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Announcements,
Morals on July 24th, 2008, by Ben.
No comments.Today marks what we believe to be a very important step in progression of the open web. Earlier this morning at OSCON, David Recordon of Six Apart announced the launch of the Open Web Foundation.
The website’s own short summary, I think, does the best justice in describing its goals:
We love that idea.
We really believe that, for some time, all future innovation will be directly imposed on the web, or will somehow be web-related. There was this same period just a decade or two ago on the desktop. Unlike what happened with most of the important protocols and formats that came out of the desktop innovation period, I think there’s a really good chance that most of what comes out of this period of innovation will, indeed, be open.
This is why the Open Web Foundation is so important — there needs to be a place accepted by the “major players” in the Internet space (Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, MySpace, SourceForge and Six Apart are among the founding members) that is simply there to incubate and further develop these specifications, as well as keep them open and make sure that there are no Intellectual Property issues in using these specifications in your own products, regardless of whether those products are proprietary or open source.
When the website launched, we were quick to jump and apply. I am pleased to say that Squish Software is now a contributing member of the Open Web Foundation. We hope to contribute wherever we can with whatever we can, as well as make sure that all applicable open web standards are used in our products.
We look forward to what comes out of the Open Web Foundation. The future could be very, very exciting (and very, very open).
In
ServeBlast on July 20th, 2008, by Ben.
No comments.Since we launched, a lot of people have approached us saying that they could replicate what we do with Automatic Website Backups through some scripts and Amazon’s S3 service.
There are a number of critical issues you could point at as to why you’d choose us over S3, but perhaps the most critical is proven uptime. Since we began internally monitoring our services a few months ago, we have seen no downtime of production servers.
We built our infrastructure from the ground up to be scalable to an infinite number of nodes in any data center anywhere in the world, and we stand by it vigorously. Similarly, we built our infrastructure around the goal of storing lots and lots of data (in the form of .tar.gzs) and distributing lots and lots of data (as new backups are uploaded and downloaded).
Beginning earlier this afternoon, Amazon S3 went down, and brought with it not only the data behind many startups (as S3 is very commonly used to store user uploaded images and videos for various web services), but the location and core system behind many people’s website and personal computer backups. Amazon S3 also went down back in mid-February.
Of course, the odds that during this exact time you’ll desparately need a backup taken or need to be able to access backups are fairly low, but we don’t take such an important necessity lightly.
What if you did need to download a backup, or if you were depending on the fact that a backup was supposed to be taken?
While some may see a price benefit to working with S3, for many things (backups included), downtime isn’t an option — regardless of who your provider is.
On a side note, we’re very careful about when we make changes to our infrastructure, regardless of the cause (optimizations, new features, etc.). We have an internal window from approximately 25 after the hour to 55 after the hour to make any changes necessary, so we don’t interrupt any ongoing backups.
Although this blog post is relatively short, the importance of it can’t be overstated.
When we launched Squish Software, we had goals of “open software.” We realized that openly supporting free and open source software, while not contributing back with our own software, was sort of hypocritical.
So today we’re very excited to announce that we’re beginning to phase out ‘open software,’ and phase in true free software. Within the next few weeks, we will place ServeBlast Automatic Backups under the GNU AGPLv3. We’re presently obligated to not release the core of BlastHoster under the AGPLv3, but hopefully by the end of the summer, we will be rewriting BlastHoster’s core from the ground up and moving it to a custom infrastructure. At that point, we will be able to put BlastHoster under the AGPL.
Backup Hosting and Temporary Hosting will almost certainly be available under the AGPL at the time of launch.
We are currently putting together a new section of our website for developers interested in playing around with our code. In the mean time, we’ve replaced our Open Software website section with a new Free Software section — be sure to visit it if this interests you.
We’ve been in contact with the Free Software Foundation, and they have been answering some legal questions we’ve had. We’re extremely grateful for all of the work they’ve done in the past and are continuing to do. We agree with their beliefs that web services under the AGPL only increase innovation due to the very strong nature of the AGPL’s copyleft, and we look forward to working with them in the future.
More on this process as it goes forward!
