[tahoe-dev] introducing Least Authority Enterprises

[Zooko Wilcox-OHearn]

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 zooko at leastauthority.com or to info at 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