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Episode Transcript

Josh Bressers (00:00) Today, open source securities talking to Frank Kolichek, the founder and CEO of Nextcloud. I am holy cow. I’m excited to have Frank here because I feel like European digital sovereignty and Nextcloud have been just like on the top of the headlines for months now. So Frank, welcome so much.

Frank (00:15) Thanks a lot for having me.

Josh Bressers (00:17) Okay, so why don’t you just start out by telling us kind of who you are, what is Nextcloud and why you’re here and we’ll go from there. Cause this one, like there’s a lot of ways we could take this one.

Frank (00:26) Yeah, yeah. Well, while I’m old, so there’s a lot to say. So, I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I started to do software development in 90s ⁓ and of course, then came across open source, ⁓ got in contact with the KDE community. And since then, I was really fascinated about like the concept of open source that you can really, you know, what software is running on your computer and you can tinker with it and you can like inspect it.

Josh Bressers (00:29) Welcome to the club, man.

Frank (00:55) and it and so on. And of course the computer was standing in front of me, right? It was like a desktop. Obviously there was no cloud at the time. So you basically were in full control of your digital life here because you have the software, you have the hardware and this felt really good and powerful. yeah, then of course in 2000s cloud came along and this meant that like the data is no longer.

on my device, somewhere else, and also some software running that I don’t even know what it is. I cannot check it, I cannot improve it, it’s just ⁓ some software that is out of my control. And basically as a developer it’s felt really bad because I turned from a developer into just a customer basically. You’re no longer like really someone who can really build things and control things. And of course from a security perspective it’s also not just a study, have to trust other people to do right thing.

and I didn’t need to trust anyone before because I could do everything myself. And this was at a time where I thought, okay, there must be some kind of open source answer to this cloud trend, basically, because the cloud also brought very powerful web applications, like collaboration tools, communication tools, collaborative editing of documents and lots of cool things. And I thought, this doesn’t necessarily need to run on some hyperscaler. This can also run on a computer I control

So I thought why not build a software that has all these powerful communication collaboration features and it’s fully open source and you can just deploy it wherever you want, like from a Raspberry Pi for your friends and family up to a huge cluster for millions of users. And yeah, this is how I started basically 16 years ago.

Josh Bressers (02:40) Now, was it Nextcloud when you started or was it something else when you started?

Frank (02:44) Yeah, that’s a bit of a complex history. So it was first started under a different name. It was called ownCloud And yeah, and I developed it and built up the community at the beginning. And then I got in contact with some other people and together we decided, okay, let’s start a company around it. Because at the beginning it was just like a fun hobby project. And when we built the company, a lot of things went wrong. So it was just a…

Josh Bressers (02:51) Yep, I remember.

Frank (03:12) wrong people, the wrong setup and basically then 10 years ago we needed to do a reboot basically. So most of the developers basically left the company and we founded Nextcloud together and now we do everything open source because owncloud was only partly open source and it’s community oriented and has more features and so on. So it was basically some kind of reboot 10 years ago.

Josh Bressers (03:35) Nice, nice. And, and yes, we should clarify that while Nextcloud is a company, all of your tooling is completely open and anyone can obviously run it at, at any time on their own stuff, which is really fricking cool because that’s yeah. Like that, that’s, mean, that’s my, my cup of tea, obviously. So awesome.

Frank (03:44) Mm-hmm. Yep.

Yeah.

Josh Bressers (03:55) Okay, Frank. So why don’t you tell us like, what is next cloud for anyone who might not know what that is?

