Dear people of the tahoe-dev mailing list: David-Sarah Hopwood, Zancas Wilcox, and I are working on a startup to commercialize Tahoe-LAFS, named "Least Authority Enterprises".
https://leastauthority.com We're simply selling Tahoe-LAFS storage service backed on Amazon S3. "Tahoe-LAFS storage service" means, of course, storage of your ciphertext. Neither your plaintext nor your keys ever get anywhere near us. Since this, as far as I remember, the first time I've mentioned Least Authority Enterprises on this mailing list, let me quickly state a few things about governance, intellectual property, and our relationship to the open source project: * We employ myself, David-Sarah Hopwood and Zancas Wilcox. We don't employ any of the other major contributors to the Tahoe-LAFS project so far. I am the CEO of Least Authority Enterprises. * So far, we contribute all of the Tahoe-LAFS code we write to the Tahoe-LAFS project under the terms of its open source licences. This is the best thing to do for our customers, because it is good for the quality of our code, it allows the customers to have a thorough understanding of what happens to their ciphertext on the backend, and it gives our customers the best chance of continuity and support (even if our company were to go out of business). * The non-profit Tahoe-LAFS Software Foundation (Peter Secor, President and Treasurer) holds the rights to relicense the Tahoe-LAFS source code under different licensing terms. Whenever new contributors offer substantial patches to Tahoe-LAFS, the developers ask them if they would agree to give the Tahoe-LAFS Software Foundation the right to relicense their contributions under terms of its choice, and so far they've always unhesitatingly agreed. Least Authority Enterprises doesn't own any special privileges to the Tahoe-LAFS source code -- we at the company don't have any rights to do anything with it that you don't also have. * In the future, when LAE creates some new derived work of Tahoe-LAFS, we might exercise the right to withhold the source code of our derived work for up to 12 months. This is the same right that you, and everyone, also has, under the terms of the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/browser/trunk/docs/about.rst . We're not currently planning on doing that, but we could change our minds. * We haven't applied for any patents. We're not planning to. We could change our minds. If we ever offer any contributions to the Tahoe-LAFS project which are covered by any patent that we've applied for then as employees of Least Authority Enterprises we'll make that clear to the other developers and to you, the community of users. (Also, as members of the open source community, we wouldn't accept such contributions, unless possibly if there were some sort of licence which permitted all users of the open source software to exercise the patent freely or something.) * We welcome feedback from the community on our technology and business decisions. For anything topical to Tahoe-LAFS itself, you can post to this list and we'll reply, or for private matters you can write to zo...@leastauthority.com or to i...@leastauthority.com. * The in-development versions of our work are available to the public under the open source licences even before they are accepted into Tahoe-LAFS trunk, for example here: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1569 . Patches and code-review welcome! * The service itself is currently open to all customers who are willing to alpha-test it. Just sign up on the web site and be prepared to tolerate a few rough edges and to chat with us about how you like it, what you use it for, and what you want out of future versions of the product. The price is $1.00/GB/month. You pay only for what you use. (Discounts are available for full-time students, educational institutions, libraries, non-profits, and open source projects.) Thank you very much! I'm excited about having "hitched our wagon" to the Tahoe-LAFS project, both because of its technical excellence and because of the vibrant open source community around it. Thank you for being part of that! Regards, Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn CEO, Least Authority Enterprises https://leastauthority.com _______________________________________________ tahoe-dev mailing list tahoe-dev@tahoe-lafs.org http://tahoe-lafs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev
