Summary
Frank Karlitschek is a veteran founder and CEO based in Berlin with over a decade of experience building and leading open-source cloud platforms, best known for founding Nextcloud and previously ownCloud. He blends hands-on Free Software development with strategic leadership, serving on boards including the MariaDB Foundation and holding executive roles across startups and industry associations. Frank’s background spans product engineering, community stewardship (including a former KDE e.V. vice presidency), and company-building, giving him a unique ability to align developer ecosystems with sustainable business models. He is also an active open-source community builder and photographer who started openDesktop.org, reflecting a long-standing commitment to user-centric, privacy-respecting software. Notably, his career trajectory shows repeated patterns of founding, scaling, and stewarding projects that bridge grassroots communities and enterprise adoption.
11 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Computer Science at Universität Tübingen
English, German