Our first Platinum sponsor isn’t just any company — it’s Nextcloud, a true open source champion. Here’s what that means to us.
Regular visitors to FOSS Force may have noticed over the past couple of months that ads for everyone’s favorite do‑it‑yourself cloud platform, Nextcloud, have been appearing on our site. There’s a reason for that — and no, it’s not because Nextcloud suddenly started spending big on Google ads. Instead, the Germany-based open source company became our very first Platinum sponsor, nearly two months ahead of the official rollout of our new tiered sponsorship program, which we’ll be announcing in about two hours.
“Critical reporting on free and open source projects is key to keep our communities and companies honest!” Jos Poortvliet, co-founder and communications director at Nextcloud said. “We are therefore very happy that we can support FOSS Force in their work.”
You might be wondering why we waited nearly two months to share the news. In hindsight, maybe we shouldn’t have. But we wanted to time the announcement to coincide with the sponsorship program rollout, which we had originally planned for July. Then one thing led to another — mostly tied to our first priority of covering open source news, even above the practical matter of keeping beans on the table.
We’re truly thrilled to welcome Nextcloud as our first financial partner — and especially as our first top‑tier Platinum sponsor. Why? Because Nextcloud is everything you could hope for in an enterprise backer. This is a company that doesn’t just pay lip service to open source; it makes open source the foundation of everything it does, and has since the day it started. In fact, when Nextcloud launched back in 2016 as a fork of ownCloud — which at the time was moving more toward an open‑core model — we covered the story.
In fact, Nextcloud fits our definition of a good corporate open source citizen so well that they were the first — and so far the only — company we approached about joining the planned sponsorship program. They came on board with little back‑and‑forth, and we couldn’t be happier.
What this means for Nextcloud — and for any company that sponsors at the top two levels — is that you’ll be seeing their cookie‑free, privacy‑respecting ads on our site, along with the occasional guest article from someone at Nextcloud. These articles will never be promotional pieces for Nextcloud products. We’ve both agreed that’s off limits. Instead, they’ll focus on broader issues important to the open source community.
If you’re wondering what these guest pieces look like, the first one — written by Nextcloud co‑founder Jos Poortvliet and published yesterday — introduces a new independent website called Is It Really FOSS. The site digs into how genuinely open various projects are, and where there may be a bit of sleight‑of‑hand.
We look forward to building a long partnership with Nextcloud — one that benefits both of us and, most importantly, the wider open source community.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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