Most of the OCIS team left to start OpenCloud, which is a OCIS fork. And it's hardware requirements are pretty tame. It's a very nice replacement for Nextcloud, if you don't need the Groupware features/Apps and are only looking for File sharing.
Actually, it's already been done by the former Nextcloud fork/predecessor. OwnCloud shared a big percentage of the Nextcloud codebase, but they decided to rewrite everything under the name OCIS (OwnCloud Infinite Scale) a couple of years ago. Recently, OwnCloud got acquired by Kiteworks and it seemed like they got in a fight with most of the staff. So big parts of the team left to start "OpenCloud", which is a fork of OCIS and is now a great competitor to Nextcloud. It's much more stable and uses less resources, but it also does a lot less than Nextcloud (namely only File sharing so far. No Apps, no Groupware.)
Thanks for sharing this, I've been wanting to look at private cloud stuff but it was all written in PHP. It looks like OpenCloud is majority Go with some php and gherkin, which is a step in the right direction.
I have OpenCloud working on my home server, and it features integration with the Collabora suite of software for office apps. Draw.io is also already supported.
They offer a Docker compose file that sets up Collabora for you, but I can't find anything info on other apps, let alone integration. Where can I see what they support?
You're right, it was my mistake. The docker compose file can set up Collabora for you and allows you to open documents from inside OpenCloud by opening the file in an embedded Collabora view. Likewise, Draw.io works in a similar fashion, opening a view to embed.diagrams.net. Underneath it's just hosting the files and offloads the operations to other apps. It's convenient, but not particularly sophisticated.
There are no "Apps". It's not a universal App platform like Nextcloud. It's just file sharing (and optionally a Radicale calender server via Environment Variable but without UI). There's optional plugins to open vendor specific files right in the browser.
OCIS does only a small part of why people deploy NextCloud. I have run it, it’s great, but it’s not a replacement for the full suite nor is it trying to be.
I found it confusing, too. In the detailed changelog it seems that some PRs for following remote users have been merged, but I assume it's not complete/usable, yet. So from what I understand, no new "usable" federation features made it to the v13 release. Please correct me, if I'm wrong.
Swiss/Danish/Finnish Mobile Payment alternatives like TWINT and MobilePay.
Also: physical lockers with PIN/Code instead of keys (in basically every country aside from Germany). It's just completely bonkers to me, that German train station lockers still use physical Keys EVERYWHERE.
I use mobilepay when paying online. Its quicker than the credit card.
But the service is owned by the greedy banks so it will probably end with me abandoning it because it will get too expensive when they have enough users.
I like the keys. The key has the locker number on it, so you don't have to remember anything. And there's no way to screw up setting the pin because of a language barrier, since there are basically no instructions needed for key lockers. FWIW the key lockers are more common in Japan as well.
I agree with you with regard to convenience, but what about security? For the application of railway station lockers, one can assume that they will be under CCTV or other monitoring. I am no expert in locks, but presumably an electronic lock, whilst perhaps less secure overall, is harder to break without obviously looking like one is tampering with it. This is in contrast to a conventional barrel lock, which can be picked with tools that look enough like keys not to arouse suspicion from a distance.
There’s probably an economy around those keys - people who lose them have to pay an (overinflated) deposit, some company is overcharging the locker owner for key replacements, etc. At every layer someone skims a bit of money, so nobody in power of changing the system is actually incentivized to do so.
I’ve been at HKUST in 2016, too. I must’ve been pretty close to that tent a couple of times. Very interesting read. I couldn’t have done it due to the crazy big spiders
Having some experience with both, I think they are quite different. N8n looks quite polished and seems primarily concerned about connecting pre-made blocks. There are custom code blocks (JS and Python only, with limited ability to import libraries), but it’s not something you’d use by default. I thinks it great for less-technical users when compared to windmill.
Windmill OTOH supports a bunch of programming languages for steps (Go, Rust, Python, TS, etc.) and seems to have a much more “code first” approach. Reusable blocks are more like code templates compared to n8n.
Hard to say which is better. I really like the ability in windmill to just write code for each step and it comes across more powerful, but it feels less polished and intuitive when compared to n8n.