Frank (04:01) Yeah, so it all started with the file management at the beginning. So something is called file syncing and share. A lot of people know it like as Dropbox or Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive. Basically a service that you can upload and sync your files, share it with other people, have it on your phone, on your desktop and so on. Basically managing your files. This is how it all started. But for me it became clear.

that this is only the beginning because it’s nice to have all your documents available and all your devices, but at the end you want to do something with them, you want to view them, you want to edit them, you want to communicate around them. So for me it was clear that the whole area will expand into more like a collaboration software. And this is also what others are doing, right? mean, Google Drive, cannot really…

get alone anymore because it’s just part of Google works. That’s why you have your documents in the chat, your calendar and everything. And that’s also the same for Microsoft, where there’s a Microsoft OneDrive, but it’s just part of Microsoft 365. And this is a little bit the same journey we are doing here with Nextcloud. So Nextcloud can synchronize your files, but it also has mail, calendar and contacts. It has chat and video conferencing. It has an office component to edit your documents collaboratively with others. Photo management.

note taking and a lot of more things. it’s basically everything you need to work together between people over the internet.

Josh Bressers (05:28) Yeah, yeah, right, right. It’s, mean, I hesitate to say the word modern office suite, but it’s basically all of the things you would expect in an online, I guess, I don’t even call it, office suite is too old, but you get the idea. Like, right.

Frank (05:35) Go.

Yeah,

yeah, but that’s what it is. That’s what it is. mean, there are lots of names for that over the years, right? At some point it was called groupware or like an online office or yeah, I think a lot of people call it a collaboration suite nowadays, but yeah, lots of different names. Yeah.

Josh Bressers (06:00) there you go. I like that name. We’ll

call it that. We’ll call it that. Okay. Now I don’t know how to ask this in a nice way. So I’m just going to, I’m just going to ask it is I feel like digital sovereignty is a huge topic at the moment for many reasons, right? We could, we could probably spend days discussing like the geopolitical reasons. Digital sovereignty is now an interesting topic, but I feel like every time

Frank (06:05) You

Mmm.

Josh Bressers (06:30) I read about digital sovereignty, especially in Europe. Nextcloud is somewhere inside of that discussion. So I will let you decide how you want to answer that question and where you want to kind of take it. But I feel like the thing it is, it is amusing to me that I suspect a couple of years ago, a lot of people would have been like, next cloud, whatever, why do I need that? And now I feel like it is everywhere if no one is asking that question. So, okay, I will let you take this one from here.

Frank (06:46) you

Hmm.

No. Yeah.

Yeah, thanks. So yeah, it’s interesting because as I said, did software development open source for a long time, like the 90s. the 90s, the whole IT stuff was not political. It was just done by some nerds in the basement, right, coding along. like the politicians didn’t care, like managers and companies didn’t care. This is just some IT stuff, boring. But this really has changed because nowadays it’s everybody understands.

that is really, really important. Who has access to the data? Who can switch off my applications? Who can, I don’t know, increase the prices and I have to pay because there’s no choice to migrate away and so on. So basically the importance of this nerdy stuff is now on the top. mean, lot of companies, lot of governments, they really think about it. Where is the data? Where is access and so on. And yeah, this was of course freedoms that… ⁓

I would say at the beginning we are connected to the term open source, but open source was always a bit like hard to explain to other people because you ask what is open source? I oh, I software licenses. And then, okay, what could be more boring than software licenses? I think this is a terrible way to promote this idea. And this is why the term digital sovereignty is a little bit better in my opinion, because it basically means that, yeah, individuals, organizations, governments are in control.

of their digital destiny in a way. yeah, because Nextcloud can be run wherever you want, right? You can install it in a hosting center you trust, on your own infrastructure. ⁓ You can decide who has access to it and who has not. Because it’s open source, you can audit the software, right? You can look inside and look for backdoors or something, right? And you can even like improve it for yourself. So it basically gives you a lot of control, lot of sovereignty over your…

digital life. This is a bit of the thing at the moment and nowadays a lot of people want to be more in control of their future.

Josh Bressers (09:03) Well,

let’s touch on that a little bit, because I think this is complicated and hard to understand and explain sometimes. And so I’ll put it in the context of many times in the past, the hyper scalers, Like Microsoft and Google and whoever have been asked, can you guarantee that my data will stay in this country or out of that country or some sort of guarantee about where your data is? Because the reason being that

For example, if I’m a European and my data ends up in the United States, now the United States can subpoena and request and do things with my data, even though I’m not in that country and I have no relation to that country necessarily. And historically, all of these companies have said, we cannot guarantee anything about where your data is. And quite frankly, a lot of these systems they have are kind of magical in the context of like the data just ends up places.

