Progress Update: VestaCP Entity, Funding, Fulltime Dev, and More

See our inital Vesta 2.0 announcement here.

I just wanted to provide a community update on our progress (or lack of visible progress). We have been working behind the scenes to provide VestaCP a sustainable future, with the correct legal structure, development team, brand protection, license, and more importantly, funding.

VestaCP Company

The most important structural change is that we are completing the creation of the VestaCP company. In short, VestaCP will be owned and managed as its own legal entity. This will provide better legal and regulatory protection for the project, and will also allow us to sell paid plugins, accept donations, and provide clearer delimitations between the project and its current owner (Outroll). We still have plans to convert this to not-for-profit as a foundation, however it will be cheaper and less onerous to incorporate as a company for the first year or two.

Sustainable Funding

Outroll is funding VestaCP for now, and we have secure ongoing funding that will allow us invest in VestaCP for a couple of years, until the project can be funded independently. We have also applied for grants in the EU that could further support the project.

New Licensing

To make the project sustainable, we have decided to release the new version of VestaCP under Business Source License 1.1 (BSL 1.1). VestaCP will continue to be free, but for organisations with more than $5 Million in revenue there will be a small license fee. With BSL 1.1, the code falls back into into GPL V3 after 3 or 4 years. This was a difficult decision to make, but I believe will allow the project to be as sustainable as possible in the long term, and also helps us protect our initial investment into VestaCP. PS. If we win any of the grants we applied for, we will keep the project license as GPL v3.

Fulltime Dev

We have onboarded a new fulltime developer that will be dedicated to VestaCP. We now have 1.5 people working fulltime on VestaCP.

Written in Rust

The original rebuild started in Go (Golang), but our vision for an enterprise level product led us to adopt Rust as the main programming language (also Outroll adopted Rust as its main language last year). This means that it is taking longer to build VestaCP 2.0 than originally estimated, however we feel a lot more confident that individuals and organisations of all sizes will benefit from a memory safe, well tested, and maintained solution. Just like with Go, Vesta will be a single binary distribution.

Run on almost any OS

The RUST binary described above will allow VestaCP to be installed on almost any Linux OS, and will support x84, amd64, arm, and arm64 architectures. The community spoke clearly about broad compatibility, and we decided that the main requirement was to run on any device that supports LXC or Incus as the virtualization engine.

Timeframe

It is very hard to estimate an accurate timeframe for the release of Vesta 2.0 given that the scope and complexity of the product increased considerably as we pivoted to Rust and an increases focus on safety and stability. Now that we have dedicated developers on it, we still expect many months to pass before we have a release candidate ready to test.

Repository changes

Because of the license change, we are building the new version privately until it will be ready to be tested. The BSL license is time dependent, so we are focusing on publishing the new codebase once the project is ready for testing. We have created a new branch in the repository where we will start updating documentation, specification, and other non-code items before the codebase is released.

Community Contributions

If you are interested in getting involved, please reach out to [email protected] to volunteer. Once the Release candidate is ready, we will open up the repository to contributions, PRs, and the usual workflows here in Github.

Thank you

I would like to thank the VestaCP community for the patience, as its been over 1 year that we started the rebuild. I really believe that the wait will be worth it. We are really excited to provide a new product that goes way above the current industry offerings, and will allow enterprise grade hosting, container orchestration, application building, and many more features on a simple VPS or cloud server.

-- Rafael Gracioso Martins