Series 8 Episode 7 – In this episode we have the pleasure of chatting with Jos Poortvliet from Nextcloud, the conversation meanders through the benefits of using Nextcloud, Open Source, Nextcloud Apps, user expectations , more under the hood tips and another epic Irish saying. Enjoy.
00:24 Wayne welcomes us to Series 8 Episode 7 from a sunny calm Bristol. It’s much the same in Kilkishen. Wayne introduces their guest, Jos Portvileet, co-founder and head of marketing at Nextcloud GmbH, the company behind the Nextcloud community. He’s a privacy activist and has been
active in the open source community for 15 years, in projects like KDE and
openSUSE. He lives in Berlin and is very frustrated he can’t tell much yet
about the announcements at the upcoming conference… But you can all tune in! Unfortunately, it’s quite dull outside for Jos, but at least the conversation is quite the opposite!
02:50 Jos tells us that he’s quite busy with upcoming releases and the upcoming conference. Wayne notes that the conference is all about Home Office this year. Jos tells us that NextCloud is a remote working organization by nature, so providing a Home Office solution comes naturally also. They’ve been working hard on improving video conferencing in Talk 9, with lots of bandwidth improvement measures and Jos tells us of many of the improvements in NextCloud 19. The guys talk about user’s expectations, and Jos jokes that we are already living in the future, giving GPSand modern CPU design as examples of the complexities involved in delivering tweets. Wayne tells us he’s quite happy living 3 years in the past with technologies, though Jos reminds him that means he’s still moving as fast, only three years behind. Jos hints at the explosion in technological advances 5G will bring.
16:50 Wayne asks Jos about his role in Nextcloud. Jokingly he tells us he talks alot while other people work! Nextcloud is building something people need, an ambitious, featureful, collaboration environment that concentrates on the user interface rather than the underlying infrastructure, using an email client without an email server as an example. Ease of use is really important to Nextcloudand they concentrate heavily on providing an integrated user experience to enable that and make them stand apart.
24:15 Wayne asks about the integration of Collaboraand OnlyOffice. Jos starts by saying they have just recently integrated Microsoft Office Online Server. He goes on to tell us that whatever they ship as default at the time will be the best integrated solution, which is currently Collabora. Jos tells us they like to support user choice, and the conference will include talks around third party app integration, including a talk on BigBlueButton. Nextcloud can be a solution to help prevent app sprawl.
31:25 Wayne asks Jos if Nextcloud instances are in many schools. Jos lists off the schools, including schools in the city of Bern and the Technical University of Berlin as examples. Jos talks about the power of monopoly and the fear of the unknown that stops people using Free and Open Source Software rather than stable user interfaces, and cites the Ribbon interface as an example of accepted change. Once the Technical University of Berlin adopted Nextcloud, many others followed. Jos goes on to describe the downfalls for organizations when using Open Source and Jos thinks organizations need to educate themselves and vendors need to help with that education and describes support contracts as a kind of insurance. Support contracts need to be with companies that include developers of the software.
44:05 The conversation turns to the most popular applications on Nextcloud. The default apps are among the most popular of course, and Talk is quite popular, along withText. Community apps including bookmarks and audio are mentioned as popular.
47:03 Wayne brings the conversation around to the much anticipated conference, and Jos tells us about the plan. The conference will take place in Berlin and the Saturday talks are going to be recorded and streamed live. The talks on Sunday will be prerecorded though there will be a live Q&A while the talk is happening, which is pretty cool.
50:35 Under the Hood – Jos gives us a great Under the Hood for KDE – Kmailhas a follow up reminder that he finds useful and he also likes the direction email clients are taking, especially the features offered by the HEY email client.
Mark’s Under the Hoods is Cory Doctorow’s Kickstarter for Attack Surface, the third of the Little Brother books. He can’t remember his second one so he passes over to Wayne. It’s been a long week for Mark…
Wayne’s Under the Hoods are firstly to tell us that OTA 13 has been released for Ubuntu Touch. Wayne uses lsblk -d -o name,rota. He finally mentions the DIY Maker School by Make from Humble Bundle.
58:17 Saying of the show – Mark was inspired by Jos and Michael Franti & Spearhead’s latest album “Work Hard and Be Nice” for this saying, and it is this: “Bad Shit Happens, but Good Shit Happens Too!”
Mark thanks Amiga Irelandfor their recent mention of the Binary Times on their podcast
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