I really like this product as it represents a brilliantly simplistic approach to a problem and beats anything I have seen on the market. I expect I will be using it for a long time to come. Please don't take this query in a negative way, I'd just like to know my level of risk and I have not seen this discussed elsewhere.

 

From reading the forum posts it appears that Lime Technology is a one man company, in my experience a very good one (both man and company).  I don't know how old Tom is or what his general health is, but I do get the impression he travels a lot.  My question is this; knock on wood.

If Tom gets hit by a bus :'(, it seems to me my unRaid server is only going to run so long as my flash drive stays alive, or two flash drives if I have a back up key.

 

Tom:  Is there someone, as capable as you, who has access to all the intellectual property you have amassed and who could, and is willing to, take on support of this product?  It could very well be one of the many capable people on this forum. 

If such an arrangement is not in place could I ask that something be done to do so?  You might even consider arranging for the code to be released to open source in your estate planning.

 

No, I'm not an insurance salesman. , just a long term IT manager who has learned not to put too many eggs in a basket I don't have the details on.

 

One alternative would be an online license management portal removal the direct link between human and license delivery etc

It is called code escrow.... and it has been mentioned here before.  Perhaps Tom will look into it after 5.x is out the door.

Actually, this is all Tom's plan to ensure we all keep him alive as long as possible.  We need to start working on the "Head-in-a-jar" technology...

 

Code escrow, in my experience has been neither a cheap nor reliable option.  Either you use lawyers (expensive) or a business (unreliable).  But maybe this would make sense to him or maybe he has a business partner.

In my very long history in IT, code escrow has never proven to be what it purports to be.  The onus to maintain an up-to-date escrow code copy, to audit the escrow repository, the legal costs, and the rigmarole required to gain access to the code escrow often proves it to be a less than satisfactory risk mitigation strategy.  Where a development organization has a broad base I use escrow clauses to keep the executive and legal departments happy and don't worry about the issue too much.  Where the developers seem to have little depth I may include escrow but hedge that with other simpler and less onerous approaches.  Thus my question.

Also, who would legally represent the user community?

I'd be quite happy to pay a slightly higher license fee or even yearly maintenance to know that the code is going to be around and available should unfortunate circumstances occur.

You are looking at legal and contractually supported code escrow.... such as "I pay you $$$ and youa re legally required to do XYZ code escrow monthly, etc..." as the developer is being FORCED to do it as a contact condition.

 

What I am talking about is an author who WANTS to do code escrow because he is a nice guy and wants to ensure the people who supported him are not left in the cold if something unexpected happens.  That isn't hard or expensive.  Plus, with unRAID, the real guts is already in the GPL code that is already released.... the proprietary management code is a lesser beast so even the emhttp code from a year ago would permit any decent programmer to update it to the latest features in the GPL code.  Bottom line is that Tom could deposit the latest codebase once or twice a year and that would be plenty. 

 

 

IIRC, the unRAID driver is open source. Only the admin platform is proprietary. If that is indeed the case, are your requirements not met, kwaldron?

IIRC, the unRAID driver is open source. Only the admin platform is proprietary. If that is indeed the case, are your requirements not met, kwaldron?

 

More than likely that will suffice.  I am a new user and have purchased a plus key.  I am still trying to get the lay of the land so to speak, but had looked for discussion on this point and not found any.  I was not aware that the code had been GPL'd.

 

Thank you for the feedback.  I feel more comfortable with my decision to use this product.

The core 'md' multi-disk driver is GPL'd as it needs to be compiled with your Linux kernel. The other major pieces of functionality (emhttp and shfs) are closed-source. The starting of the array as well as it's management including licensing is controlled by 'emhttp'. What allows all the drives to be seen as one single share known as the user filesystem is handled by 'shfs'. These are the core pieces of the system.

 

Limetech has also modified a few more configuration files and scripts, but it's mostly a very minimal Slackware 32bit image. There's minimal work involved in setting up a full Slackware 12.2, 13.0, or Current 32bit distribution that will run unRAID. The wiki entry on it includes some steps that are not needed if you don't need to control everything via 'emhttp' such as NTP or if you see no need in using 'ifplugd'. The few required steps are recompiling the kernel with the unRAID md driver, copying over emhttp and shfs, copying over minimal config files for samba and nfs (to hook into how unRAID manages user shares), and finally hooking the 'go' script into your system startup.

 

As others have said, should anything happen to Limetech, there are plenty of skilled enough people here that have the ability to reverse engineer the closed-source portions to continue it's viability.

No, I'm not an insurance salesman. , just a long term IT manager who has learned not to put too many eggs in a basket I don't have the details on.

 

And hopefully not a hit man 

 

Actually I do have quite detailed instructions on file with a lawyer & my wife 

No, I'm not an insurance salesman. , just a long term IT manager who has learned not to put too many eggs in a basket I don't have the details on.

 

And hopefully not a hit man 

 

Actually I do have quite detailed instructions on file with a lawyer & my wife 

 

Thanks Tom.  No, not a hitman.

No company that you buy a product from will ever guarantee a lifetime service (even if they do, there is always a fine print to it).

And one would be stupid enough to rely on a particular company service and/or their business continuity.

Take, for example Amazon online backup service (via Jungle Disk). I use it and pay a monthly fee, but I do realize the are not really liable for anything that can potentially happen to my data.

So let's just get down to Earth and simply have more than one copy of our precious data stored in more than one place.

For example, I have 2 independent NAS storages duplicating all my data, as well I use Amazon for the off-site backups of most important stuff, (eg. family photos and videos).

 

UnRAID is just excellent. Done everything else and the philosophy behing unRAID is just great for home mediastore. Nothing can beat it.. great user interface, very simple commandline and cool design being compatible to slackware. Thanks, Tom!