ABOUT

FatCloud is an open-source cloud computing platform that provides infrastructure for free & open-source web services at no cost. Our goal is to incubate large-scale, turnkey open-source web services -- alternatives to daily essentials like Google Search, Facebook, Flickr, Gmail and more -- by removing the cost and headache of server administration.

Large, easy-to-use web services have historically been difficult for the open-source community to create and operate. They are expensive, require full-time monitoring & upgrades, and open-source software is often a labor of love. FatCloud provides the financial & technical backbone necessary to incubate a new generation of FreeGoogles and OpenFacebooks: "public good" projects built on free software, transparency, and respect for individual privacy.

All hosted applications must be entirely open-source and free of commercial advertising. A granting process admits applicants on a rolling basis.

For developers FatCloud provides a platform on which to build the next great web application without the cost & vendor lock-in of commercial options like Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine. For the public FatCloud provides services which that adhere to transparency, privacy, and accountability to their users, not their stockholders.

  1. Developers make everything open
  2. We provide free hosting & admin
  3. Everybody gets free stuff

TECHNOLOGY

FatCloud's core is a cluster of servers powered by software originally developed at NASA. All data is mirrored to multiple off-site locations in safe-haven countries like Iceland and Sweden to protect against data loss & censorship.

Cloud computing technologies (specifically "Infrastructure as a Service," or IaaS) divide up our large, powerful servers into many smaller "virtualized" server instances. Developers can have total control (root) of these instances, and an API lets you launch new servers within minutes instead of the hours or days associated with traditional hardware. Virtualized servers utilize computing resources more efficiently & provide an easy way to scale up capacity as demand increases.

Beyond infrastructure, the fffff.at/cloud website is being built into a community hub for people working with open-source software, free culture and web standards to connect & collaborate.

TEAM

The Free Art & Technology Lab (FAT) is an interdisciplinary group of engineers, artists, hackers, lawyers & viral media gurus dedicated to spreading open-source & free ideals into popular culture. We operate as an all-volunteer open-source research & development lab, encouraging open entrepreneurship and the admonishment of secrecy, copyright monopolies and patents. Our members have been recognized with the Ars Electronica Golden Nica, FutureEverything Award, the British Design Museum Design of the Year, exhibited in the MoMA & Tate Modern, been featured on CNN, the New York Times, NBC, TIME, CurrentTV & and the front page of YouTube.

Jamie Wilkinson is an Emmy-award winning technologist and Internet researcher. He is co-creator of the Know Your Meme video series & Internet meme database, selected as one of TIME Magazine's Top 50 websites of 2009, and a member of the Star Wars Uncut team, winners of the 2010 Creative Arts Emmy for Interactive Media. He is a founding member of the Free Art & Technology (FAT) Lab, an open-source research & development lab. Wilkinson lives in San Francisco where he writes software and studies the spread of ideas and information online.

If you are interested in participating, sponsoring or otherwise contributing to FatCloud please contact Jamie Wilkinson: jamie@fffff.at or @jamiew on Twitter