ownCloud's Community Continues to Expand

Last week marked the release of ownCloud 7 Community Edition, the new version of the ever popular open source file-sharing and storage platform for building private clouds. As The Var Guy noted: "The biggest update that makes the software stand out from other cloud services is a server-to-server sharing feature, which allows users of one ownCloud cloud to share files with those on a completely separate instance, without having to use file-share links."

Now, the founder and leader of the ownCloud project, Frank Karlitschek, has released some interesting numbers on the ownCloud community.

According to Karlitschek, ownCloud has had nearly 57,000 commits made by more than 550 contributors, currently developing ownCloud at a speed of about 1,500 commits (changes to code) per month. "This makes ownCloud one of the largest open source teams in the world -- in the top 2 percent of all project teams," he claims.

 Karlitschek added the following:

"The ownCloud sync clients alone had close to 6,000 commits made by 59 contributors, giving the clients the same performance, ease of use and polish as any consumer-grade file sync and share client. Beyond code contributors, including roughly 70 who contribute regularly, more than 4,000 people submitted bug reports and feature requests, more than 900 have closed issues and more than 6,500 participate in discussions around issues and feature requests."

"These code contributors represent more than 10 countries, but ownCloud also has been translated by the community – at least partially – into more than 70 languages, 32 of which are fully translated."

The statement also notes that in the past year more than 300 developers have contributed new code to ownCloud. 

OwnCloud has been getting a lot of attention for its flexibility, and because interest in private clouds is on the rise.

Among recent additions to the plattform, ownCloud Documents now lets users convert Word documents quickly and edit them with ownCloud, after which they can save them back to Word format.  If you're interested in checking out the new Community Edition, you can find out more here and watch a video highlighting new features.