It's nice to see Heinlein groups' activities see some more publicity.
They have been continuously chipping away at making OSS more suitable for business and government use-cases (from Big Blue Button to NextCloud). OpenCloud and OpenTalk are some of their current in-house developed efforts in this sector.
This was a nice surprise. It looks simple but it does the job. It allows me to put my pics and videos on my private cloud. My pdf also and search is fun. It allows me to create markdown docs too.
A simple docker install and you have your private cloud. Top!
It is not NextCloud. Nor it pretends to be. I like it, might keep this running and maybe put it to work.
Thanks.
Was this done because the performance of Nextcloud is poor? I have been using Nextcloud for a few years on my own (admittedly overkill) hardware and haven't had performance issues, but I am the only user.
> OpenCloud is based on a fork of the open source software ‘ownCloud Infinite Scale' (OCIS), whose components were co-developed by developers from the science organisation CERN and other active contributors. OpenCloud is now being further developed.. clear focus on data protection, interoperability..
> modern file-sync and share platform.. oCIS breaks down the old [PHP] ownCloud 10 user specific namespace.. makes the individual parts accessible to clients as storage spaces and storage space registries.. WebDAV based oc sync protocol to manage files and folders, ocs to manage shares and TUS to upload files in a resumable way. On the server side REVA is the reference implementation of the CS3 apis which is defined using protobuf. By embedding libregraph/idm, oCIS provides a LDAP interface to make accounts, including guests available to firewalls and other systems.
> [oCIS] first production deployment.. CERN IT department‘s storage team has engaged in UI, API and backend development with ownCloud for many years.. users have access to the underlying data repository containing 1.4 billion files and 12 petabytes of data.
> OpenCloud discusses the challenges that arise when proprietary products are discontinued or acquired by competitors.. examines a current case.. new company is likely to include over a dozen employees who previously worked on Infinite Scale for ownCloud.
It's file sharing with organizational features (shared directories, autz) and some value adds. They have integrated collabora online[0] for web office tasks and provide search on some indexable files (full-text + metadata).
There was a recent "why nextcloud feels slow' submission. Submission itself seemed off-course, to not really have analyzed the problem well (picked a pretty conventional a-priori whipping boy of bundle sizes). To me the clear winner in the comments was pointing out that there are massive waterfalls of fetching data to the client. https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/11/03/nextcloud-slow/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45799860
This data architecture problem burns you whether you are native or mobile, is the secret boss lurking in most application development. I wonder if OpenCloud is doing better than NextCloud with their middle-layers!
If you need a Docker to run what is essentially a webserver, I’m not surprised it will run slow.
In my stack software shipped with Docker are the most unreliable, opaque messes. Whereas bare metals are usually light, lean and sustainably maintainable, especially single executables.
If you have to do may round-trips to display a page after a UI action, and most round-trips involve hitting the storage on the server, the UI will feel slow sometimes.
100%. This person is a very specific anti-* hater, for something that was such a rampantly popular hatred 10 years ago. But the FUDites rarely bother with bona-fides, with real argument.
We should feel bad for them, those decoupled folks who needs help. It's sad pathetic and remarkable how these weird software enmities crop up, are let to grow and never addressed. Their time of their outrage being popular & hip fades but the disdain-without-argument sticks around.
Thankfully container hatred is a pretty tiny frakking force, of very disparate widely scattered eccentrics these days. But there's so many weird FUD proclivities folks can opt into, can find to stoke their lifelong hatreds against. Theres just so few warnings: such audience acuity is required to parse, realize the windmill tilting, & move along.
I understood that their point was not that Docker makes it slow, but that if it needs Docker to run, it probably needs a complicated environment which makes it slow.
I’m not using docker to deploy things because the things I’m deploying need a complicated environment, I’m using it because it’s an incredibly easy and consistent way to deploy things. It’s an immutable image that is highly convenient to distribute, update, and manage, which is pretty much the opposite experience of installing software on virtual machines.
Dropping a docker compose file into Portainer and I’m up and running with a new service in a few seconds. I’ve removed the overhead and spin up time of VMs, there’s no more running Chef/Ansible to do basic VM management for every single service I’m running, no more cookbooks/playbooks or manual SSHing to get software updated, no more minutes to hours of fixing configuration management that never seems to work the first time, no more bad in-place upgrade states, etc.
Good job to the authors. I have been waiting for something like that for years.
I just dislike the scripted languages as they are a mess to handle while docker is a resource waste, not to mention golang single statically compiled binary and speed of execution.
Authors, please think really well about:
- upgrade strategies (owncloud/nextcloud were a huge mess, for long time, currently looks that nextcloud is handling it well - I have upgraded it for 2 versions and it didnt break anything)
- what external dependencies you are using, make additional layer of OS abstraction to avoid incompatibilities between various linux distributions, freebsd and windows. There isn't a lot to handle differently but once you tie yourself to linux only, it is hard to add support afterwards (try to not call external binaries that you havent installed yourself, if you must, put it into compatibility layer). If you do this one right, people will port it to different environments, if you blow it, you will have to - or you wont.
- do not rely on docker "installation", presume that it is installed directly on the system and you wont go far wrong. Treat docker just as another system. Docker is going to make you become "lazy" to not think about vital details while developing.
- do check how to handle reverse proxies gracefully, this is something everyone forgets while for any serious environment, there will be nginx frontend
- dont support all the databases, pick one and stick to it, to support it really well, including backups, upgrades and versions
- sooner or later redis is going to be a must, think upfront
- make a backup system, backup before upgrades and be sure you can restore it if something goes wrong, including binaries, database,...
- make an installation/upgrade layer that doesn't depend on "run this sql script", have a well versioned database revision system that can get database from version "0.1" to "2.0" without breaking anything and migrate the data. There are hardly any database changes where database upgrade cant be handled with sql statements.
- think really well about external dependencies, dont pick it just as it is popular and you need one functionality. An example, recently I did a benchmark of 15 concurrent maps in go and the differences were huge where the fastest one was one that you can hardly find by searching while the author did things like aligning the structures with cpu cache, full of unsafe pointers etc., but beating the first selected "popular" map by 2x, and the worse by 15x+. Dont trust authors self promotion, measure it.
- try to not make it confusingly strange, you have the whole usage/administration well done with nextcloud, stick to it, dont reinvent what works, as for instance, sftpgo did and I hate every second using it.
- if something needs to be documented, think about how to implement it, in a way, that doesnt need to be documented. Over time those documented features become a huge burden for you and for users.
- please, if you dethrone nextcloud, dont become evil, like projects normally do. Get the money from where the money is (smb, corporations), spare the home users. :)
If it does webdav, it automatically does passwords. My password manager has otp anyway. Calendar's important, but I'm pretty sure that it (and contacts) are also just webdav.
Notes though... ouch. I can't find anything for that, there's no decent Notes client that does webdav natively.
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