Time to say goodbye!

Hello everyone,

TL;DR: the party is over, we are closing slowly!

Long version:

As you already noticed, the frequency of my answers dropped down to pretty much zero. On the Android side, there is already no active feedback by Jochen anymore. I don't want to set everything offline and just say goodbye.

The project is an important milestone in my life, so I want to give you a personal message what's up:

When I started to help out at the project at January 2011, I had no idea where this journey will end. With my understanding of Linux, I decided to help an open source project.
This time, I increased steadily my daily invested time up to around one up to three and more hours a day. I dropped my loved hobby tabletop role playing games, and also worked on weekends to get something running and well tested.
I learned git the hard way and all this invested hard work was always given back as positive feedback from A LOT of nice people. I picked up their ideas and developed the features together with them.

Based on the work for PirateBox I was able to visit Eindhoven, 2x Berlin, Lille, Paris, Hamburg, Goteborg and Montreal. A super cool PirateBox Camp was made a couple of times.

By now, November 2019, I am not able to devote any freetime on the project, which results in many many unanswered questions, suggestions and comments. The development stream is in a kinda-good shape, because of the.wrong-project, but I don't find time to push a beta or stable release.
My personal situation does not allow a freetime project in that dimension anymore.

There are also a lot of things, which make the "life" of a piratebox more and more harder, which we can't overcome on the piratebox software side:

- In the year 2016 FCC changed the rules about firmware security, resulting in more locked router firmware.
- HTTPS everywhere is kicking PirateBox' butt with the redirect everywhere. All the technical enhancements for the user security made us to go one step back.
- Beginning last year (2018) I tried to push it much more, but for another reason I haven't made it to an release.

Last, but not least: In the last month, the amount of spam increase tremendousely.. so we are closing the forum. I like to forward you to /r/PirateBox.

In the next year (2020), I'll stop slowly the different services like tracker etc., because I don't expect anybody to take over the work (If there is anybody, I'm willing to keep everything running and partially support with infrastructure, help.).

I understand, that PirateBox is useful for a lot of people out there. Yes, but I think you will find better alternatives out there then this old software project. If you are looking for a FOSS project helping you for your use case, have a look at [nethood.org] , which provides a ton of useful links.
Still no clue? Ask in /r/piratebox.

Thank you very much for all the thankful emails, tweets, pictures, mate, beer and stories. All of them were heart warming and kept me running for a very long time.

AMAZING YEARS! THANK YOU SO MUCH!

Matthias

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Update 2019-11-26:
To answer some common questions:

a) The website will be available at least to the end of 2021. If there is a serious activity by other participants, I can keep the wiki and the download domains online. The tracker or sharing of RPi images may end earlier.
b) Github will stay until "forever".
c) Volunteers for taking over the projects, need to survive a "pull request" phase. This means, that I don't want to give away the control to strangers. The is a result of experiences in the javascript / nodejs community.
d) If volunteers need help for a development build server / infrastructure or whatever; I am willing to participate with me experiences and knowledge. I can also provide some sort of (un)regular development builds, if needed.
e) Feel free to distribute the binary stuff, but make sure to lay down a copy of the installation instructions beside the binaries.
f) Feel free to fork and try out other directions like IPFS!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/26/2019 07:28PM by Matthias.

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