Reactivating This Group

[Paddy Foran]

According to Google Groups, there are 24 people subscribed to this group. I feel pretty bad, because that's 24 people who have expressed interest in contributing to the development of this project, but couldn't due to a lack of organization and process for contributing.

We've been toiling away at the latest release of 2cloud in private Github repositories, discussing things quietly amongst ourselves, for about a year now. There are a lot of reasons we chose to do this, but the main reason was out of fear. We weren't sure what challenges we faced, and we wanted the chance to try things when our failures would be private.

As of today, we're changing that. We've strayed from our dedication to the spirit of open source, even if all of our released software has been available for anyone to use under the MIT license. We've strayed from the collaborative, community-guided service we set out to be. It has taken us too long to do it, but we're returning to those roots today. All of our Github repositories have been set to public save one---the repository we use to deploy servers. When we can spend the time to separate the sensitive information (passwords, private keys, etc.) and create a deploy system, that too will be public. Our goal is to open source every aspect of our infrastructure and management, while keeping only the sensitive information private. We still aren't sure about the challenges we're going to face, and we're pretty sure we're going to fail now and then, but that's part of the bargain when you make something.

Furthermore, every decision we make or choice we face when writing the software will be posted about here. I'm going to follow this post will a post outlining the current status of the project, our current thoughts, goals, and ideas. Everyone is encouraged to chime in and debate these changes. Everyone is encouraged to send in pull requests to get code merged into the project. We claim this is an open source project, and we're finally going to let it grow up into a true open source project.

I just wanted to let the 24 of you know this ahead of time: this list will start generating emails again shortly. Most of them will be from me. I have no desire to invade your inboxes or inundate you with email from a list you joined months ago and forgot about. If you are no longer interested in this, feel free to unsubscribe; we'll understand.

Thank you all for your interest. I hope we can give you the community you deserve, and I hope you'll choose to be part of it.

Thanks,

Paddy Foran