Dear People Interested in the Tahoe-LAFS project: Allmydata.com is responsible for the creation of Tahoe. Allmydata.com was my employer and also Brian Warner's for the last several years, and the company, under Peter Secor's leadership, asked me and later Brian, Rob Kinninmont, Mike Booker, Zandr Milewski, Justin Boreta, and others to spend some of our work hours inventing a completely new storage platform and to release it to the public as open source! This gamble seems to have paid off, as the resulting open source software now supports all of allmydata.com's customers securely, reliably, and at low cost.
Now allmydata.com is focussed on serving customers and keeping costs down. While the company will continue to fix bugs in tahoe and in the other open source software that their customers rely on (tahoe- w32-client, tahoe-iphone-client, tahoe-webdrive, etc.), it will not continue to fund major new development of tahoe. The fledgling open source project is kicked out of the nest and has to learn to fly on its own. I'm actually not too worried about the future of Tahoe. I obviously love it so much that I'll end up hacking on it, at least evenings and weekends if not full-time. Hopefully other folks will get into a similar groove. There's actually reason to believe that open source projects which *don't* have a single major corporate backer can flourish more than those that do. If that is true, I guess it is because people feel more responsibility for contributing to the project themselves instead of waiting for The Corporation to do it, and they feel like they have more control over the direction of the project. On the other hand, Tahoe could wither and die. That's life when you get kicked out of the nest. Strategically, what I most want for Tahoe is to get a second major user. Allmydata.com is a major user -- they rely on Tahoe heavily and are very good about expressing their needs in the form of specific trac tickets and use cases and so on. But we need two users, so that we don't over-focus development on the needs of one user. I think Shawn Willden's backup app might turn out to be the second major user. Anyway, I'm looking for new job opportunities! I love freedom and open source, high-quality engineering, friendly people, and most of all I love the idea of making the world a better place than we found it. Please write to [email protected] if you're interested in hiring me. I answer all e-mail so if you don't get a reply that means your mail was accidentally deleted as spam so please try again. Thanks to all of the users and contributors and thanks to allmydata.com for their generous and public-spirited sponsorship of Tahoe's inception. Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn Boulder, Colorado _______________________________________________ tahoe-dev mailing list [email protected] http://allmydata.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev
