Own your files with ownCloud

Why this conversation

Files are where an organisation’s data actually lives, and a file sync service decides who holds them. For anyone who runs systems and wants that data on hardware they choose, the question is whether a self-hosted service is simple enough to run and open enough to trust. At Open Source Summit Europe in Prague the host spoke with Giordana Fung, Open Source and Community Manager at ownCloud, about what ownCloud is today and how it is reconnecting with its community.

This is a short conversation, recorded on the Thursday of the conference. The story of the week is in Open Source Summit Europe 2026: who we met.

The first file sync, rewritten in Go

ownCloud, she says, was the first open source file sync and share, and it has been around for a while. It has been forked along the way; one of the forks people will know is Nextcloud, which came from the PHP version. The flagship product now is ownCloud Infinite Scale.

Infinite Scale is written in Go and ships as a single binary. It does not use a database: the metadata is written with the file. That, she explains, is what makes it fast and easy to install. The same software runs on a Raspberry Pi in someone’s closet for a home lab, on your own server, or scaled out on Kubernetes.

On resilience in a cluster she pointed to the components it relies on, NATS among them, and to backups, while saying openly that the Kubernetes side is not her own area of detail.

Sovereignty: you own the data

The case for it is sovereignty. You own the data and you choose the server, on premises or in any cloud you want, and you can mix and match. The data stays inside the perimeter of your organisation.

The project is completely open source under the Apache 2.0 licence. Nothing is gated and there is no open core: enterprise users run the same community edition, because there are no other editions. The aim, she says, is to make it as simple as possible both to use and to contribute back to. For organisations that need support, ownCloud works with a few key support partners, and is working out how to approach some larger customers.

Collaborative editing comes the same way. Remove a hashtag in the environment file and Infinite Scale works out of the box with Collabora Online, the open source document editing suite, so several people can work in the same document at the same time.

Back with the community

She is candid about the recent past. ownCloud went quiet towards its community for a while; she joined in March, the company apologised publicly and explained what had happened, and it is now re-engaging, including coming back to events.

As a thank you, an ownCloud contribution spotlight starts in January. Each month it highlights one contribution or group of contributions and rewards it with a 100-euro gift card or cloud credits, whichever is more useful. To start it off, anyone who contributes before 1 December can win a ticket to join the team at KubeCon, the next one being in Barcelona in 2027.

To try it, she points people to owncloud.com, to the community, and to her directly: she is happy to walk people through it.