Re-enforcing our Commitment to Free Software

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!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 3:22 pm and is filed under Announcements, Morals, ServeBlast. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.