Inside XWiki SAS, we long upheld our commitment to independence, with shareholders exclusively comprising current and former employees. However, recognizing the importance of strong collaboration among major open-source projects in the EU, we're embracing a strategic shift through a symbolic investment in XWiki SAS from Frank Karlitschek, Founder and CEO of Nextcloud. Moreover, Nextcloud GmbH and XWiki SAS have signed a mutual resellers' agreement to provide their customers an easy way to purchase a complete solution from either vendor. This move aims to foster partnerships with a fellow EU open-source software product and promoting competitiveness against US-based alternatives while safeguarding, as always, software and data control.
Building on shared values
Our objective inside XWiki SAS remains the same—to create software that matters and makes a difference. How we do that is by keeping our open-source core, focused on privacy and knowledge management, with a commitment to transparency, user control, and alignment with our values. Both XWiki SAS and Nextcloud advocate for the empowerment of individuals and organizations to reclaim their digital sovereignty through collaborative, transparent, and fully open-source platforms.
A recent conversation between Frank and Ludovic culminated in December 2023 with a modest investment by Frank in XWiki SAS, symbolizing a deepening of our business relationship. This fits with the trend of the growing relation between XWiki and Nextcloud on some customer projects, in several formal alliances, and now a mutual reseller agreement, but also in the political space with both organizations pushing together for an open and free European market. A good example here is XWiki's support for Nextcloud's antitrust complaint about Microsoft to the European Union.
What this means for the XWiki community
XWiki and Nextcloud software are both rooted in community-driven open-source development and are committed to maintaining free, independent, and organically grown communities and products. Rejecting venture capital backing, we both prioritize long-term sustainability and community-building over short-term gains.
In alliance with Nextcloud, we share a common ethos centered on privacy and data control and we plan on working even closer together in the following years. This small investment is on one hand a sign of growing trust and partnership, and on another hand marks for us a significant step towards realizing our shared vision of digitally sovereign collaborative solutions in Europe. At the same time, both companies will continue to work indepedently as they did until now. Ludovic Dubost, Founder and CEO of XWiki SAS and CryptPad
XWiki has been maturing for many years into the robust and versatile knowledge management platform that it is today. We have been cooperating in various areas for some time now, and I am glad that I am able to formalize our ties a little further with this investment. Frank Karlitschek, Founder and CEO of Nextcloud
What's next?
We believe there is a bright future for digitally sovereign collaboration solutions in Europe and this is a step forward in bringing two leading projects in this space closer together. Join us on the road towards a more digitally sovereign future by following XWiki SAS on Mastodon, LinkedIn, X, Facebook, or through our newsletter and Nextcloud on Mastodon, LinkedIn, X, Facebook, Instagram, or through their newsletter, or read their blog about our collaboration. If you're looking for a great collaboration platform with powerful, integrated knowledge management, contact Nextcloud or XWiki sales to get started!
About XWiki SAS and Nextcloud
XWiki SAS is the top sponsoring company for the XWiki and CryptPad open-source projects, and we also offer services on top of these two products.
XWiki is an open-source wiki platform that offers extensive customization features, collaborative editing, document and files management, integration capabilities, and granular rights management. It is a flexible and scalable solution, with features for creating, organizing, searching, and sharing knowledge within teams and organizations, on-premises or in cloud.
CryptPad is an open-source online collaboration suite that provides secure and privacy-focused tools for document editing, real-time collaboration, and communication. CryptPad enables users to use and share rich text, spreadsheets, polls, presentations, whiteboard functions, forms, kanban, diagrams, and code/markdown without compromising the confidentiality of their data.
Nextcloud Hub is an open source, on-premises content collaboration platform with a strong focus on data protection. It offers document sharing, real-time editing, video conferencing, calendaring, mail and more across mobile, web and desktop interfaces.
Frank Karlitschek is a long time open-source contributor and privacy activist. He is former board member of the KDE e.V. and has initiated several initiatives over the years to make the internet more secure and more federated like the open collaboration services and the user data manifesto. He is founder and CEO of Nextcloud.
