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Comment by lachiflippi | Hacker News Reader

Why should Germany be wasting public money on a private company who keeps shoveling more and more restrictions on their open-source-washed "community" offering, and whose "enterprise" pricing comes in at twice* the price MS365 does for fewer features, worse integration, and with added costs for hosting, storage, and maintenance?

* or same, if excluding nextcloud talk, but then missing a chat feature

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It makes a lot of sense for Germany to keep some independance from foreign proprietary cloud providers (Microsoft, Google); Money very well invested imo. It helps the local industry and data stays under German sovereignity.

I find your "open-source-washed" remark deplaced and quite deragoraty. Nextcloud is, imo, totally right to (try to) monetize. They have to, they must further improve the technical backbone to stay competitive with the big boys.

Could you expand on what restrictions they have placed on the community version?

At the very least their app store, which is pretty much required for OIDC, most 2FA methods, and some other features, stops working at 500 users. AFAIK you can still manually install addons, it's just the integration that's gone, though I'm not 100% sure. Same with their notification push service (which is apparently closed source?[0]), which wouldn't be as much of an issue if there were proper docs on how to stand up your own instance of that.

IIRC they also display a banner on the login screen to all users advertising the enterprise license, and start emailing enterprise ads to all admin users.

Their "fair use policy"[1] also includes some "and more" wording.

[0] https://github.com/nextcloud/notifications/issues/82

[1] https://nextcloud.com/fairusepolicy/

> their app store, which is pretty much required for OIDC, most 2FA methods, and some other features, stops working at 500 users

How dare they. I just want to share photos and calendar with the 502 people in my immediate family.

This may come as a surprise to you, but there are organizations, for example German municipalities, that have more than 500 users but can't afford to start pumping tens or hundreds of thousands per year into a file sharing service. Nextcloud themselves recognize this and offer 95%+ discounts to edu, similar to what Adobe, Microsoft, and Git[Hub,Lab] are doing.

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