey, how would we do this? What was good in the past? What was bad in the past? How should the business model look like? How should the community relations look like house should basically how should this whole company and project look like so that we Can still work here in 20 years? Because none of it was interested and still not interested in some kind of exit or selling it or something to anyone We only want to have something sustainable a project that is sustainable and a company that's sustainable and just a normal boring Thing without fancy venture capital just something that we can all work for in 20 30 years So this is what we discussed like for for a week We can then we came up with some principles some guiding principles that we that we decided to follow The first is that we really want to have a sustainable organization and that we don't accept external investment so so the next letter company is Has no external investment is still owned by everybody who is like working in the company and this is something which gives us like independence and No external pressure to do certain things to I don't know to raise certain amount of money or customer numbers or quarterly numbers or whatever Of course, we have the pressure to be to make sure that we can all pay our rents But I talk a little bit about the business model later, but we just decided that we don't want any external investment Second principle and maybe this should be the first. I don't know is that we decided that everything we do should be open source and free software so We do everything as free software. So we Reimplemented all these proper Terry enterprise features. That's very nice. Thank you It's yeah, that's very nice good that we under the same ideas and some principles So we re-implemented all these proper Terry enterprise features and released them under open source we Yeah, there are a few things we had to fix for example the iOS app We couldn't fork because of the not working licensing. So we had to work with a partner To use this app that we later convinced the partner to open source it to so the iOS app is now also completely GPL and we even added a special clause to the GPL which makes it compatible with the Apple app store So it's actually everybody can take it and put it into the app store which wasn't possible in the old model So it's really we we fixed this and it's all it's all free software Next thing is that we kill this contributor agreement thing. So No one who contributes to next cloud has to transfer any rights to Our company that's not needed because we don't do this do a licensing anymore. We don't do the open core anymore We don't need it and we also don't need to collect Some intellectual property here because we need this because we want to sell it later to some other companies We don't plan to do this. So we don't collect any intellectual property The only thing we do is we have a real open source business model talk about it later We sell support and for this there is no right on the code needed It's just that we basically employ some of the core people of next cloud Which means we are able to support the software in a good way and this is what companies pay us for So no more contributor agreement you just Thank you so so this is something it just works the same as with other projects with Kde or GNOME or the Linux kernel itself where everybody keeps their own individual copyright on their piece of code of Coursing the agreement is that we all agreed on some license in our case on the server at the HGPL This is where all contributors has to agree on to use this license for that piece of code But the code itself is still owned by the contributor Which is then gives us that basically the situation that we have a shared ownership of the code base Which some people say is a bad thing because there's no way to ever change the license of it Because you would need the agreement from thousands of people Some people say this is bad. You can also say it's good I think it's actually good because no one can can fuck this up. This is just it's always is the license This and it will always stay the license And I think that's just a nice insurance that we have this shared ownership here Then of course use open standards for everything so we use Existing standards if they exist for example web doff we use for the file transfer if there are other pieces where no open standard exists like for the federated sharing we Invented our own standard publish it and release it and work with others to adapt it to to make it a real standard Federation and decentralization. I mean, this is the whole point of everything So we as a company we don't have any infrastructure. We don't have any server We don't have any user accounts nothing. We just like give people the software you can run it wherever you want And you can federate and distribute between it but distributed not through us So we are done not in a central position somehow That's a very important principle We use open source Thank you Use open source community processes, which means all the feature requests all the bugs everything we do or discussions are in GitHub in our case every we can have a look to contribute There's nothing really happening behind closed doors. They are like, I don't know a tiny bit of communication which requires Like talking about a specific customer who where we have signed an NDA But it's only for sub projects and the overall product discussion is everything Everything's in the open and we don't have this. I don't know Secret roadmap documents anymore or that we present to someone everything happens on GitHub And the last thing is that's really important for us is diversity So I have to say that we are not doing great here. It's similar to lots of open source projects We have a lot to do, but this is something which we think is really important. So we are active in different Organizations or last week. I think we approve we've got approved to be part of range of the race girls Initiative and some others. So we really try to to build up a community and a company which is diverse. That's really important Thanks Okay, let's talk a little bit about business model because at the moment I just presented Yeah, we are so nice. You can do everything for free. We're really open, right? You might wonder. How do we actually make money? Which is important if we want to be sustainable, right? We don't want to get any Spend money that comes from the bank. We want to get spent money that comes from real customers So we have to be sustainable. So we have to have a real business model and here we Just got the inspiration from Yeah, well the biggest open source companies out there So if you look at what redhead and Susie's are doing for example redhead is the biggest open source company in the world as you know This is exactly what we what we copied basically their