Today I have very exiting news to share. Effectively January 1 2016, my company hive01 GmbH has been bought by Blue Systems GmbH. hive01 GmbH runs the network of opendesktop.org sites like KDE-Look.org, KDE-Apps.org, GNOME-Look.org, Qt-apps.org and all the other 30 websites

As you might know I have founded the website network 15 years ago and was running it since then. Over the years the websites and the company grew significantly with the help of a great team and two VCs. Today they are one of the biggest and most important resources in the open source space with over 60 million page view a month, 350.000 registered users and over 150.000 uploaded apps and artwork.

In the last 4 years the network of sites didn’t get the love and attention they deserved, both considering how important they are for the open source ecosystem and the potential they have. The reason was, of course, that I was very busy with ownCloud.

I was looking for a new owner for a while and got interesting offers from the publishing and advertising industry. But I decided to go with Blue Systems because they are an open source minded company and I trust them to do the right thing with the websites, community and source code.

I realize millions of users on these websites might be wondering what this means for them. Blue Systems will keep on running and maintaining all the websites so that users shouldn’t notice any change. I even know they’ve got plans to improve things.

So I’m very happy that I found an agreement with Blue Systems and I think it is a great solution.

Best
Frank