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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • The guy who founded owncloud (Frank), sold it to american venture capitalists. When Frank didn’t like how the VCs were planning to enshittify Owncloud, he forked the project and moved it back to Germany from Boston. The American VCs saw this, realized they couldn’t exploit the software anymore, so they sold Owncloud to a group of German businessmen. Ironically for Frank there are now two german owned non-VC backed cloud software based on the same code. But yeah they’re taking different strategic paths for growth.




  • I’m using it and it’s pretty good. It’s arguably too feature rich though. I mean that in every right click you have like 20 options. It’s overwhelming.

    Also I use the cloud sync and every few days something doesn’t sync properly when you’re typing and it asks you to re-sync. And so you have to wait a minute while it re-builds the entire index. It doesn’t happen often but when it does it’s annoying.




  • Between the two I recommend OnlyOffice because it has better export compatibility, a PDF editor, seamless interchange between their desktop, mobile, and web versions, and a nicer UI. You’d only need LibreOffice if you’re doing very advanced document formatting or very niche scientific or financial formulas. LibreOffice has been around for a lot longer than OnlyOffice so its got more edge use cases figured out. Onlyoffice is more modern and IMO feels like a smoother experience with the UI.


  • I don’t think there are any sustainable fully open source software out there that are used for consumers besides the ones that reach a critical mass of support. And even then as a software gets more complex the more there are sacrifices to the FOSS model. You should read the boad discuss forum for TDF/Libreoffice. Collabora is trying to nerf the free version of TDF and the board reps are in this toxic battle with Collabora board reps. Eventually FOSS software needs a stable revenue stream besides donations.