ownCloud and Nextcloud devs might need to collaborate too

Dec 14, 2016 01:33 GMT  ·  By

On December 13, 2016, Nextcloud's Jos Poortvliet has revealed that the company behind the popular self-hosting cloud server forked from ownCloud is currently in discussions with the developers of the KDE Plasma desktop to deeply integrate Nextcloud.

It appears that back in July 2016, Nextcloud founder Frank Karlitschek and community manager Jos Poortvliet, along with long-time KDE developers Kai-Uwe Bergmann and Martin Gräßlin, gathered together in Stuttgart to discuss the steps they need to take for a deeper integration of Nextcloud into KDE Plasma.

"A feature that has been discussed is synchronization of settings, password and file metadata over cloud servers," said Jos Poortvliet in the blog post. "The fork of Nextcloud from ownCloud has brought about new questions regarding this topic: Will the Plasma team have to support two different systems?"

The answer to the above question would be that both ownCloud and Nextcloud systems should be actively maintained for KDE Plasma users, but it looks like the developers have discussed a unified client supporting the popular cloud implementations for file syncing, which means that ownCloud and Nextcloud devs need to collaborate too.

A unified client would offer support for both Nextcloud and ownCloud

The best way to achieve this goal would be for the KDE development team to create an Online Accounts module, allowing users to set up their Nextcloud or ownCloud accounts. The deeper integration of Nextcloud into KDE Plasma might bring many other goodies to the table, allowing users to sync tags, ratings, and comments.

It remains to be seen what effect this implementation of a unified client will have on the KDE PIM personal information management system of the KDE Plasma desktop environment when automatically setting up the calendar. If you'd like to contribute to this new project, the Nextcloud, ownCloud, and KDE devs are happy to have you. In related news, Nexcloud 11 is out!