business model, which means Everything we do is open source and free software and we sell support subscriptions To companies and we focus here on big enterprises So there I think there is no way that we try to monetize charge likes home users or small installations or whatever This is not the plan We sell like support subscriptions to the big organizations. It's the organizations who have thousands of users so This is this is really important the way this usually works is if you're if you're the IT department of a big bank or a big Government organization or big university then you usually want to have a service level agreement or something You want to have a phone number that you can call if something is not working Tiggered you want to if everything explodes you want to be able to call the developer who wrote the code in the first place Right, right direct contact and to the people to solve this And this is what we sell so we have to support subscription thing And that's what we sell support security consulting scalability consulting Branding so if you want to have a client with your logo in we can build it for you And professional service or if you want to have a special feature and want to pay for this feature You can pay us and we develop the feature for you, which then again will be open source after that So this is what we offer the important thing here is that we don't have any vendor login Not like certain other other business models where you if you stop the subscription that you're not allowed to use the software anymore That's not the case here. It's free software. You just take the software do whatever you want forever if you want There's no restrictions. I think we offer great services for big customers. I think Big organizations should pay us. But if you don't do You can keep on using the software. It's not a problem. So there's no vendor login I think this is also very important and like absolutely absolutely most of our customers absolutely appreciate that and I think they understand in the meantime some other business model where they talk about open source and nice nice nice And then the end you still have this login All right, this is This is different here So no vendor login The right to distribute and change it inside and outside your organization Participate in the community. So actually lots of our customers in and and users actually Contribute code back sometimes that work with they have their own developers or the higher different Development company and I say hey, I want to have this feature and just move it back into in the next cloud So it will be supported part of the next release. So this is something which is really More and more customers of actually understand is that this is so much nicer than this proper Terry software If you buy a like a Microsoft or Oracle product. There's just Nothing you can do right you Talk to your sales person say we would love to have this feature and they say yeah sure and then nothing happens Right, and then you can't fix it right here. We have actually an open process You can ask us to fix it. You can pay us to fix it You can pay someone else to fix it. You can fix it yourself and contribute it. You have all these options That's actually really powerful The clear licenses I find is very interesting that sometimes I talk to people who say that yeah, this whole GPL stuff That's so dangerous, right? It's so hard to understand what? Rights I give up and that's so crazy. I Actually think it's the opposite the GPL license is really well understood There are so many lawyers and organizations who can explain it to you and it's really well understood if you use some other Software if you for example use something from Oracle and it comes with a proper to a licensing Licensing agreement which by the way changes every week And it's like I don't know so long good luck with reviewing that and evaluating what consequence this license has on your long-term business And it changes all the time anyways, so I actually think that clear licenses free software license are actually a good thing And of course this whole open-source thing is also an insurance that this whole solution you have Keeps on existing right? I mean if the absolute worst case happens, and I don't know I'm I don't know the whole next lot communities run over by a bus or something right then It's like it's still free software you can still use it So if you decide to use it as a strategic platform for your organization, it's still there You can just go to some other developers and say hey, can you fix this for me? That's possible, but if it's proprietary software, then you have to log in and you can't really change anything So a little bit of an outlook where we are today with next load on where we're going We have more contributions than ever so this works out really well We as a company and by the way contributors. I think the latest release. I'm not sure I have to have to look it up, but if I remember correctly over 500 people contributed Like in the last release or something is really a nice number, but I forgot but it's a nice number But we as a company we also employ people and we employ like 35 people actually I think there are three more now in the meantime, but we really it's nice number of employees and a big part of you are actually engineers and People from a technical side and then a bit of sales and marketing and other stuff We are profitable. This is something which is really it's really happy So this crazy open-source business model of giving everything away for free actually works. So This is really nice. So we don't have any extra external investment Which is really it's really good. Our customer base are growing. It's like we have some nice government customers bigger enterprises bigger Universities is really good and we are still growing and hiring like I said in the last three weeks I think I hide three more people alone. So it's really really going well Like I said before on a contributor agreement 100% free software It's also I mean, it's just amazing with the speed that that our community does So when we did a fork we thought that we do the first release in two months But actually the first release was ready two weeks after the fog already So we for example merge all the pull requests with the same priority It doesn't matter if the pull request comes from a random community person or some from the core team It doesn't matter. It's the same process same for everything We don't have any roadblocks of community pull requests So this is also happened in the past somehow where there was a policy that hey We do our own pull requests and then merge we merge one community pull pull request per month Just crazy. This wasn't the Android app by the way where we had a really active community of contributors in the Android space but The official developer sub company that own cloud hired merged only one community pull requests per Per month. So it's completely killed the enthusiasm and when we did the fork I mean, I think they merged like over a hundred pull requests in just a few weeks and Now I mean our client is I don't know we're moving with such a higher speed now than before It's really really working. Well, I mean we do even crazy stuff that our website our main website is also in git so community people can actually contribute to our Company website by doing pull requests Actually, we sometimes get credits that we have this really nice design on next law.com Well, the designer actually is a community guy who just thinks that they want to contribute something and do it That's all our designs which is Quite interesting far Of course, it's still it's still there's still challenges. I mean when I came up with the name own cloud I think this was not a totally bad idea. It's a good name So it's it takes take some time to build up the awareness and everything So if you look at Google Trends, for example, so you get a chart like that So it's still And I just for fun. Yeah, so here is like the own cloud site and Yeah, I think we overtook it like last few days here But it's still like a it's still a long road and I just talked with with Michael Meeks here On the stage a few minutes ago I think one of the main guys in the LibreOffice project there's some lots of others that with LibreOffice and an open office We have a similar situation actually I looked up the chart for them. It looks very similar So it's also just now that they overtook like the old the old print which is just that's it takes a while But that's what it is. We're moving forward. It's really high high speed in lots of areas Obviously, it's too much stuff to read but lots of improvements in key areas in collaborations capability security So I'm really happy that we are really innovating so fast. I'm want to point out only two features briefly One is the next loud talk feature that we released like three weeks ago. That's a web RTC based video voice Calling features so you can actually call people via web RTC And this is for group calls and video calls and audio calls and also group chats And it's of course again running all on your own machine And we even have complete free software Android and iOS apps for that so you can actually from your phone Call another person and it sends a push notification to your server and maybe just serve of this other person and then The first server to the phone of this person and the phone rings and they click accept and then you have a Encrypted peer-to-peer and encrypted peer-to-peer connection between the phones. I have this video call And it's all on your own all of your own server This is a nice new feature that we added to the next load And the second thing I want to point out is the end-to-end encryption for file sharing This is also very new one of the most requested features forever And it took quite a while to do it because to figuring out how the key management everything should work But it is something that is coming next at 13 which is scheduled to be released next week. So really really fast Okay, and I want to Thanks a lot. I think I have to wrap up What next load is what we are doing is we want to build or we are building an Alternative to dropbox to Google suite and to office 365 Like we want to have to similar functionality But with a few differences obviously first of all completely self-hosted second is completely open source and third is distributed and federated So this is like the in the nutshell The mission that we have and this is what we all want to do like company and community together in a real Sorry for the buzzword win-win situation. I think this is possible and this is what we're trying to do Okay, thanks a lot. I think we still have a few minutes for questions 10 minutes awesome cool, okay So I think here's someone Has own cloud started picking up code from next cloud? No as far as I know because They could we release everything on the HPL, but they want to have ownership of their of the code Which means they decide to not take our code? That's their problem How does your government purchase open-source software? So I think how how does government purchase open-source software? So Yeah, lately we were involved in a in a big public tender for example That we also won for big government to use next cloud This is just their standard processes like for public tenders and we participate in that just in a normal way Sometimes nowadays only sometimes There are there are requirements in the in the documents that it has to be open source and free software But this is not not always the case I think in some state in Germany in Schleswig-Holstein the government decided lately that this is a this is a requirement for all public Software purchases or something which is totally awesome But in in most other cases we still compete against the proprietary Competitors and then it's just a normal thing. It's like features price it's the normal game You mentioned that you you target big customers So you're also not the only one so how hard was it to get to sit with these people and get their attention How was it to do marketing basically? Yeah, well, I mean, it's not it's not easy. It's not that it's super easy. We have to fight for it every day We have to do lots of marketing to tell people that next lot exists I mean our competitors from all of a Microsoft Google they're doing a really good job So we have to say hey, we're also here. We're also here. We are small, but still we are here Then we have to compete against just the features and a lot of his trust a lot of it I mean we are an organization is one and a half years old and Sometimes customers ask, okay, why should I buy you against Microsoft? That's like, yeah That's something that's not not easy But I Don't know at least in in Europe. It's working very well at the moment Because people understand that maybe maybe it's a bad future if everybody's like using like one cloud vendor Which is like on the other side of the planet Maybe this login effect this dependency on someone is really too strong so we got quite some requests from Companies organization governments would say hey, it's we pick you because we have to be independent So this this works well Your your old company was funded by some By open source people and now you mentioned that The the company that only accept one one pull request and with a company Wanted to have dual license. Can you elaborate a little bit on how that happened the venture capital people? Give you these these these guidelines or how how did it happen? I? Hope you understand that I want to go and not go into much detail here because has to do with people But it's yeah, I mean there were lots of discussions. There was lots of pressure to to make money and Making money is like in