[lug] ANNOUNCING Tahoe, the Lofty-Atmospheric Filesystem, v1.5

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn]

Folks:

Here's the new release of the secure distributed filesystem that I  
talked about at the May 2009 meeting.

Regards,

Zooko


The Tahoe-LAFS team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of
version 1.5 of Tahoe, the Lofty Atmospheric File System.

Tahoe-LAFS is the first cloud storage technology which offers security
and privacy in the sense that the cloud storage service provider itself
can't read or alter your data. Here is the one-page explanation of
its unique security and fault-tolerance properties:

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

This release is the successor to v1.4.1, which was released April 13,
2009 [1]. This is a major new release, improving the user interface and
performance and fixing a few bugs, and adding ports to OpenBSD, NetBSD,
ArchLinux, NixOS, and embedded systems built on ARM CPUs. See the NEWS
file [2] for more information.

In addition to the functionality of Tahoe-LAFS itself, a crop of related
projects have sprung up to extend it and to integrate it into operating
systems and applications.  These include frontends for Windows,
Macintosh, JavaScript, and iPhone, and plugins for duplicity, bzr,
Hadoop, and TiddlyWiki, and more. See the Related Projects page on the
wiki [3].


COMPATIBILITY

Version 1.5 is fully compatible with the version 1 series of
Tahoe-LAFS. Files written by v1.5 clients can be read by clients of all
versions back to v1.0. v1.5 clients can read files produced by clients
of all versions since v1.0.  v1.5 servers can serve clients of all
versions back to v1.0 and v1.5 clients can use servers of all versions
back to v1.0.

This is the sixth release in the version 1 series. The version 1 series
of Tahoe-LAFS will be actively supported and maintained for the
forseeable future, and future versions of Tahoe-LAFS will retain the
ability to read and write files compatible with Tahoe-LAFS v1.

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


WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

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

We believe that the combination of erasure coding, strong encryption,
Free/Open Source Software and careful engineering make Tahoe-LAFS safer
than RAID, removable drive, tape, on-line backup or other Cloud storage
systems.

This software comes with extensive tests, and there are no known
security flaws which would compromise confidentiality or data integrity
in typical use.  (For all currently known issues please see the
known_issues.txt file [4].)


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" [5]
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" [6] 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-LAFS works on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, Cygwin, Solaris, *BSD, and
probably most other systems.  Start with "docs/install.html" [7].


HACKING AND COMMUNITY

Please join us on the mailing list [8].  Patches are gratefully accepted
-- the RoadMap page [9] shows the next improvements that we plan to make
and CREDITS [10] lists the names of people who've contributed to the
project.  The Dev page [11] contains resources for hackers.


SPONSORSHIP

Tahoe-LAFS was originally developed thanks to the sponsorship of
Allmydata, Inc. [12], a provider of commercial backup services.
Allmydata, Inc. created the Tahoe-LAFS project and contributed hardware,
software, ideas, bug reports, suggestions, demands, and money (employing
several Tahoe-LAFS 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 found security flaws in Tahoe-LAFS (see
http://hacktahoe.org ). After discontinuing funding of Tahoe-LAFS R&D in
early 2009, Allmydata, Inc. has continued to provide servers, co-lo
space and bandwidth to the open source project. Thank you to Allmydata,
Inc. for their generous and public-spirited support.

This is the second release of Tahoe-LAFS which was created solely as a
labor of love by volunteers; developer time is no longer funded by
allmydata.com (see [13] for details).

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn
on behalf of the Tahoe-LAFS team

Special acknowledgment goes to Brian Warner, whose superb engineering
skills and dedication are primarily responsible for the Tahoe
implementation, and significantly responsible for the Tahoe design as
well, not to mention most of the docs and tests. Tahoe-LAFS wouldn't
exist without him.

August 1, 2009
Boulder, Colorado, USA

P.S.  Just kidding about that acronym.  "LAFS" actually stands for
"Lightweight Authorization File System".  Or possibly for
"Least-Authority File System".  There is no truth to the rumour that it
actually stands for "Long-lived Axe-tolerant File System".

[1] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/relnotes.txt?rev=3853
[2] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/NEWS?rev=4033
[3] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/RelatedProjects
[4] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/docs/known_issues.txt
[5] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/COPYING.GPL
[6] http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/COPYING.TGPPL.html
[7] http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/docs/install.html
[8] http://allmydata.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev
[9] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/roadmap
[10] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/CREDITS?rev=4035
[11] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/Dev
[12] http://allmydata.com
[13] http://allmydata.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2009-March/001461.html