[tahoe-dev] draft release announcement for Tahoe 1.4.0

Mon Apr 6 20:24:15 PDT 2009

Folks:

The next release announcement will look something like this.

--Zooko

DRAFT announcement for:
ANNOUNCING allmydata.org "Tahoe", the Least-Authority Filesystem, v1.4

The allmydata.org team is pleased to announce the release of version
1.4.0 of "Tahoe", the Lightweight-Authorization Filesystem. This is the
first release of Tahoe which was created solely as a labor of love by
volunteers -- it is no longer funded by allmydata.com (see [1] for
details).

Tahoe-LAFS is a secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant filesystem.  All
of the source code is available under Free Software, Open Source
licences.

This filesystem is distributed over multiple peers in such a way the
filesystem continues to operate correctly even when some of the peers
are unavailable, malfunctioning, or malicious. Users can easily share
files with each other, using a simple and flexible access control
scheme.

Here is the one-page explanation of Tahoe's unique security and
fault-tolerance properties:

http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/docs/about.html

This is the successor to Tahoe-LAFS v1.3, which was released February
13, 2009 [2].  This is a major new release, adding garbage collection
XXX a repairer, an efficient backup command, support for large files,
an (S)FTP server, and much more.

See the NEWS file [3] and the known_issues.txt file [4] for more
information.

Besides the Tahoe core, a crop of related projects have sprung up,
including Tahoe frontends for Windows and Macintosh, two front-ends
written in JavaScript, a Tahoe plugin for duplicity, a Tahoe plugin for
TiddlyWiki, a project to create a new backup tool, CIFS/SMB
integration, an iPhone app, and three incomplete Tahoe frontends for
FUSE. See the Related Projects page on the wiki: [5].

COMPATIBILITY

Tahoe v1.4 is fully compatible with the version 1 series of Tahoe.

Files written by v1.4 clients can be read by clients of all versions
back to v1.0.  (Unless the file is too large.  Files greater than about
12 GiB -- depending on the configuration -- can't be read by clients of
v1.2 or older).

v1.4 clients can read files produced by clients of all versions since
v1.0.  v1.4 servers can serve clients of all versions back to v1.0 and
v1.4 clients can use servers of all versions back to v1.0 (but can't
upload large files to them).

This is the fifth release in the version 1 series.  We believe that
this version of Tahoe is stable enough to use as a permanent store of
valuable data.  The version 1 series of Tahoe will be actively
supported and maintained for the forseeable future, and future versions
of Tahoe will retain the ability to read files and directories produced
by Tahoe v1 for the forseeable future.

The version 1 branch of Tahoe is the basis of the consumer backup
product from Allmydata, Inc. -- http://allmydata.com .

WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

With Tahoe, you can distribute your filesystem across a set of
computers, such that if some of the computers fail or turn out to be
malicious, the entire filesystem continues to be available, thanks to
the remaining computers.  You can also share your files with other
users, using a simple and flexible access control scheme.

Because this software is new, we do not categorically recommend it as
the sole repository of data which is extremely confidential or
precious.  However, we believe that erasure coding, strong encryption,
Free/Open Source Software and careful engineering make Tahoe safer than
common alternatives, such as RAID, removable drive, tape, "on-line
storage" or "Cloud storage" systems.

This software comes with extensive unit tests [6], and there are no
known security flaws which would compromise confidentiality or data
integrity.  (For all currently known issues please see the
known_issues.txt file [3].)

This release of Tahoe is suitable for the "friendnet" use case [7] --
it is easy to create a filesystem spread over the computers of you and
your friends so that you can share disk space and files.

LICENCE

You may use this package under the GNU General Public License, version
2 or, at your option, any later version.  See the file "COPYING.GPL"
[8] for the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2.

You may use this package under the Transitive Grace Period Public
Licence, version 1 or, at your option, any later version.  (The
Transitive Grace Period Public Licence has requirements similar to the
GPL except that it allows you to wait for up to twelve months after you
redistribute a derived work before releasing the source code of your
derived work.) See the file "COPYING.TGPPL.html" [9] for the terms of
the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence, version 1.

(You may choose to use this package under the terms of either licence,
at your option.)

INSTALLATION

Tahoe works on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, Cygwin, and Solaris, and
probably most other systems.  Start with "docs/install.html" [10].

HACKING AND COMMUNITY

Please join us on the mailing list [11].  Patches that extend and
improve Tahoe are gratefully accepted -- the RoadMap page [12] shows
the next improvements that we plan to make and CREDITS [13] lists the
names of people who've contributed to the project.  The wiki Dev page
[14] contains resources for hackers.

SPONSORSHIP

Tahoe was originally developed thanks to the sponsorship of Allmydata,
Inc. [15], a provider of commercial backup services.  Allmydata,
Inc. created the Tahoe project, and contributed hardware, software,
ideas, bug reports, suggestions, demands, and money (employing several
Tahoe hackers and instructing them to spend part of their work time on
this Free Software project).  Also they awarded customized t-shirts to
hackers who find security flaws in Tahoe (see http://hacktahoe.org ).
Thank you to Allmydata, Inc. for their generous and public-spirited
support.

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn
on behalf of the allmydata.org team

Special acknowledgment goes to Brian Warner, whose superb engineering
skills and dedication are primarily responsible for the Tahoe
implementation, and largely responsible for the Tahoe design as well,
not to mention most of the docs and many other things besides.

April 7, 2009
Boulder, Colorado, USA

[1] http://allmydata.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2009-March/001461.html
[2] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/relnotes.txt?rev=XXX
[3] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/NEWS ? rev = XXX
[4] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/docs/known_issues.txt
[5] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/RelatedProjects
[6] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/Dev
[7] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/UseCases
[8] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/COPYING.GPL
[9] http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/COPYING.TGPPL.html
[10] http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/docs/install.html
[11] http://allmydata.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev
[12] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/roadmap
[13] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/CREDITS?rev=XXX 2677
[14] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/Dev
[15] http://allmydata.com