Frank (09:48) Mm-hmm.

Josh Bressers (10:02) where it might need to be for some reason. And so I think that the data sovereignty aspect of this is for me, I find it super fascinating because like when we think of Europe, right? Like as an American, Europe is this amorphous blob, right? We think of it kind of like in the same way we think of the United States where it’s like this giant country with a bunch of States, but no one really knows what that means and whatever, it’s just a place we all live. Europe is what like 200, not 200, it’s what is it? Like 47 countries or something? I forget the number, but like,

Frank (10:05) Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Josh Bressers (10:31) Every one of them has its own sovereignty, its own rules, its own laws, and they take it super seriously. So it’s like a very, very interesting problem, I think.

Frank (10:39) Hmm.

Yeah, there a lot of things to say here. ⁓ there’s of course also the European Union, Like a party that is harmonizing the laws between all the states. And that’s a good thing. And the EU decided that we want to have the GDPR, which is a strong data protection laws. It has like several things that ⁓ you ⁓ need to protect the data of your users, your customers, for example, you cannot really give it to someone else without.

and so on, lot of requirements there, which I think it’s common sense, it’s a good idea. But unfortunately, the US does not have this kind of legislation. think California introduced it a little bit, but it’s definitely not on the same level. this is then an interesting challenge for European organizations because they cannot really give the data to the hyperscalers because then it would basically leave this protection that is required by law.

Josh Bressers (11:21) Ugh, I know.

Frank (11:40) This is a challenge of course, and the politicians, the American, US politicians and the European politicians noticed many years ago that this is a problem and they created like agreements. It first started with the Safe Harbor Agreement and then later the Privacy Shield Agreement and now we had a third version which is the data protection framework ⁓ and this is basically a piece of paper which says like it’s fine.

can give the data to the hyperscalers and say that they’re protecting it and it’s fine. But of course it’s not so easy because if you’re American company you need to follow American law and there are American laws like the Patriot Act and the Cloud Act and so on. And there’s this law basically say that ⁓ under lot of conditions a lot of people who have some interest in this data can have access and this is then violates or this goes against the European law so there’s a bit of a problem here.

And this creates a lot of tension, basically.

Josh Bressers (12:41) Yeah. Yeah. man. That’s a, that’s a two hour conversation in itself right there. But, but, but let’s not, I don’t want to dwell on that too much, I guess, cause I feel like the, the, the legal aspects of this, like if you’re getting your legal advice from, from Frank and myself, you probably have a lot bigger problems than anything else. So not a lawyer, but, but okay. So like, let’s talk about next cloud a little bit. Cause I want to get into some of the nitty gritty details of this, which is

Frank (12:44) You

Yeah, at least.

Yeah.

Josh Bressers (13:10) It is comically easy to set this tool up. And for anyone who doesn’t know, I’ll have links in the show notes to all of the instructions, but like fundamentally, this is meant to be a system that like, me as a person, I can just get it and run it. Now I will say it has to be run on a public IP. That is one of the like requirements to set this up, which I mean, I I understand why, but like, I also like, I’d love to run it in my lab and destroy it.

Frank (13:35) Well, actually that’s not true.

That’s actually not true. mean, lot of people actually run it on a private network alone, basically air-gapped, disconnected from the internet. For example, if you really have super high security requirements and you have like an internal network in between different offices of your company or sometimes government organizations have the internal private network, then you can install an exploit there and it’s not even connected to the internet.

Josh Bressers (14:01) It needs a valid certificate. That’s what it is, isn’t it? I don’t remember. I remember I tried to set this up internally and I was like, this is too much hassle. I’ll just get a VM. And I don’t remember exactly why at the moment. It’s been a while since I’ve done this, but yeah, but it’s super easy, right? You literally run a couple, like what you have a Docker command basically and it’s magic.

