Introducing "Duplicati, Inc."

Announcements
1

It is my pleasure to introduce the newly formed Duplicati company!

I have worked on Duplicati for over 15 years, but it has always been a side project that I spent my spare time on. The project has grown quite a lot with millions of backups running each month and a vibrant user community that found a home with the introduction of the forum. Naturally, the project has also attracted many voluntary contributors, and it would not be half as good without the massive contributions.

For the last few years, I have unfortunately had significantly less spare time to manage and contribute to the project. This means that PR turnover has been a bit slow, some of the deeper structural changes are still pending, and many collaboration requests have been left unanswered.

In this light, I am happy to introduce Duplicati, Inc., an open core company around the Duplicati project. I will assume the role of CTO and enable many of the functions that have simply not been possible so far, even with the generous donations. With the establishment of a company, it is possible to hire developers to complete tasks and generally boost the project. The company is funded by the remarkable Open Core Ventures which I have only praise for.

This change also introduces a re-licensing to the MIT license, which will make it possible to use the program and modules in many more settings. Thanks to all the top contributors for your faith in me, and for responding positively to the license change.

I know that some are skeptical of mixing open source and a commercial entity, but I am confident that this change will not have negative impacts on the open source version. The company will focus on features that are not currently a good fit for the open source version. No open source features will be changed to “paid only”, but features from the company may be introduced into the open source version. The company will only thrive if the open source project does, so there is no incentive to reduce the open source project.

I am excited to start the next level of Duplicati and hire developers, designers, testers, etc. and improve Duplicati for everyone. Thanks to the community for supporting the project and to everyone who uses it. I hope you will appreciate the changes!

32 Likes
2

Best of luck with it… Hopefully the new structure will drive development of Duplicati to new heights!

6 Likes
3

Congrats Ken - your friends at Wasabi wish you the best in the new adventure - thanks for all the great work you have done to get the product to this point! Jim @ Wasabi

2 Likes
4

Good luck & have a good life during the “Inc.” project. Duplicati has potential.

2 Likes
5

Good news. I wish you good luck in this new stage.
Fidabh from Paris.

1 Like
6

Great news.
Best of luck with your journey!

1 Like
7

Good to see the project alive !
I wish you the best, and to all the project !

1 Like
8

Good luck, I hope this works out.

I am wary of such changes. I’ve seen too many times when a previously fully open source project splits into separate “community” and “professional” versions, even when features aren’t outright removed from the open source version, all or nearly all of the best new features end up exclusive to the “pro” version.

You don’t owe me an answer @kenkendk - I have never contributed directly to Duplicati outside of occasional participation in these forums, but what would you say is an example of a feature that is “not currently a good fit for the open source version”?

1 Like
9

Congratulations! That’s a crowning achievement! You have a lot to be proud of and I’m very happy for you!

Ride the wave and…as long as you’re having fun…keep doing what you’re doing. It’s obviously the right thing for the right reasons.

Godspeed!

2 Likes
10

No reason to add me to your mailing list without being asked!

A project that has been in the beta phase bob and down for years. Of course we wisch you good luck for you but we gave up using this since years.

2 Likes
11

Good luck in your new corporate venture :+1:

Colin

1 Like
12

Wish you all the best.

When can we expect more details regarding license changes?

We use Duplicati at our business and we’ve previously donated for several years as a way of payment thus have no problem paying for software, but when there’s a reoccuring fee I’m expected to present it in my yearly budget in which 2024 is set.

Previously the donated amount to various FOSS we use have been based on how much money the business have earned, but sounds to me like it’ll be more static and hence it’s something I either need to adjust for 2024 and / or prepare for 2025.

2 Likes
13

I fully understand the concern. The company will obey the OCV recommendations, being an open core company. I hope this reduces your concerns a bit.

I would suggest a custom backend that will integrate into a corporate AD. I would initially develop this in the company, but if it turns out there is demand for it within the community and it can be “generic”, then it could go to open-source.

1 Like
14

Appologies! When you sign up to the forum, you are automatically signed up for the announcements, but there has been very few of those. You can manage subscriptions in your profile page.

1 Like
15

Great news! And best of luck!
I stopped using Duplicati some time ago because it had too many bugs and too many failed backups. The reliability of my backups was also very questionable for me.

1 Like
16

The license is MIT. There is no charge for using it, same as before.

There is no fee for using Duplicati, but your donations have been much appreciated!

