ANNOUNCING Tahoe, the Lofty-Atmospheric Filesystem, v1.5

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
