Frank Karlitschek


Frank Karlitschek is a German open source software developer living in Stuttgart, Germany.
Karlitschek argues on his blog that "Privacy is the foundation of democracy." He says that people should have a basic right "to control their own data in the Internet age."

Free software

Karlitschek is a KDE contributor since 2001 when he mainly worked in web community and artist team. He is a member of the KDE e.V. since 2003. In summer 2009 he was elected as a board member and vice president of KDE e.V.
In 2001, Karlitschek started KDE-Look.org. At Akademy 2008, Frank presented the vision of the Social Desktop for the KDE project. Karlitschek further started the Open-PC and the Open Collaboration Services projects. He is also a cohost of RadioTux the biggest German Linux Podcast. In 2012 Karlitschek started the User Data Manifesto initiative.
Karlitschek gives keynotes at conferences like LinuxCon,
Latinoware,
openSUSE Conf,
and Akademy.

ownCloud

In 2010 Karlitschek started the ownCloud project during a CampKDE keynote
and released the version 1.0 in June 2010.
He was the project leader and maintainer.
In 2011 Karlitschek co-founded ownCloud Inc. to offer an enterprise version of ownCloud. He served as the CTO and oversaw the product development and community relations.
In April 2016 Karlitschek left ownCloud Inc.

Nextcloud

In June 2016, five weeks after leaving ownCloud, he started Nextcloud, a fork of ownCloud.