The Happy-Happy Sort-of-Varnish-4.0 2013 Status Email

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

This is the annual Varnish Project status email, and as
usual I'll try to keep it short:


VUG8
----

We just came home from a great VUG8 in Berlin.  Many thanks to the
sponsors, Fastly, Axel Springer, UPLEX & Varnish Software for making
this possible.

Ruben has updated the VUG8 page with links to videos og slides:

	https://www.varnish-cache.org/vug8

Find a moment to watch Martins and my talks about what's new
in Varnish V4.  The list is too long to repeat here, but the
two absolute highlights are:

1. Truly asynchronous backend fetches with full streaming.

2. New varnishlog filter-language (Martin did this!)

If you want to sponsor VUG9 or to make VUG9 come to your city,
talk to Ruben <ruben at varnish-software.com> about it.  (He is also
planning Varnish-4 release parties, once the 4.0-RELEASE comes out,
he will send mail about that later.)


4.0-TP1
-------

A few hours ago Tollef released  "Varnish 4.0-Tech-Preview-1"

As the name should make obvious, we don't expect you to rush this
new version into production over the holidays, at least not these
holidays, but we hope you will take some time to play with it.

The point about this release is to get the new code out there for
you to test and experiment with, because there are a LOT of good
new stuff, and undoubtedly also some new bugs, and we'd like to get
those found and fixed before we call it 4.0-Release.

The "real" 4.0-RELEASE will happen once our QA and documentation
efforts are completed, and the more you guys help us test and
stress the new code, the sooner that can happen.

Have at it, and if you find bugs, please open a ticket about it
so we can fix it.


Varnish Moral License
---------------------

I earn my living from my one-man company, and the work I do on
Varnish is paid for by companies which pay for a Varnish Moral
Licenses.  This year i have been able to spend approx 900 hours on
developing Varnish this year thanks to (in alphabetically sorted,
3rd letter):

    Radio New Zealand, UPLEX, DYN, GLOBO.com, Varnish Software

Thanks a LOT for that.

But...

The last couple of months I have been burning through VML money at
about twice the rate it has come in.  This means that we get a lot
of stuff done, but it also means that the VML silo is rapidly
running out of money.

Obviously I must either sell more Varnish Moral Licenses to
keep going at this rate, or scale back my Varnish work and find
some contracts to fill my time.

I'd much prefer the former.

If your company makes money running Varnish, please consider
pitching in:  Investing in Varnish development is how you make
sure that Varnish will work great for your website in the future.

You can read all about the VML here:

	http://phk.freebsd.dk/VML/

And since this invariably causes some emails along the lines of "I
wish, but..." I will mention that you can also show your appreciation
by spelunking my Amazon wish list:

	 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/wishlist/1XSZNDWXKIAS0


Thanks in advance,

Poul-Henning Kamp

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.