Ten years ago, I did something most founders would call unthinkable: I walked away from the company I had built and forked my own project, code, and all. That decision became Nextcloud, today one of the world's largest self-hosted collaboration platforms, used by tens of millions of people and thousands of organizations, from schools to governments.

In this keynote, I'll share the honest story behind that fork: why company structure, investor incentives, and community governance can drift apart, what it takes to realign them, and the lessons for anyone building on open source — lessons the Drupal community knows well.

But the story is bigger than one company. Open source has become a geopolitical issue. Across Europe and beyond, governments are asking who controls their data, their infrastructure, and increasingly their AI. I'll talk about how we've worked with policymakers, initiatives like EuroStack, and public sector organizations to turn "Digital Sovereignty" from a buzzword into procurement decisions, legislation, and real migrations away from Big Tech — and why open source communities like Drupal and Nextcloud are the foundation this movement is built on.
The fork was never just about a product. It was about who technology should serve. Ten years in, that question matters more than ever.

Biography:
Frank Karlitschek is a long time open source contributor and former board member of the KDE e.V. He founded ownCloud in 2010 and the successor Nextcloud in 2016 to create a fully open source and decentralized alternative to big centralized cloud companies. Frank was an invited expert at the W3C to help to create the ActivityPub standard. Frank has spoken at MIT, CERN, Harvard and ETH and keynoted many conferences. Frank is the founder and CEO of Nextcloud GmbH. He is also a fellow of Open Forum Europe and an advisor to the United Nations regarding Open Source. Frank won the European SFS Free Software Award 2023 and the Acteurs du Libre European Award 2023.