Frank (14:05) Yeah, yeah, yeah,

No.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah,

it’s one of the design goals basically to make running this thing as easy as possible because I mean it’s great that you have this open source software and you can decentralize everything but if people cannot run it then what’s the point, right? So it was always the goal to make it like stupidly easy to set it up and at the beginning it was like even easier it was just you unpack a zip file basically in the web server root

and that it works. It can even do this in a sub directory. It can create its own database. You don’t even need shell access. So this was the original design goal and it still sort of works like that. Unfortunately, with more and more features we added, also more and more components that you need, right? Like different services, microservices configured in certain ways. And then it all became, unfortunately, just a little bit more complicated. And this is why nowadays we recommend the Docker container because it has everything in there. It’s nicely configured. You basically don’t need to do a lot.

Josh Bressers (15:20) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I couldn’t imagine trying to set this up without the Docker container. It would take me a month just to read the docs, I suspect. Now I will say that I applaud you as a company because most companies, when they have like an open source version or something, they make it so hard to install or use that they’re obviously trying to shepherd people into their walled garden. And that’s not the strategy you’ve taken. so like,

Frank (15:25) Yeah.

No, but then

you have to hurt your own community with that. That’s stupid.

Josh Bressers (15:50) Well, I I agree with you as old open source nerds, but obviously a lot ⁓ of startups today don’t function like that, right? They see open source as the advertising wing of their company as a way to lure people in and then trap them in the bog. And you’re not taking that approach. So I honestly did want to ask like the business model question about this because…

Frank (15:52) Hehehehe. Hehehehe.

Josh Bressers (16:14) I don’t think what Nextcloud is doing is necessarily a typical open source business model, but I feel like it is a really good business model because you’re, you’re build, like you said, you’re building a community and you also have the commercial piece, which is like how to make commercial open source work is, is definitely one of the challenges we have today. Like as just an open source universe.

Frank (16:22) Mmm.

Yeah,

no, that’s true, of course. And I think we found a very nice business model that works good for us. But I wouldn’t say this works for everyone. It’s just worked for us. And we developed this over 10 years. We fine tuned it all the time. But the idea is to explain it quickly is that, as you said, everything is open source. So we actually don’t have any proprietary pieces. ⁓ Sometimes people always expect, yeah, there must be some special features that you only get as a paying customer.

No, it’s basically all open source, it’s all the same. What we are offering, how we make our money, is that we provide or we offer support contracts, enterprise subscriptions. So if you run NextLog in a mission-critical way, then you can get the support from us, then you can directly contact the developers themselves if something is not working. We have access to some knowledge base for if you really want to scale it via Kubernetes to millions of users, then you can example configurations from there.

There are some certifications that we provide to paying customers like special accessibility certification, stuff like that. So there a of services around that you don’t need as a home user. So as a small organization, you don’t need. But if you’re a big government organization, if you’re a huge university or something, you probably want to work together with us because we are the specialists who can help you. And this is how we make our money. it’s not so unusual. And this is also the Red Hat business model.

Canonical Ubuntu business model and MariaDB business model. In my opinion, it’s one of the best.

Josh Bressers (18:09) I mean, I don’t know if you know this, I spent a decade at Red Hat, so I’m incredibly familiar with the business model. And I agree, it’s a lovely way to do this. And I mean, like, and the customers you’re dealing with, I can’t, I think it was what the country of Austria recently, like transitioned all of their government, like that’s, the scale of that is mind boggling. I mean, yes, I,

Frank (18:13) No.

Hmm.

Josh Bressers (18:35) A country is not going to be like, we’ll just self support, right? Like they, they have a vested interest in working with you and they’re probably honestly going to save money over the time it would take having people figure this crap out on their own, right?

Frank (18:42) Exactly.

Of course.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Now we have more and more huge organizations switching to Nextcloud. There’s also the Ministry of Education in France. There are several million users. I’m actually also a little bit proud that the code is basically the same. It’s like really interesting scalability architecture. The code you’re running on the Raspberry Pi is like 99 % the same that you would run on a huge cluster.

