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FileZilla Server 1.0 is out and you’ll love it! 14 Sep 2021 8:41 AM (3 years ago)

Back in Octobre 2019 we started developing a brand new version of the FileZilla Server, as we wanted to leave the technical debt of the old version behind us. Today I am proud to announce the public availability of the first stable release of the new version! Read below to learn more.

Originally we were aiming to ship a first version by the end of 2020. Eventually we started shipping a first release candidate by the end of June this year, though. It must be said that the first version comes with all the important features of the old one plus Let’s Encrypt native support and other great features are behind the corner (user impersonation, multi-platform support and more).

I wish to take the opportunity to publicly thank the Open Technology Fund for sponsoring the Let’s Encrypt feature and some of others to come. OpenCollective backers have been nice too, providing some financial support and a lot of encouragement. 

FileZilla Server is released under the AGPL 3.0 and it is freely available from the developer’s site download page. 

Give it a try, it is fast and reliable!

FileZilla Storj Labs Collaboration—4 Years later 29 Oct 2020 1:00 AM (4 years ago)

Four years ago I was head-down looking for a potential partner for FileZilla. We wanted to empower our users and bring more value to all our stakeholders. Given FileZilla’s unmatched ability to deliver file transfer capabilities, it was natural to look into the cloud storage space.

As FileZilla is distributed under a Free and Open Source license, it was natural to want to partner with a like-minded company or organization.

Much of my previous experience at the time was helping companies and organizations evaluate Open Source projects’ sustainability. So all I did was to analyse all the Open Source initiatives focusing on the cloud.

The candidates we discovered were limited to Filecoin, MaidSafe, Sia and Storj Labs. As you know, we decided to bet on the latter, despite the fact they were less funded than others. As explained in a previous post, the reason was simply they were a more mature Open Source project, and as such, it was well positioned to become the first Distributed Cloud Storage platform to leverage blockchain technology and deliver enterprise-grade service level agreements.

Did we do our homework right?

Let’s have a deeper look at Storj’s rivals. Filecoin ran an amazing ICO, and from a financial point of view they look like a great partner. On a more technical note, Filecoin went live just a few days ago, though.

MaidSafe isn’t in a better spot. Alphas got named fleming and baby fleming, yet despite the efforts and the advancements they are still far from realizing their promises.

Last but not least Sia, later renamed Skynet, is finally making interesting progress, like their recently launched SkyDB, and the company behind it (Nebolous) six years later is getting investors’ attention.

Years later it’s clear we made the right choice by sticking with the less-funded, technically advanced Storj Labs. By doing so we’ve been able to enable developers beta testing Storj since July 2017, and we never stopped updating the FileZilla-Storj integration. Eventually this summer we moved to a ready-for-prime-time phase releasing Tardigrade.

The FileZilla/Storj collaboration has been a win-win. Storj has been able to tap into our huge user base, while the FileZilla project has secured the necessary funds to keep investing in developing its client and server.

The FileZilla project and Storj Labs utilized each other’s audiences for a profit, empowering users with easy access to a secure distributed cloud. All stakeholders got their due share of value added, in a positive-sum game.

And we are still at the very beginning of all this, stay tuned for upcoming features unveiling the potential of our partnership by making super easy to share files confidentially with your peers!

About Storj Open Source Partner Program 30 Aug 2018 2:21 AM (6 years ago)

Yesterday Storj has launched the Open Source Partner Program, to help open-source projects to generate revenues.

I’ve been envisioning the importance of such opportunities from a long time now, and I’m really glad to see this happening now. I started writing about Open Source Sustainability and how partnering with a blockchain-based venture could help over a year ago.

SFSCon later kindly invited me to talk about how crypto 2.0 initiatives could help Open Source projects to reach financial sustainability and how to identify potential ‘twin projects’ to leverage respective technologies

As Storj board member I’m involved in helping them find more projects to join, feel free to contact me to know more.

Github Exodus is an Alternative Fact 8 Jun 2018 6:59 AM (6 years ago)

Having read few articles speaking of the mass exodus that Github’s acquisition by Microsoft might cause, I’ve had a look at how this is going, and it is safe to say movingtogitlab is not happening.

FileZilla Pro Customer Survey 2018 6 Jun 2018 8:46 AM (6 years ago)

We asked FileZilla Pro Customer how they like it, what new features they want and what is missing, you can see a recap of our findings in this video of the FileZilla Pro Video series.