the short term actually works by forcing the customer to pay you And then if it's a proper tariff feature, then they have to pay you I think it's true if you force the customer to pay you it works well in the short term I think in the long term it's bad because Happy customers are actually good customers, but this is like a long-term thing which It's maybe not so important if the only thing that you care about is the next quarterly number so Yeah, lots of ongoing discussions at the end the free software people like couldn't like Yeah Couldn't influence it too much I would have assumed that or could have imagined that even with the old model some fraction maybe large fraction of the customers was Paying you because they were actually interested in service sort of buy it the new Model rather than because they required a proprietary feature so I would have guessed that Your new model would probably work well because I always would have assumed that the main Reason for paying you is that some or two or is it all could it do you have an idea of what fraction of the old Customers were buying you for that reason or for the other And that's a good question. I don't know it exactly I mean there is for example one business model in the past was the Dual licensing which is basically hey if you don't like GPL a GPL pay us then you get it undone Whatever license you want not GPL. So this is something which we don't offer anymore So this is something I can judge and I think I Had it zero times in the existence of next cloud But I think once in the existing of own cloud before that a company really really wanted to have that I Think it was if I remember correctly It was some American Bank or something who has a policy that GPL is evil and no GPL here But besides that that's not a problem. So I don't know usually I ask him Hey, do you have a linux service somewhere see it's all the GPL does it hurt you? No Yeah So this is fine Then the second thing about the enterprise extensions That's I mean They get the same features from us just under free software, which is they don't complain, right? This is like fine But it's true that I think that most of the customers there want to have a support contract service level agreement I want to have a guarantee they get a security patches in time and so on and so on This is the main motivator and I think it's the same if you buy a redhead subscription or Susie or something Over like Debian just the main difference that this insurance that you get support and you have someone's call and so on The same for us. I would say this is the motivation for 95% of the people So I want to first congratulate you to choosing this model I'm the CEO of xwiki and we very much aligned on the on the rules that you set And I wanted to know How did you pay the salaries initially after the fork and how long did it take to get profitable and how many customers you have? Yeah, good questions precise questions Yes, that's the first question about the salaries that's indeed was a challenge because as I mentioned we We were like 12 people at the beginning with zero customers Right in the first day So this was a challenge. So this is something that was we're able to compensate with I don't know Private money from the people together who are involved Then relatively quickly we Got like the first customers So this like went really well in fact like the biggest customer signed up I think at the end of 2016 which then directly Made us profitable, but we're lucky in a way. I don't know that we got like a really big one really fast So this was good and since then we are Hiring more people and getting more customers at the moment. I think we have a bit over 100 customers One or two last questions Talk about money again Now with the experience of two companies financing open source and with services emerging like bounty source or patreon or such What can you recommend the community as a whole to get more people to be paid for? contributing to open source That's a big question. I'm not sure I can answer that and also not in one minute So, yeah, I mean, I think it's something we have to figure out. I think this is something I think you agreed is why you ask the question This is something we all have to figure out if you really want to change the world if you want to make it better I really think we need to have more more people more more investment more time more full-time Developers and so on so I mean there's a lot we can do like as volunteers But I think if you really want to like this with his whole threat in in the cloud area Which is red on mobile, which is totally locked down which totally locked down Artificial intelligence with total lockdown IoT like all these upcoming battles where if we want to be relevant There's an open-source free software community Then we need to figure out some way to make money then to be able to pay people So this is super important and how to do this. That's that's a big question. Yeah I mean with not sure I can answer that you need some kind of business model all I can say here is that pick a business model which Doesn't work against open source. Otherwise You're not open source and otherwise you lose all your your support And then you'd have nothing You have to pick something which works for all involved parties What it is I I can't answer that now. I mean, this is what works for us But this is only one solution. So this only works because we are Something that's useful in the enterprise market If it would be something that's not interested for enterprises for example, if you would do I don't know Toasters or something right this wouldn't work But figuring something out is really important With the general data protection regulation GDPR coming in Do you feel that's going to drive more people towards solutions like next cloud for self-hosting to bring things In-house, or do you think it's going to drive people to office 365 Google apps to you know have the protection of the big company I Hard to say but I think it would actually help Solutions like next cloud and other self-hosted open source solutions. I think so because it's I Don't know at the end of the day. It just gives you more freedom and more more Flexibility to do to do certain things and then to be compliant to certain regulations If you just a customer for a software as a service solution, then you Get what you get and if there's a new regulation because you in I don't know health care or some other market And if it's not there then it you're just out So I think at the end of the day what we do is always more flexible always better But of course it's again up here build a battle right because Microsoft now does are not stupid They also work with the politicians to make sure that they're compliant But yeah, at the end I think it creates awareness and it helps like our community all together here. Yeah Thank you Frank