When it comes to open source (and, I imagine in pretty much every other issue) John Kozubik puts his money where his mouth is.
His offsite backup business, rsync.net (which I use and can highly recommend) has just launched the 2007 Code Bounties which is a fantastic way to create pots of cash attached to issues that the OS community feels need resolving. The listed pots are:
- Vmware 5.5 on FreeBSD
- Updating Duplicity and establishing a maintainer
- Working Unison support and long options support in scponly shell
- FreeBSD UFS2 problem resolution and standardised UFS2 stress testing
- Outstanding rsync feature set
As well as just wanting to mention a generally great idea, I wanted to send some linkage to rsync.net–in particular i wanted to mention a service I use which is the Geo-Redundant Filesystem.
The rsync.net philosophy is partly to protect your data (including low-level stuff like log data) from the prying eyes of the US or other governments. With a strong and flexible technology to support you, you are better able to make fair use of your freedoms.
You can store and publish information that your government might not want you to and you can circumvent onerous or restrictive interpretations of international law by any given state. In effect, with a geo-redundant file system, your information is, at least theoretically, never under one governments jurisdiction.
Of course, not living in Pyongyang, I have yet to test the sharp end of this feature in anger of course…