Microsoft Doesn’t Love nor Hate Open Source, Just Needs it 5 Jun 2018 12:59 PM (6 years ago)

I’ve been writing of Microsoft Open Source Strategy much before the idea of Microsoft having one was accepted, years before Microsoft started contributing to Open Source projects, not even to mention hiring Open Source talents and advocates. Back in time I’ve been called biased, if not worse.

Yesterday’s news and people feedback – ranging from unconditional praise to a call to migrate away from Github on the very same day – brought me to write this blog entry on my take on the matter.

1. Microsoft is a platform company, and it aims to become ‘the platform company’;
2. Github is where the scene is, no matter how hard (and well) others try;
3. Developers are a scarce resource, so are Open Source developers.

Github from a long time is where smart companies look for talents, I bet Microsoft will do its best to nurture this amazing gathering of Open Source developers, for its own good. Remember Adam Smith:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

Microsoft will take very good care of Github, as it is aligned with its business objectives.

Notes from Silicon Slopes 2018 22 Jan 2018 5:42 AM (7 years ago)

Last week I’ve joined the Blockchain track at Silicon Slopes Summit to talk about how Open Source projects and Crypto initiatives could greatly benefit from each other. Before getting into my talk, I wish to acknowledge the great job that Silicon Slopes’ exec Director Clint Bett betts has done in preparing the event. Looking at the list of sponsors, the local unicorns and the amazing number of attendees, you get the impression that there is a concrete alternative to Silicon Valley in Utah. Personally I would definitely choose Utah over the Bay Area for a number of reason, ranging from the culture of belief to the beautiful mountains and surroundings, last but not least the cost of living.

Among my favorite talks I can name a few, starting from Stewart Butterfield of the Stack fame – who gave an inspiring speech talking about his experiences and takeaways in the context of entrepreneurial life – to Omar Johnson who shared few examples of amazing marketing strategies at Beats, as much as I enjoyed Ryan Smith of Qualtrics explaining the Utah way to entrepreneurship (build to keep).

I had the pleasure to share the stage with Walter De Brouwer, an Internet and technological entrepreneur, and my friend John Quinn, of the Storj team.

Marc Andreessen back in 2011 made clear that “Software is eating up the world”, and five year laters we learned that Open Source has won, but unfortunately it still unclear who is willing to pay for that.

Few years after the Hearbleed bug hit the news, making clear to everyone that the IT giants stand on feet of clay, it is still unclear when, how and if we’ll cope with the challenges that the digital infrastructure is facing. It must be said that the Linux Foundation’s Collaborative Infrastructure Initiative, tries to fortify part of that by providing funds to infrastructural projects that are recognised as key for the IT ecosystem at large. The Linux Foundation it is also home to other interesting initiatives in this space, like the TODO group, aimed at creating and sharing good practices, tools and programs on how to run open source programs and projects within companies. As well as the CHAOSS project, providing tools to measure an open source projects health (disclosure: I’m an advisory to the company who provides the vast majority of these tools, Bitergia).

Beyond the Linux Foundation there are also philanthropic initiatives, like the Pineapple fund, as well as academic ones like NumFocus, and let’s not forget about Google Summer of code or Mozilla Open Source Support.

Short story: only few open source initiatives are backed or supported by tech companies, philanthropists or individuals. It’s the tragedy of the (free software) commons.

And what about Open source applications? Well, not any better, as you can guess. And that’s exactly what I’ve been working on during the last two years, so without further ado let’s talk about FileZilla® sustainability.

In order to commercialize an open source project you need:

• a big enough “market” (your audience);
• Among them you need people who are able and willing to pay for value;
• a product strategy that targets potential customers without trying to upsell own your community.

At FileZilla we designed and implemented a business strategy that has included: promoting ancillary services, think for example of FileZilla dedicated phone support; selling a pro version that provides non ftp-like protocols, and more recently adding features that enable network effects.

Storj is a very good example of that: by achieving an higher product utility – allowing users to simply use Storj storage cloud service or to become ‘drive farmers‘ and earn Storj tokens by sharing their network and bandwidth – we increase the product’s value for other users, farmers and customers. We really believe we identified a way out of the “zero sum” game, and we are planning over time to provide a new whole class of value added services.

