ownCloud is currently doing a full rewrite called "ocis" which uses the go-micro stack. It allows us to focus on the business-logic of file-syncing while taking care of all the micro-service plumbing.
Disclaimer: I work for ownCloud.
Disclaimer: I work for ownCloud.
Stop trying to tell the river where to turn. It's already done.
There are multiple open-source file sync and share platforms. The reason is quite simple: There are multiple ways to implement a digitally sovereign file platform, and different needs call for different feature sets. ownCloud focuses on code quality, reliability and features that security conscious companies and institutions have come to expect. You do not have to like ownCloud, you do you. To your open standards point: I posted here because we use go-micro in our current rewrite, which is by the way under the Apache 2.0 licence. We cherish and embrace open standards and open source, so I don’t exactly get what you mean by “more open standards”. But to answer your first question: we did not die because we were and are in good health, still had and have work to do and, most importantly, have oodles of happy users and customers to serve.
OpenOffice, for example, has basically done nothing but maintenance. It's not something to be proud of.
What? Absolutely! Maintenance is hard. Maintenance of old/big/complex systems is even harder. Maintaining something for so long with substantial user base is definitely something to be proud for. Everything doesn't need to constantly add features in order for people to be proud of their work. Just adding bug/security fixes once you feel something is feature-complete is also OK.
Not sure where this constant need for changes is coming from, but each to their own. But to look down on people who are doing maintenance is a real shitty thing to do.
I hope you don't work together with others in open source, as they'll also feel saddened by your comment that they should not be proud unless they work on new features.
My point was, nothing but maintenance is OK too, and sometimes even favorable, depending on what you're working on.
As an example, the software behind HN is pretty much maintenance-only for as long as I've been lurking here. While there is bug fixes sometimes, I don't think there been any new features the last few years. You don't think the people running the HN software should be proud of that?
That's a dangerous fallacy. Only innovation and no maintenance is not the way economies grow. Go ahead and take a deep breath -> https://aeon.co/essays/innovation-is-overvalued-maintenance-...
> [...] opted for more ethics where their fork showed them the way [...]
Forking isn't necessarily a bad thing. From a free market perspective it incentives competition, and per my respect, the original company owes nothing to a forked business out of the original codebase. In this particular example both projects took different directions, why would the fork have to take a higher moral grounds in respect to the original?
After almost a decade of HN I have to say that's one of the most un-HN comments I have ever read.
Additionally we invested a lot in a unparalleled test-suite in this space which runs against the old and new codebase.
How could we innovate further?