[tahoe-dev] not-the Tahoe 1.3.0 Release Announcement

[zooko]

Okay folks, this obviously isn't ready, but you can see what it is  
going to look like.  I'm excited about releasing Tahoe-1.3.0 and  
telling the world about it.  Please read over this announcement and  
test out the current trunk and report any bugs before the 1.3.0 release!

not-actually-ANNOUNCING-yet Allmydata.org "Tahoe", the Least- 
Authority Filesystem, v1.3

We are pleased to announce the release of version 1.3.0 of "Tahoe", the
Least Authority Filesystem.

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

This filesystem is encrypted and distributed over multiple peers in
such a way it continues to function even when some of the peers are
unavailable, malfunctioning, or malicious.

Here is the one-page explanation of the security and fault-tolerance
properties that it offers:

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


This is the successor to v1.2, which was released July 21, 2008 [1].
This is a major new release, adding a repairer, an efficient backup
command, support for large files, an (S)FTP server, and more.

See the known_issues.txt file [2] and the NEWS file [3] for details.

In addition to the many new features of Tahoe itself, a handful 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, and oh probably more but I might be
forgetting some because it is way too late at night.


COMPATIBILITY

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

Tahoe v1.3 is fully compatible with Tahoe v1 branch.  v1.3 clients
produce files which can be read by clients of all versions back to v1.0
(unless the file is too large -- greater than 12 GiB with default
configuration).  v1.3 clients can read files produced by clients of all
versions since v1.0.  v1.3 servers can serve clients of all versions
back to v1.0 and v1.3 clients can use servers of all versions back to
v1.0 (but can't upload large files to them).

This is the fourth release in the version 1 series.  We believe that
this version of Tahoe is stable enough to rely on as a permanent store
of valuable data.  The version 1 branch 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.


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, provided by
the remaining computers.  You can also share your files with other
users, using a simple and flexible access control scheme.

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

This software comes with extensive unit tests [4], 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 [2].)

This release of Tahoe is suitable for the "friendnet" use case [5] --
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"
[6] for the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2.

You may use this package under the Transitive Grace Period Public
Licence, version 1.0.  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" [7] for the terms of the Transitive Grace Period
Public Licence, version 1.0.

(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 which have a Python interpreter and a C/C++
compiler.  Start with "docs/install.html" [8].


HACKING AND COMMUNITY

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


SPONSORSHIP

Tahoe is sponsored by Allmydata, Inc. [13], a provider of commercial
backup services.  Allmydata, Inc. contributes hardware, software,
ideas, bug reports, suggestions, demands, and money (employing several
allmydata.org Tahoe hackers and instructing them to spend part of their
work time on this Free Software project).  Also they distribute
customized t-shirts just for some of our favorite security testers.  We
are eternally grateful!


Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn
on behalf of the allmydata.org team
February 11, 2009 (XXX HOPEFULLY)
Boulder, Colorado, USA

[1] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/relnotes.txt?rev=2789
[2] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/docs/known_issues.txt
[3] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/NEWS
[4] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/Dev
[5] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/UseCases
[6] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/COPYING.GPL
[7] http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/COPYING.TGPPL.html
[8] http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/docs/install.html
[9] http://allmydata.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev
[10] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/roadmap
[11] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/CREDITS?rev=2677
[12] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/Dev
[13] http://allmydata.com