[Owncloud] Information for OC-developers

[Jan Niggemann]

Dear developers,

I'd like to point you to some discussions on the owncloud forum.
Please read these comments by different users:
"I wish to point out my dissatisfaction (....) For me "stable release" 
= production mode without blocking bugs" [1]

"We considered buying the enterprise plan of owncloud because it did 
sound soooo good. However we wanted to test the community version first 
and we are very dissatisfied as well - looking forward to use an other 
system than owncloud." [1]

"Sorry, but there were (and still are) a lot of bugs I've posted on the 
bugtracker site (and also in the forums and the mailing list). But all 
of them have been ignored. One is still alive since v3.0.1 and would be 
very, very easy to fix." [2]

"owcloud 4.0.0 was a complete failure ..." [3]
"My mistake was to move to 4.0.0 that was official release May 22, 
2012.... today is june 03 and still owncloud still provide the link for 
4.0.0" [3]

It was already discussed here if the project should be moved to github. 
That would IMHO be a good idea, as the widespread use of the platform 
would lead to more contributions in the form of patches and pull 
requests. But IIRC someone pointed out that the non-free nature of 
github didn't match the ideals of owncloud... :(

I see it this way: Owncloud has a chance to be a killer application for 
a lot of people. But poor documentation, (unfixed) bugs and a crappy 4.0 
release are already chasing people away, see the comments above. If you 
spend a lot of time on the forums you feel the bad mood people are in...

Too may unsatisfied users lead to a fork, a fork splits the developers 
and the community, both projects lose their pace, ...
None of us users wants that and quite likely the developers don't want 
that either.

This mail is not meant to discourage the team, I wish owncloud all the 
best and I try to support it as good as my time permits!

But, developers: How do you plan to tackle the problems OC has from 
your users point of view?

[1] http://forum.owncloud.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2769
[2] http://forum.owncloud.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2742
[3] http://forum.owncloud.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2752