project status?

[Miles Fidelman]

On 9/1/17 4:57 PM, dawuud wrote:

>> Hi Folks,
> Hi!
>
>> I haven't seen much activity on this list of late, and the last release was
>> back in January - which leads me to wonder the current status of Tahoe-LAFS.
> Yes, I agree that the Tahoe mailing list is rather quiet for long streches of time.
> Of course Tahoe-LAFS is still actively being developed and you can easily see
> all of this activity on the master branch on github:
>
> https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs/commits/master
>
> I'm sorry if I got the wrong idea from your e-mail... but it sounded like you
> are asking if the project is abandoned.

Well, maybe.  I saw the activity on github, but nothing on the list from 
Zooko or any of the other key people - which kind of gave me pause.

>
>> On a broader note, I wonder about how many people/organizations are using
>> Tahoe-LAFS in a production mode (beyond Least Authority).  I'm very
> That's a very good question. Companies besides leastauthority; I'm not so sure.
> I heard of at least two... but I don't recall the company names. Maybe they'll
> chime in and write to this mailing list thread to say they exist.
>
>> interested in maturity, readiness for prime time, the largest installation
> The project has been around for a while. 10 years? I am not the best person
> to answer these questions... so I hope Brian Warner or someone else can tell us
> how long the project has been around. I know there's been stable releases for many years.
>
>> currently in operation, and any scaling/stress testing that's been done.
> I don't know what you mean by scaling testing. But maybe someone else will chime
> in with some insight.

It seems to be the ONLY dispersed file system that's stood the test of 
time, but I'm kind of interested in how it might work at "Internet 
scale" - anything about the largest installations, usage, etc.  As well 
as measurements/modeling that might talk about bandwidth and cpu 
requirements as a function of users/files/etc.

>> (In the wake of CrashPlan going out of the consumer backup business, I'm
> I've never heard of CrashPlan before. Is their software open source?
> I wasn't able to find any source code. I feel very strongly that proprietary
> crypto software shouldn't be taken seriously because of lack of peer review.

CrashPlan is pretty much the best of the commercial backup services 
around.  But.. they recently decided to focus on the small business 
market (at a higher cost/year/desktop).  There's some transition time 
available, and a deep discount if you switch to the small business 
service (which makes sense for me) - but it brought me back to thinking 
that it's time to start thinking about large scale, persistant, 
storage-as-a-utility, that isn't tied to a single vendor.  A federation 
of Tahoe-LAFS providers strikes me as a possible way to go.

>
>> starting to think that it's time for somebody to set up a very-large-scale,
>> cooperative, persistent storage fabric.  Tahoe-LAFS sure looks like the
> By fabric I guess you mean infrastructure? I love the idea of storage infrastructure
> allowing a great many people to share files. It's a very fun idea that we haven't yet
> implemented. There's some ideas floating around about how to do this.

See above.

There have been things like it before.  The ARPANET had the 
Datacomputer.  Oceanstore & Publius were nice experimental storage 
networks that were secure, dispersed, and persistent - but, without a 
financial model that supported ongoing operations. Seems like time to 
make another stab at it.  The business model is that hard part (think 
about building a federated ecosystem for a new protocol, and how to pay 
for it) - it's only been done a few times - email, the web, DNS, USENET.

Cheers,

Miles

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra