Hi James: I'm mindful of avoiding Project Xanadu's fate -- prolonged ambitious design, but failure to actually implement and deploy to the benefit of real users. Also, I've contributed to a couple of ambitious failures myself: Mojo Nation and Mnet.
Tahoe-LAFS already has a solid anchor to save it from this fate: it already has a substantial number of users who complain when it doesn't do what they expected and who request new features. They request short-term, not-too-ambitious features like faster upload and better charset encoding support. Also, we're committed to full backwards-compatibility in important dimensions (data, API, network protocol, cap). This doesn't mean we're not ambitious. Just wait til you hear about my ideas for a global decentralized currency! :-) But for now, we appear to be making slow but steady progress on adding small features like #778 and #607 while maintaining excellent reliability and code quality. It remains to be seen whether our progress will be fast enough, or whether something else will arise to satisfy people who could have used Tahoe-LAFS. If that happens, then I hope Tahoe-LAFS at least leaves a legacy of impressing into people's minds that provider-independent security is possible. Project Xanadu was a failure at giving people tools they could use, but it was a success at spreading valuable ideas that later took root in projects like Tahoe-LAFS. I hope we can do at least as good. By the way, we need help. Kevan Carstensen's contributions over the summer were a real boon, and we need more! If you can read code, please review patches [1]. If you can write code, please look at "tickets tagged as 'easy'" [2]. In any case, please use Tahoe-LAFS and complain about it! :-) Regards, Zooko tickets mentioned in this email: http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/778 # "shares of happiness" is the wrong measure; "servers of happiness" is better http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/607 # DIR2:IMM [1] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/PatchReviewProcess [2] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/query?status=!closed&order=priority&keywords=~easy _______________________________________________ tahoe-dev mailing list [email protected] http://allmydata.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev
