65 karma · joined October 10, 2008
Thanks for this.
I'm more curious as to how the latest release scales to multiple processors, given the additional MPSAFE advances they made.
* Make the front page simpler in content, richer in design/graphics:
In the front page, I'd put WHAT exactly is tarsnap (few words, like "Tarsnap is an online backup service for UNIX operating systems with emphasis on security" and avoid the "probably will compile" stuff, and WHY should someone use it instead of other products/solutions, in a few words. Drop the "start now" box and make a nice button instead that says "Start now with $5" or something simple like that.
Make a simple logo in GIMP, there are hundreds of tutorials for this.
Avoid listing the pricing in the front page, but make sure it is accessible from a nice viewable button. Use normal units, not "picodollars".
* Use a sans font. Serifs are nice, but seem "oldish" and are not the best fonts to describe a new product.
* I'd use blue and shades of grey as the dominant colors. Grey speaks "solid". I'd use other colors such as yellow,red etc. to achieve contrast to the buttons that might interest the visitor (pricing,documentation,legal etc)
Many,many people do not understand the GPL.
In my opinion, this is the major drawback of the GPL: It's complexity. I've read it a dozen of times and still I'm not sure about some corner cases.
This leads to
a) Programmers who are not willing to use it and prefer a much simpler license, such as BSD.
b) To people spreading misinformation about the GPL that already worsens this situation.
MySQL is an open-source PRODUCT (and can be bought as such). Postgres is an open-source PROJECT (and can't be bought, and will be around as long as there is a sizable developer pool).
http://www.jiaozhoujob.com/newsprint-995.html
EDIT: PostgreSQL also seems to take support very seriously. Their latest security advisory has a patch back to version 7.4, which was released in November 2003.
http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/7.0%20Preview.pdf
Database-wise, they should be still considered recent. PostgreSQL features impressive scaling there.
* Building a complete, final product with appropriate documentation, feature matrix etc.
* Building a nice and informative web page describing your product, it's features, your offerings, it's advantages/disadvantages etc.
(...or maybe you already have plans for all those after you finish beta-testing.)
Note that DTrace on FreeBSD can only be used for kernel-space probing, for the time being. Userland probing is expected in a future release.
For more information on why git was not chosen instead of svn for FreeBSD you can look at http://wiki.freebsd.org/VCSWhy
Again, each vc has it's uses, and nothing is merely a 'subset' of another.