Ex-ownCloud devs seek new start at OpenCloud – Owncloud owner wants to sue

On January 22, the Heinlein Group announced that the source code of the data exchange platform ownCloud Infinite Scale (oCIS) will be further developed as OpenCloud in a new subsidiary of the same name. The new company is likely to include over a dozen employees who previously worked on Infinite Scale for ownCloud. The ownCloud owner Kiteworks, on the other hand, is threatening legal action, even though oCIS is open source software.

Background: In recent years, ownCloud has renewed its technical foundation. While ownCloud 10 remained in the portfolio as a PHP product, an almost complete rewrite of the code in Go and under an Apache 2.0 license was launched in 2018. The new approach, called Infinite Scale, works with microservices and is therefore more performant and scalable. Infinite Scale is intended as a data exchange platform for enterprise customers and is used in the BayernCloud school, for example.

Employees lacked perspective

In November 2023, Kiteworks Europe AG acquired ownCloud –, a subsidiary of the billion-dollar American security provider Kiteworks LLC. Together with the file-sharing company Dracoon, ownCloud thus gained a foothold in the DACH market, as Kiteworks announced.

After the takeover, the management style changed, former ownCloud employees told heise online in confidence. And there was a lack of concrete commitments from Kiteworks regarding the long-term development of oCIS. They had worked on oCIS out of conviction, believed in its future as an open source product and also valued the joint team. For this reason, the decision was made to gradually make a new start with OpenCloud, according to several employees.

The Heinlein Group, to which OpenCloud belongs, is probably best known as the operator of the email provider mailbox.org, but also develops OpenTalk, an open source video conferencing solution. Heinlein wants to market both OpenTalk and OpenCloud to companies, the education sector, research institutions and public authorities as a secure and independent digital infrastructure. "We are proud that several developers with many years of expertise have approached us and are contributing their wealth of experience to a free open source solution," says Managing Director Peer Heinlein.

Kiteworks threatens legal action

Kiteworks, on the other hand, is less than enthusiastic about – a closed group of developers who are now using the same code in their own company that they already developed under Kiteworks or ownCloud? For Kiteworks, this smells like poaching, so the company is going on the offensive: in an interview with heise online, Kiteworks CEO Jonathan Yaron stated that he intends to sue Peer Heinlein under German and US law: "We love open source, but we won't let anyone steal from us".

The bone of contention here is the framework that Kiteworks claims to have made available to the oCIS developers over the last year and a half. Although the code is undoubtedly open source, the design, product management and everything surrounding the code came from Kiteworks. He points out that there is not only a public GitHub repository for oCIS, but also a private one – which cannot be verified at this point. In any case, OpenCloud insists on forking only the public oCIS code.

In addition, the employees would have had full access to Kiteworks internals. It would be outrageous for them to flow out to another company in such an agglomeration – Yaron speaks of 15 employees. In contrast, Peer Heinlein expressly emphasizes that he would never have actively arranged for a change of employees. Only employees from the oCIS team would have applied to OpenCloud – so that OpenCloud should be available in the first quarter of 2025. However, Kiteworks CEO Yaron is confident for ownCloud customers: they are currently hiring new employees and the development and support of the oCIS approach within ownCloud is not under threat.

This is now the second time that the ownCloud code has been forked: In spring 2016, co-founder Frank Karlitschek left the company together with a dozen developers and founded Nextcloud. There, they further developed the PHP code and incorporated many additional functions.

(kki)