Nextcloud's Open Source Collaboration Suite Challenges Microsoft Dominance

Frank Karlitschek, founder and CEO of Nextcloud, has built a successful open source collaboration suite despite employing just 170 people across 30 countries. This growth is remarkable given that Nextcloud's platform is used by tens of thousands of civil service desktops in Germany, the French ministry of education runs it for 400,000 staff, and Amnesty International Spain has hosted its own infrastructure on it for over a decade.

Karlitschek grew up with computers and knew he wanted to work in the industry. He taught himself to code by borrowing books from the library and contributing to the KDE Linux project, which drew him in with its collaborative nature. However, he noticed that talented contributors would join as students, make significant contributions, and then quietly leave once they graduated or started families.

This experience led Karlitschek to ask if there was a way for people to pay their bills by doing open source work. He eventually answered this question himself when he rebooted his ownCloud project in 2016 as Nextcloud, choosing the Affero General Public License (AGPL) that makes every line of code open and available for modification.

Nextcloud's growth has been rapid, with demand materializing faster than expected. The company grew from zero income to profitability within six months, and by April 2018, ITZBund had put the software through a formal public tender and made it available to 300,000 civil servants across the Bundesverwaltung.