[Owncloud] company/community relationship

[Frank Karlitschek]

Hi everybody,

in ownCloud we are in the very lucky situation that we have a healthy 
open source project and also a company that cares about the commercial 
aspects of ownCloud like providing services which make ownCloud relevant 
for bigger enterprises. 

This is a great symbiotic relationship. I´m involved in free software project 
for a long time and I think that having a company and an open source project 
in parallel that work closely together and complement each other is key if 
you want to spread ownCloud. It would be great if ownCloud could play a small
role in the federated web and decentralized web-services movement.

I wrote a short essay for Lydias book about the need to have a business model 
for an open source project a while ago. Month before that there was even the 
possibility to found an ownCloud company. The text is here if someone is 
interested: http://open-advice.org

So I think that we found a good balanced relationship between the community 
and the company. To be completely open and transparent with this, we created a
guideline document that describes how the relationship works. I haven´t seen a
similar document from other open source companies yet but I think it´s a good
thing to be completely open here.

There is nothing new here. It´s just a description of the status quo. We will 
put this on the website soon.

Please let me know if there are any questions. :-)



Frank


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Guidelines for the ownCloud community

Started in 2010 at the San Diego KDE event, the ownCloud community project started as a way to control your own data while sharing it. ownCloud, Inc. was created to carry on this mission, while also meeting the rising demand for commercial support from the ownCloud user community.

The ownCloud community consists of all people interested in the success of ownCloud - including all employees of ownCloud, Inc. All work together to build, support, promote and spread the use of ownCloud, as well as the idea of decentralized cloud services and an open Web.

- The ownCloud community is a friendly, innovative and open community of contributors and users. We help each other to have the best ownCloud experience possible.

- ownCloud, Inc. is a software company built around the ownCloud Open Source project and is fully committed to Open Source principles.

- ownCloud is developed as an Open Source project by all participants of the ownCloud community.

- All members of the ownCloud community understand that ownCloud Inc. can sell proprietary licenses for ownCloud to its customers. As in many Open Source companies, parts of the proceeds flow back into the ownCloud community, e.g. through sponsorships or employing ownCloud community developers.

- There will always be a standard ownCloud available under an OSI-approved Open Source license.

- ownCloud, Inc. may choose to develop proprietary enterprise extensions to ownCloud. Those extensions are optional, and will not be required to run standard ownCloud.

- The ownCloud community respects the ownCloud trademark usage guidelines, which explain usage options for the ownCloud trademarks.

- The owncloud.org website is centered around the ownCloud community, while owncloud.com promotes the offerings of ownCloud, Inc. All work together to promote the ideas behind ownCloud and to increase usage.