Josh Bressers (18:58) Nice.

Wow, that’s

Frank (19:16) ⁓

Josh Bressers (19:16) epic.

Frank (19:17) Of course there are some differences with clustered databases and clustered redis caches and so on, but most of the things are really the same.

Josh Bressers (19:26) That’s awesome. Holy cow, I love that. That’s one of those things that is so hard to explain. And like, you’re one of the few people I’ve talked to that’s in this universe is it’s so easy for us to build a tool that works for like one or 10 people. But once you hit like millions of things happening at the same time, the scalability issues turn into these ridiculous problems that like no normal developer will ever even imagine, right? On a day-to-day basis. That’s so cool.

Frank (19:39) Thank you.

Josh Bressers (19:58) Okay. Okay. So, so we’re kind of, we’re running the clock down a little bit here. So I also, Frank wanted to talk to you a little bit about like, you’ve got this tool, right? You’re coming in, you’re helping with sovereignty. You’re helping people kind of free themselves and put them back into control. And there’s, there’s two pieces to this story. I would, I would love to, to have you kind of tell me about. So anyone who, I suspect the vast majority of people who listen to this podcast.

are familiar with Cory Doctorow, right? And he’s had an enormous amount to say about, you know, digital sovereignty and what, you know, he calls it in enshitification And there’s just all, there’s all these moving parts going on right now. And so I kind of have, have a two-part question for you really is, so first of all, there’s the, angle of

we’re seeing a lot of cloud providers kind of starting to turn up the ratchet. And so I’m curious what kind of interest you’re starting to see outside of maybe Europe. Like, is this a thing we’re seeing? Are we seeing these companies trying to kind of bring some things back in to rid themselves of some of these hyper-scalar type things?

a

so then the other piece, Frank, is like, how do you make sure Nextcloud doesn’t end up on like that in enshitification treadmill for its users? So, okay, I’ll let you start with the first part about just like digital sovereignty, the interest you’re seeing in just not maybe European governments.

Frank (21:23) Yeah, there are course a lot of other benefits running Nextcloud beside the digital sovereignty. For example, another thing we can do is a big cloud provider, service provider can take Nextcloud, white label it under their own name and offer it as a service to their customers. Because you cannot really do this with Microsoft or Google. Microsoft 365 comes out even from Microsoft and Google works better only from Google. But if you then some other service provider, cloud provider, then what can you do? Then you’re out of business very soon.

But you can take Nextcloud and you can white label it and you can offer it to your customers. For example, one of our bigger customers is American Mobile. They’re like a huge service provider in Mexico, but they also have basically all of South America as customers. don’t know, 250 million customers or something. It’s gigantic. yeah, for example, they take Nextcloud and they’re offered under the name Cloud Drive to their customers under their own name. And that’s something that a lot of companies do all over the world.

So that’s something that’s also Nextcloud can do and the hyperscalers not just interested.

Josh Bressers (22:28) Wow, that’s really cool. Well, they have no reason to do that, right? They want their name all over everything.

Frank (22:33) Yeah, exactly. And then the second question was of course how do we prevent that Nextcloud becomes evil basically tomorrow. yeah, mean that’s the question. So I think we have some guardrails built in. For example, the first thing is that everybody who contributes to Nextcloud, codes to Nextcloud, and this are thousands of people,

Josh Bressers (22:43) Yeah, yeah, right, right. ⁓

Frank (23:02) they keep their own copyright on the software. So we don’t have a contributor license agreement. So the next cloud code base is basically shared, owned by thousands of people. And this prevents any evil license change from our side. So we, for example, could not change the license. There are a of companies who trying to make it like proprietary or need to optimize some quarterly numbers. don’t know. And then suddenly it’s no longer open source.

