ANNOUNCING Tahoe, the Least-Authority File System, v1.6

The Tahoe-LAFS team is pleased to announce the immediate
availability of version 1.6 of Tahoe-LAFS, an extremely
reliable distributed key-value store and cloud storage system.

Tahoe-LAFS is the first cloud storage system which offers
"provider-independent security" -- meaning the privacy and
security of your data is not dependent on the behavior of your
cloud service provider. Here is the one-page explanation of its
unique security and fault-tolerance properties:

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

Tahoe-LAFS v1.6.0 is the successor to v1.5.0, which was
released August 1, 2009 [1]. In this major new release, we've
added deep-immutable directories (i.e. permanent snapshots),
greatly increased performance for some common operations, and
improved the help text, documentation, command-line options,
and web user interface. The FUSE plugin has been fixed. We also
fixed a few bugs. See the NEWS file [2] for details.

In addition to the core storage system 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 Hadoop, bzr, duplicity, TiddlyWiki, and more. See
the Related Projects page on the wiki [3].


WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

With Tahoe-LAFS, you distribute your filesystem across multiple
servers, and even if some of the servers fail or are taken over
by an attacker, the entire filesystem continues to work
correctly, and continues to preserve your privacy and
security. You can easily and securely share chosen files and
directories with others.

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 is developed under thorough unit tests, and there
are no known bugs or security flaws which would compromise
confidentiality or data integrity under normal use. (For all
currently known issues please see the known_issues.txt file
[4].)


COMPATIBILITY

This release is fully compatible with the version 1 series of
Tahoe-LAFS. Clients from this release can write files and
directories in the format used by clients of all versions back
to v1.0 (which was released March 25, 2008). Clients from this
release can read files and directories produced by clients of
all versions since v1.0. Servers from this release can serve
clients of all versions back to v1.0 and clients from this
release can use servers of all versions back to v1.0.

This is the seventh 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.

In addition, version 1.6 improves forward-compatibility with
planned future cap formats, allowing updates to a directory
containing both current and future caps, without loss of
information.


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, bandwidth, and thank-you gifts to
the open source project. Thank you to Allmydata, Inc. for their
generous and public-spirited support.

This is the third release of Tahoe-LAFS to be created solely as
a labor of love by volunteers. Thank you very much to the
dedicated team of "hackers in the public interest" who make
Tahoe-LAFS possible.

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

January 31 2010
Boulder, Colorado, USA

[1] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/relnotes.txt?rev=4042
[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