5 ms·

Someone should just clone Tarsnap, run it as a business, and compete with Colin. He's in it for the fun and hobby, not the money and no one can change that in h

Someone should just clone Tarsnap, run it as a business, and compete with Colin. He's in it for the fun and hobby, not the money and no one can change that in his personality. If anyone feels that a company can be doing something better but refuses to do it better, then compete with it. People keep trying to "fix" Colin instead of doing the entrepreneurial thing and competing with him. He can't be fixed because there's nothing "wrong" with him. That's like telling Good Will or the Salvation Army to change their pricing. If you want a for-profit department store then start your own Walmart. If you want a better backup service like Tarsnap then clone the thing and do it better.

thaumaturgy 13y ago
Tarsnap is trustworthy partly because of Colin's reputation, and you can't clone that. Colin's an unfathomably smart, pretty reasonable dude. It feels wrong to assume that he's in this for the religion of it, or that no argument exists that's convincing enough to change his mind. For the same reason, "fixing" seems like the wrong verb here.
miles932 13y ago
Better, why compete? Just wrap him! Put up a better marketing site, sell packages, and pass the actual traffic back to Colin's servers. Volia!
- StavrosK 13y ago
  That... is interesting.
- vbit 13y ago
  It's not easy to wrap tarsnap. If you own one tarsnap account, how do you split that up into multiple accounts? You'd end up writing code for account management and authorization (not written by colin). Also, you can't provide the guarantees you want. You could hire 24 hour tech support but will they be able to troubleshoot colin's servers if they are down and he is sleeping? Update: another business idea for Colin. Keep tarsnap as-is but license the server code for a fee so others can run a business as proposed.
atmosx 13y ago
What the OP don't understand is that there are services like that already (i.e. [1]). You want something more drobxy but supposedly secure?! Go for SpiderOak!!! Plenty of solutions around you could even buy Amazon S3 or Glacier storage yourself, make a gpg and use dump/tar/whatever-utility-you-like encrypt and upload them yourself using a script (or set of scripts). [1] http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/ http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/
- merijnv 13y ago
  The difference is, I trust Colin. Aside from djb he's one of the few people on this planet I would trust to write crypto/security software and get it right. SpiderOak? Only heard about them because they're "hip" on here, given the state of technology in the average startup, I wouldn't trust them with my data ever.
  - atmosx 13y ago
    So you want the hip part of Spider-oak and the quality of TarSnap. That's fine to ask, but these things very rarely play well together. PS. Let's not be harsh on SpiderOak though, I never used it for backup purposes and haven't read about any security breaches or privacy concerns about it anyway.
akavel 13y ago
As to "just clone Tarsnap", up till now I thought that only the client app is open-source, isn't that so? If yes, then I believe it's not even "just clone"?
- hyperpape 13y ago
  I believe that the website mentions open source contributions, but that the entire client is not open source.

thaumaturgy 13y ago

Tarsnap is trustworthy partly because of Colin's reputation, and you can't clone that. Colin's an unfathomably smart, pretty reasonable dude. It feels wrong to assume that he's in this for the religion of it, or that no argument exists that's convincing enough to change his mind. For the same reason, "fixing" seems like the wrong verb here.

miles932 13y ago

Better, why compete? Just wrap him! Put up a better marketing site, sell packages, and pass the actual traffic back to Colin's servers. Volia!

StavrosK 13y ago
That... is interesting.
vbit 13y ago
It's not easy to wrap tarsnap. If you own one tarsnap account, how do you split that up into multiple accounts? You'd end up writing code for account management and authorization (not written by colin). Also, you can't provide the guarantees you want. You could hire 24 hour tech support but will they be able to troubleshoot colin's servers if they are down and he is sleeping? Update: another business idea for Colin. Keep tarsnap as-is but license the server code for a fee so others can run a business as proposed.

atmosx 13y ago

What the OP don't understand is that there are services like that already (i.e. [1]). You want something more drobxy but supposedly secure?! Go for SpiderOak!!! Plenty of solutions around you could even buy Amazon S3 or Glacier storage yourself, make a gpg and use dump/tar/whatever-utility-you-like encrypt and upload them yourself using a script (or set of scripts). [1] http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/ http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/

merijnv 13y ago
The difference is, I trust Colin. Aside from djb he's one of the few people on this planet I would trust to write crypto/security software and get it right. SpiderOak? Only heard about them because they're "hip" on here, given the state of technology in the average startup, I wouldn't trust them with my data ever.
- atmosx 13y ago
  So you want the hip part of Spider-oak and the quality of TarSnap. That's fine to ask, but these things very rarely play well together. PS. Let's not be harsh on SpiderOak though, I never used it for backup purposes and haven't read about any security breaches or privacy concerns about it anyway.

akavel 13y ago

As to "just clone Tarsnap", up till now I thought that only the client app is open-source, isn't that so? If yes, then I believe it's not even "just clone"?

hyperpape 13y ago
I believe that the website mentions open source contributions, but that the entire client is not open source.