The Foundation is dedicated to building a sustainable ecosystem around ownCloud in order to accelerate technology development and industry adoption.

The ownCloud Foundation aims to provide developers, users and the entire global ecosystem with a set of shared resources to grow the footprint of public, private and enterprise ownClouds, as well as assisting developers to produce the best decentralized cloud platform in the industry.

Like the ownCloud software, individual and contributor memberships within the ownCloud Foundation are free and open to all. Organisation members pay a yearly membership fee to help fund the Foundation and are expected to participate in the ownCloud community through technical contributions or community building efforts.

The Foundation will be managed by a board of seven members, including representatives from AARNet, CERN, KonicaMinolta, Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung Göttingen (GWDG), ownCloud, GEANT and ETH-Zürich.

The ownCloud Foundation forms the basis for sustaining the ownCloud project as an open source solution operated and further developed by the community. At the same time, it acts as a forum that brings the professional developer community and system administrators who use ownCloud in daily operations closer together. Development and operation find a permanent platform in the Foundation, which meets the DevOps idea in the best possible way. This gives the community more freedom for creativity, helping to ensure the long-term independence of ownCloud.

“The huge community of contributors has made ownCloud the largest open source filesharing project in the world. It is in our best interest that all contributors find an open, developer-friendly atmosphere in order to promote the further development of ownCloud according to their ideas. The ownCloud Foundation guarantees this through independence and sustainability and thus gives the necessary impulses that make a real difference in the market,” says Tobias Gerlinger, CEO of ownCloud, about the official launch of the Foundation.

The activities of the ownCloud Foundation will focus on promoting and supporting all developments related to ownCloud, including further technical development, knowledge exchange and any community-related activities.

“The collection and intelligent usage of data is a key value in research and ownCloud is a major component of AARNet’s CloudStor storage service, which supports data sharing for than 50,000 Australian researchers. Being actively involved in the further development of ownCloud enables us to contribute to the project and to meet the evolving needs of the global research community.” Guido Aben, Director, e-Infrastructure Partnerships, AARNet and member of the ownCloud Foundation Board.

Find out more about the ownCloud Foundation