[Spread-users] Just before announcing Spread 3.17.0

[Yair Amir]

Hi,

We are just about to announce Spread 3.17.0 but I wanted to drop the
list a note before doing that.

Spread has been available on the Internet for 5 years this month, the last
15 months of which as an open source project. During these 5 years it
had exponential growth in use and interest of the community as is evident
by the number of distinct download we get on the spread.org site
(around 50 downloads after a year, 200 after 2 years, 600 after 3 years,
1800 after 4 years, and over 4000 today).

There are many people that contributed to Spread over the years (see
the announcement). For this version, I want to take the opportunity
and mention a few people.

First, I want to congratulate Professor Jonathan Stanton, the chief
architect of Spread in the last two years (taking over from Michal and
myself). Jonathan just took a faculty position as an Assistant
Professor at George Washington University in DC. In addition he
was also nominated adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins. I wish him all the
best in this endeavor. We will of course continue our strong collaboration
through Spread Concepts, CNDS, and his group at George Washington.
Besides, Washington and Baltimore are only an hour away by car :)

Second, I want to thank Cristina Nita-Rotaru from CNDS who was added as
a Major Contributor to the Spread toolkit. Cristina is our expert in
systems security and the architect of the Secure Spread project.
Spread 3.17.0 is the version based on which we integrate many of the
security mechanisms as enhancements to the Spread toolkit.
This version will go through a DARPA red-team experimentation by
BBN Technologies and SRI International in the following weeks.

I want to mention Ryan Caudy from CNDS, who joined the core Spread team
in the last couple of months. His first contributions to Spread are
included in this version. Some of you know Ryan as one of the creators
of Wackamole.

I want to thank Theo Schlossnalge, a long time major contributor to
Spread for his enormous contributions, the last of which is autoconf.
Hopefully this new capability will make it easier for people to port
Spread to myriad environments with little pain. Theo contributes a lot
of real-life experience to our team.

Last I want to thank Daniel Rall from CollabNet for his active
participation, help, patches and comments.

   Enjoy this version,

   :) Yair.  http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~yairamir