This cannot happen with Nextcloud because we would need approval from thousands of people and this is not possible. So it’s basically guaranteed to always stay open source. It’s in a way very similar to the Linux kernel, which I think gives you a nice guarantee. And then the second thing is if we as a company would make some mistakes or some things that our customers or users don’t want. For example, we develop the software in the wrong direction or we build in restrictions or we…

to bad quality or we increase the prices a lot or whatever bad thing, someone can always take it and fork it and turn it into a better direction. We think we’re doing a good job steering in the right direction, but if people disagree, they can do it themselves, it and do something different. So that’s basically always the safety net there. So if we somehow don’t make our customer and our community happy anymore, then someone else will. I think it’s a very nice guarantee that’s built.

Josh Bressers (24:27) Fair enough, yeah, yeah. Okay, and I do have kind of a follow-up to that then, something I do not know the answer to, and I should, I feel like, is, so when, do you host Nextcloud for customers, or do customers always run it on their stuff?

Frank (24:41) We intentionally don’t host Nextcloud because if you would offer a hosting service then you would become like the de facto official place and I don’t like that. It’s all about decentralization. So you can get Nextcloud by hosting it yourself or you can go to one of the many service providers who offer Unix cloud and there lots of them but we don’t do that.

Josh Bressers (24:44) Okay.

Okay, gotcha, gotcha. Wow, that, I applaud you for that because obviously that is probably an easy way to get a lot of customers quickly and also an easy way to trap them into an ecosystem. And so that is definitely, I think it is a choice that deserves applause. And I love it. That’s amazing.

Frank (25:26) Thanks a lot.

Josh Bressers (25:27) It’s easy to chase the quick and easy money in stuff like this, right? Like it’s obvious you’re not doing this.

Frank (25:34) Yeah, I totally agree.

You want to do the right thing and you think it pays off in the long run. For example, as I said, there are lots and of service providers.

who offer Nextcloud and lately at our conference that we did last fall, we got the feedback by some people that, hey, it’s really hard to move from one service provider to another because some of them don’t give you access to the file system or to the database. So you cannot really take your stuff and move it somewhere else, lock you in. Then for example, then we decided, okay, that’s not good. So in the next release that comes out very soon or maybe already is out when you hear this podcast, we introduce a super powerful import export feature.

They can really import, export everything from the web interface, so it’s basically guaranteed that as a user, you always have the freedom to take the stuff with you. If you decided to run, go with a service provider and this organization becomes evil or don’t like it anymore, you can always export it and import it in somewhere else and then you can just go on. And these are some things that doesn’t really directly give us any revenue, right? But it’s like, it’s just the right thing to do. I mean, we want to have a tool that empowers our users.

Josh Bressers (26:16) Awesome.

Frank (26:44) fully convinced that this will then also come back to us in a positive way because happy users then also happy.

Josh Bressers (26:52) Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s so cool. Okay. So speaking of your next release and just kind of any, will give you the floor kind of at the end here to just say like, what is next? Like, what should we look for coming next in the context of like digital sovereignty, next cloud, like whatever you want to tell us about, I’ll let you tell us about Frank, because I feel like you, there’s probably a lot common, right?

Frank (27:14) Yeah.

There’s a lot coming, yes. We do three really big releases every year, so there’s always constant news. I don’t want to spoil anything here. This is something I personally don’t really like because then you have marketing promises and then later you get a software and software is not doing what it’s promised. I don’t really like this too much. But we produce a very nice release video every time. It’s on PeerTube or on YouTube and we really show you all the cool new features. But this is also at the exact same day when the software is available.

Josh Bressers (27:30) Sure.

Frank (27:46) So we never do any pre-announcements and I recommend everybody who is interested to ⁓ watch that. ⁓ But from a direction perspective, of course, we will keep on investing in performance. There’s actually a lot in the next release that makes it faster than investing in security. For example, we do a big push to make our end-to-end encryption better. There’s a big effort for the last release and then of course, just the functionality and usability of the system because…

needs to be fun to use it and these are basically the main areas.