If you got an open source projects that lacks resources, or a blockchain-based technology that needs an audience, consider that these collaborations can open up a new whole world of opportunities, where everyone wins.

More on Open Source Sustainability 11 Jan 2018 4:53 AM (7 years ago)

Photo by Kris Atomic on Unsplash

Having been helping dozens of Open Source projects to grow, either with marketing tactics or sales strategies, my long time biggest passion has been how Open Source ventures can possibly sell their products without upselling their own community.

I remember myself talking and commenting about how some Open Source companies approached the problem in the past: think of NGINX,  Funambol, as well as companies who later dropped their Open Source strategy, like SugarCRM. Today I wish to share some insights about how we’re approaching this at FileZilla®, and how that is going.

The FileZilla project started in 2001 as a class project, 16 years later is one of the most popular Open Source applications in the world: FileZilla counts 100+ Million downloads per year, and the site on average gets over 3.5 Million unique visitors per month. Enough to say FileZilla IS a commercializable project. Quoting Nadia Eghbal:

“Think about the open source project as the market, not the product.”

Historically speaking FileZilla has been focusing only on FTP-like protocols (FTP, SFTP and FTPS). So when we started brainstorming ideas around what people would have paid for, it was natural to think about extending it to other network protocols.

So when over an year ago at FileZilla we decided to build a pro version targeted at administrators, developers, engineers we thought that offering them a seamless access to Amazon S3 was a good start.

Few months later, backed by over 12,000 happy customers, we just added WebDav support.

We’re at the very beginning of our journey, and we’re very grateful to both our loyal user base and our growing customer base. In future posts I’ll make sure to provide insights on how our funnel marketing works, products’ roadmaps and more.

Stay tuned.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Open Source Sustainability 20 Jul 2017 1:21 PM (7 years ago)

Open Source Sustainability has been Achilles’ heel for a long time now, as Matt Asay, myself and others said a number of times. While initiatives like the Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative are able to sustain some open source security projects, or OSI working group proposal might hopefully help others, we are far from finding an ultimate answer to this very problem.

My job recently has been focusing solely on finding ways to help open source ventures to flourish, and I’m glad to share one of the most interesting and potentially impactful work I’ve been on.

At the FileZilla^® Project – the free FTP solution for both client and server – we were looking for ways to reach financial sustainability, and we decided to look for a partner that would have helped us to provide both new features and more value to all stakeholders.

Given FileZilla scope, the Cloud arena was the natural target, and we were looking for a company offering a cloud service that was going to be exclusively available to our users. Our first rose of candidates included MaidSafe, FileCoin, SIA and Storj. Eventually we opted for the latter, read below to learn more about.

When we started talking to them in late October 2016, despite it was less funded than others, from an implementation, vision and user base standpoint it was well positioned to become the first Distributed Cloud Storage platform to leverage the blockchain technology. In the Storj peer-to-peer network you can either make profit from sharing your extra hard drive space and bandwidth or pay to rent it. Thanks to their technology we can provide FileZilla users with a decentralized cloud storage designed to provide censorship resistance properties, with an incentivisation system implemented on the blockchain, turning a feature into a potential source of revenues.

The two teams worked smoothly together, as though we had done it many times, and over the last weeks we have been testing and refining the integration. While we are at the very beginning of all this and definitely in beta mode, I wish to take a moment to thank all the people who made it possible. It has been a great privilege for me to have been able to work on a similar collaboration, and it is a double pleasure to finally turn my long time interest for cryptocurrencies into my job.

You can read more about the technical background and the state of the art at Storj blog.

About Storj [from their FAQ].

It is the first decentralized, end-to-end encrypted cloud storage that uses blockchain technology and cryptography to secure your files. Storj is a platform, cryptocurrency, and suite of decentralized applications that allows you to store data in a secure and decentralized manner. Your files are encrypted, shredded into little pieces called ‘shards’, and stored in a decentralized network of computers around the globe. No one but you has a complete copy of your file, not even in an encrypted form.

Once more unto the breach: meet Business Follows 2 Jun 2016 8:33 AM (8 years ago)

It seems yesterday to me when I was writing about moving on, four months later I am happy to announce I have just started a new business venture.

I have called my new company Business Follows, because users (and customers!) come first. If we play right, the business should be as much as possible a (nice) consequence.