I'm not ashamed to admit than n8n feels more polished. There are a few reasons:
- Our team was and is still much smaller. We were 5 for the first 2 years, we are now 10 (year 3), and are continuing to hire to follow our growth.
- They have been around for longer and mature for longer, more time to iterate. We have reached some level of maturity recently and are now spending more iterations on polishing rather than new features.
- Their surface area is smaller, windmill does A LOT and expose more for the better or worse.
n8n has done a lot of things really well and although we have a different audience, there is a lot to learn from what they did very well and we have the upmost respect for them. We have some overlap, but I think ultimately we strive in different kind of orgs and will cohabit rather than compete.
While you're here, may I ask something about Windmill? My impression of n8n is that it's similar to Zapier in the sense that it mainly focuses on linking pre-made integrations, while Windmill is more of a workflow engine like Temporal. But while I see on your landing page that Windmill also boast lots of integrations, clicking on any of them take me to a sort of community script sharing interface, where it's not really clear how fully fleshed out any of the integrations are.
Are these two things being wrongly compared to each other when they're actually meant for different purposes? Or is Windmill indeed a good point of comparison?
Windmill is also not fully open source; there are major sections of it powering central features that are not released as free software.
Also, they require a CLA with copyright assignment so they can reuse your contributions in nonfree software. It’s always shady when companies do this.
The open source parts of Windmill are partially Apache and partially AGPL; there are some of us who additionally regard the AGPL as nonfree (because it’s really a EULA).
> Also, they require a CLA with copyright assignment so they can reuse your contributions in nonfree software. It’s always shady when companies do this.
They sell a version of the software, of course they'd have a CLA. It's not shady, it's a prerequisite to be able to sell - because even if you assume no contributor will decide to retract their contribution later on, many of your customers will ask for guarantees that you fully own, control and can sell the code you're selling them
Yes, that’s why it’s shady. It expects the community to contribute to this free software project, only to use those contributions in nonfree software. It’s trying to leverage community efforts for private gain.
If you believe in the ideology of software freedoms, you don’t release nonfree software. It’s open source cosplay.
Linux is GPL and that hasn’t stopped anyone from adopting it.
> If you believe in the ideology of software freedoms, you don’t release nonfree software. It’s open source cosplay
Or, you believe in open source software, want yours to be available, forkable and even why not get community contributions, but you also want a full time job that allows you to eat? How much of the world's software wouldn't exist if we gatekept open source to a volunteer effort only?
Linux and Python the projects don't make any money. Various orgs that contribute to them and build off them do, but that's irrelevant.
WordPress mostly make money hosting, and are indeed a good example. Redis somewhat, but it wasn't going that well, hence their recent license changes.
> The choice is not “release only free software xor be commercially successful”.
There are vanishingly few companies that manage to pull off a successful (profitable) business off open source software they're developing, and most of them predate the rise of the hyperscalers that can just sell everyone your open source as a service. Can you think of any others?
Just to clarify.
The reason why you aren't saying N8n is open source because of its license right? I haven't read its license but it does seem to me to have quite some restrictions.
Typically when people say open source they mean that the source code can be used , modified and made public for any purpose. There is an organization called OSI that maintains a ratified list of licenses that are compatible with the ideals of the open source movement. Although the OSI has been compromised by the big cloud providers and no longer serves the public interest, the list can still be relied on as a good sign that the license you're looking at is open source.
iOS did boycott RCS for a long time in order to convince US teens to buy iPhones rather than Android phones (due to incompatibilities between iMessage and SMS, which are popular in the US). It worked. I think there was even some leaked internal email which admitted to doing this. The US antitrust agencies ignored it; there were no legal consequences for Apple. I believe Apple finally decided to add RCS support after EU legislators threatened to force their hand.
About a billion people use it every day, but they're concentrated in specific countries. I believe India is a major RCS user for instance.
Like Signal, it works fine, but you need your contacts to also use it. That's easy on Android (Google hosts an RCS server for people whose carriers don't) but carrier dependent on iOS.
RCS video calls and payments seem to be left unimplemented by Google.