Josh Bressers (28:19) Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I actually, have one last thing. I just looked at my notes and I totally, I totally miss this is the digital sovereignty index, which is something I found while, while trolling through your website. Like I, I love this site. Like this is so cool. You, you, you’re basically what? Using Shodan to find how much like self hosted infrastructure every country has. And it’s not great. say.

Frank (28:32) Yeah.

Mmm.

Yeah, this was an interesting small project we did last year. basically we are looking for services hosted in the IP space of the different countries. And it doesn’t need to be self-hosted, right? It can also be company offering a service or university offering a service or something. But a service that’s running in this IP space of a country. And then we can basically count, okay, here in…

whatever, Austria, we have so many services running and Switzerland so many services. And then you basically put this into relation with the size of the country. And then we calculate this index, it’s basically say it’s like, hey, how much of the essential services and data is in the country and how much is outside the country basically. That’s the idea behind it.

Josh Bressers (29:35) And you have

a nice map. can click the map and it’s, it’s a lot of red on that map, but that’s all right.

Frank (29:38) Yeah,

I mean, I’m a big fan, a huge fan of decentralization. I the Internet was built in a decentralized way. Everybody could host a mail service, everybody could host an FTP server, host a website wherever they want. This is how the Internet was built. Nowadays we have just more more centralized services that only exist once by some gigantic corporation. This is at the end what we want to change.

Josh Bressers (30:05) Yeah, which yeah. And I love that. Right. I think you’re right. That is how the internet was built. And I would love to see it. I guess here’s what, here’s how I will end it. And I would value your thought on this is if we talk two years ago or maybe three years ago and you would have told me, ⁓ we’re going to centralize the internet. Like we’re going to give the power back to individuals and organizations and stuff. I’d be like, this guy’s off his rocker.

Like no way. And now we’re talking and I’m like, holy crap. Like, I feel like this is 100%, not just the right thing to do, but it is totally happening right now.

Frank (30:41) Well, thanks a for your optimism, but of course we are still the absolute underdog. I don’t know how our market share compared to Microsoft is like 0.01 % or something. don’t know. So it’s like there’s still a long way to go. But more and more people understand that this is actually a good thing to be in control of your data.

Josh Bressers (30:43) Hahahaha

Yes.

Right, right, for sure.

Yeah. No, yes, I agree. You have a, it is a long, long path. We all have to travel for this, but I also feel like there’s something in the air that wasn’t in the air before. And there’s again, a multi-day conversation as to why that is. But all right. All right, Frank. ⁓ I love it. guess I’ll let’s close it down by just tell us, you know, what, what are the next things you want us to do?

Frank (31:11) Yep. Yes.

Josh Bressers (31:26) to either get involved or give it a try or what’s next for us as listeners to this conversation.

Frank (31:32) Well, there a lot of things you can do. Of course you can watch our nice announcement video to get an impression of what the next step actually is. I would recommend for everybody for the first step. Then of course you can play with it. You can just download it and install it wherever you want. If you know a little bit about Docker, then it’s easy as you said.

Josh Bressers (31:52) Honestly, you don’t even need to know about Docker. Like you give us the command. You just need a machine with Docker and it’ll work.

Frank (32:01) It’s true. But I don’t know if I would recommend someone to actually host Nextloud if they have absolutely no clue about the internet or what. Yeah, but…

Josh Bressers (32:07) Okay, that’s fair. I’ll agree with that, but you can at least try it out.

Frank (32:13) Yeah, exactly. just the next recommendation would be to try it out. And then of course, if you’re a developer, we are super open, welcoming community. As I said, thousands of people, can help giving feedback, like helping with translations or some fixes or whatever. We also, as Nextcloud we attend a lot of events, so we will also be at a lot of the…

Source events in the US, outside the US this year. yeah, just come by and say hello and everybody’s welcome.

Josh Bressers (32:45) Awesome. Frank, I want to thank you so much for the time. I learned a ton. This is a great conversation. And I can’t wait to have you back someday once we’ve, you you’ve taken over the world. I look forward to it.

Frank (32:56) Yeah, let’s see here. Thanks a lot for your time. Thanks for the invitation.