Turning Down Upspin Infrastructure

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Sad. As a fan of Plan 9 myself it’s somewhat expected. The ideas are strong but there’s something about it all not quite catching on.

I regularly referred others to Upspin’s source tree [1] if they wondered about larger systems written in Go but weren’t too big and gross like Kubernetes.

[1]: https://github.com/upspin/upspin

This saddens me because I think the concept behind Upspin is powerful. Is it really that much of a resource drain to drop the key server? I imagine it could run on a $10/mo VPS.

This is the talk that introduced Upspin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENLWEfi0Tkg

This is the first time I've heard of this but "All the users are connected through a central key server at key.upspin.io, which holds the public key and directory server address for each user"[1] sounds like they reinvented PGP's key server. To the best of my knowledge one can have arbitrary metadata in a published key[2], with the benefit that it's subject to revocation just like any other part of the key. I believe that's the whole idea that keybase.io was trying to build upon, although them orphaning their infra when Zoom bought them isn't lost on me

1: https://upspin.io/doc/arch.md

2: https://openpgp.dev/book/certificates.html#user-attributes-i...

I don’t understand why this is (was?) dead. Can someone address mdaniel’s comment and explain what is so egregious?

It’s not obvious from the website, but Rob Pike and Andrew Gerrand started work on Upspin after stepping back from the Go team. I suspect that many of the folks early to Go have at least occasionally checked in on Upspin.

I’m sad to see this chapter of their work shut down, but excited to see where each of them goes from here.

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