> and build a business as the premier support consultants without most of the original developer's startup costs
I think a real world example for this would be https://www.collaboraoffice.com/about-us/. And looking at it from the outside a positive example as well. At least I could not find any public beef between collabora and the document foundation (as the organisation behind libreoffice).
The one big plus for ucs is their samba server, but it's not the right choice if you are looking for an appstore to install apps from.
My personal favorite is Cloudron, as they have an app concept that only needs minimal human maintenance. And you could even combine it with an LDAP server like ucs for the user management.
Disclaimer: I work for Kopano. So if anybody reads this and has questions (not related to CERN) to ahead.
To answer your question: In europe there is currently a push to get more independent of (us) cloud providers. On top of that Cern has decided to embrace Open Source and companies supporting it, so in the end its not really about cutting costs, but getting more control.
My guess he is referring to https://github.com/nextcloud/server/pull/12693, which sits there as a pr for 16 days now (even though it was opened from one of the nextcloud core team afaik).
But it's open source, so if you can life without the automatic updates and the app store (install apps and updates manually through their cli utility) you can still install more apps.
Yes, they have been around for quite a while already, although I don't know if they have since updates their tech stack. Back when I played with it apps were formed from a bunch of bash scripts that simply automate install and uogrades. One nice thing though was the self made SSO module for nginx, so everything supporting http basic authentication could easily be integrated.
Nowadays I am running Cloudron for these use cases. Here the big plus in apps is that each app runs on docker and has to use the Cloudron docker vase image (with very few paths having write access), through that apps and the server can easily backed up and restored in exactly the same state (user, data, apps installed).
> Mattermost, Zulip and Rocketchat I have the least experience with; they all seem to be very popular with small groups of users but are complex to install and have very few clients.
At least for Mattermost I have to disagree with the "complex to install". All you need is a sql database (MySQL/MariaDB or Postgres), for production you then also should put a reverse proxy in front.
With "very few clients" you are referring to client software, correct?
The project has not been updated for quite some time by the original author, but luckily there is a quite active fork on Github (including a public demo):
https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli
I think a real world example for this would be https://www.collaboraoffice.com/about-us/. And looking at it from the outside a positive example as well. At least I could not find any public beef between collabora and the document foundation (as the organisation behind libreoffice).