I am not sure how we will deal with having an open-source project, donations and a commercial entity. For now I have removed options to donate outside of the Open Collective, as that is a registered fiscal host, and any payouts will be visible.

17

Hello,

I have used the software with succes. Especially on Windows platforms, where users wanted a GUI it has been one of my products of choice, with the large amount of storage backends available. On Linux it also works quite stable, but there are more cli based alternatives available.
I appreciate all the time you have spent on Duplicati, and I was getting a bit worried about the slow flow of features and updates.

I am one of those that is sceptical about Open Source and a commercial entity. Usually things start going down the drain, once a commercial aspect is introduced, because it then is all about the money and generating income, and less about the product and the community around it. While I do like you, as the parent of this product, can generate an income and get rewarded for your hard work. It sounds brilliant that you can hire extra help, but the money to do so does not come from thin air. Money has to come in, to be able to pay for things. Creating a company doesn’t change this, but might add tax benefits. If donations don’t cut it, then why would selling licenses do it?

I hope it works out, and you can allocate more time to the project and can reap the rewards for your 15 years of efforts, while we can continue to enjoy Duplicati. I hope it doesn’t get hidden away behind a paywall, or worse, the newly founded company is bought by a giant competitor usually killing the product off or making it unreachable for your current community.
It can also cause a forking “war”, where we all of a sudden have to deal with a couple of forks from the last Open Source version. Instead of bundling efforts it can lead to bitter internal struggles and brilliant features being split over mulitple forks of Duplicati. But that is a worst case scenario… I’m positive, and hope for the best :slight_smile:

It is comforting to see, that you are commiting to Open Source for now. Not many details are shared in your post, on how the company will impact Duplicati, but I’m assuming a paid version will be introduced. New features developed by the company “may be” introduced in the Open Source version. It is not clear to me what features would be “no good fit” to the Open Source community.

It will be tough to compete against established backup products, and one of Duplicatis strengths is that it is Open Source enabling people with few resources to make backups of their data to a backend of their choice. Making a paid version, might steer people instead to the free version of Veeam backup agent.

The best of luck with it… I will continue to keep an eye on the product, as it has served me well (apart from a few hiccups in the past) and I still have friends and family members using the product.

18

I do not see any business in selling licenses.

I think this is the strength of open-source: anyone can make a competing version. If there is a supporting community, it will be more popular than the original. See the MySQL vs MariaDB story for an example.

At this point I cannot give many details about what the company will focus on, but for the time being, I expect the only impact to the open source project will be more activity and PRs from me.

1 Like
19

I’m going to lie if I say I’m not worried. But I also realise as a developer that it’s nice to have Open Source but it is also unrealistic to maintain it as a side hustle. So eventually every Open-Source project has to make a choice to go commercial or let it go stale.

To that end, the reason I choose Duplicati was because of the amazing way it stores the backups. Duplicati 1 was good but when Duplicati 2 came along with the block level stuff, it was impressive.

Also, the technical documents that explained exactly how it worked was awesome, as it was not just a case of “go read the source code” or “it just works, trust me”.

Another important fact IS the open-source nature of the product, for backups I need to ensure that I can restore them for as long as I can “store” them. But having a paid solution that only works untill you can’t afford the licences or in order to continue using it you have to constantly “buy” the upgraded version to get bug fixes.

Lastly it works natively on Windows, I’ve used it from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and from Windows Server 2008 to 2012.

I also use it to backup over FTP using Radmin VPN to a local PC over an LTE connection. Because of the unique way Duplicati 2 stores the files and it’s reliability for failed connections, and resuming of partial backups it is really the only solution that would work in this setup.

It’s great that there are other (paid) options available, but they don’t cater for the person that can’t pay for expensive storage or having a more consumer setup. Backups was not an option for very long until I discovered Duplicati. Please don’t kill these features! Luckily the solution is stable enough that even if the project would die, I would still be able to use the current copy that I have since it does not require licencing servers to be online or require constant bug fixes.

20

How will the commercial entity make money, to pay for developers?

While I’m sure there are success stories, there are countless examples where it did not work out so well, causing a good product to be weakened and users got confused on which one to use, making them abandon it altogether. I hope, this does not happen for Duplicati.

That sound brilliant… looking forward to it… and again, I wish you all the best. I will certainly not abandon Duplicati and keep donating from time to time :slight_smile: