On February 1-2, 2025 FileSender was presented at FOSDEM 2025 in Brussels at the GÉANT’s exhibition booth. FileSender is an important part of many NRENs services portfolios for the R&E community, and was shown by GÉANT together with other open source services such as Argus, eduVPN, LSO, Maat, NMaaS, perfSONAR, RARE and Workflow Orchestrator. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software gather at the FOSDEM event to meet, share ideas and collaborate. For FileSender it was a great opportunity – to be exhibited and to get more attention from the open source community that may turn into more interested end-users, new deployments and collaborative contributions down the line.
“Going to FOSDEM is a fantastic way to connect with the open source community. It's an incredible place to meet like-minded people and the exceptional authors behind amazing software. At FOSDEM, we don’t just talk about the future of open source – we build it together”.
Open source is always about open collaboration. Open source values bring together people who are passionate about the projects they develop, care about the resulting software and share their work with others.
We, at the FileSender project, believe in the power of collaboration and the values of the open source community. That is why FileSender is fully open source. It relies on the contributions of developers, testers, writers and many other supporters. From new lines of code to better translations, every little bit helps. At present, FileSender is not just a blob of software with a small team of enthusiasts, but it is backed by a whole FileSender community (including supporting financial arrangements) and the amount of end-user exposure it gets.
Currently, NRENs from all over the world offer FileSender service to their R&E communities to exchange large files such as data sets. Healthcare facilities can use the application to exchange diagnostic imagery such as cardiograms or MRI images. Government agencies as well as private companies that need to exchange (privacy) sensitive data sets can use FileSender and rest assured the data will never fall into the wrong hands.
Contributions are welcome
The encouraging progress of FileSender, as an open source project, happens when individuals and organisations are willing to collaborate and to contribute their time and resources. Any FileSender user can join us and support the FileSender development effort – we would love to see your contribution and we really appreciate it!
User interface translations. It matters a lot to us to be able to offer the FileSender user interface in all the languages of the world. Those individuals and organisations who have produced a translation are warmly invited to make their translation files publicly available. In the spirit of open source, doing so would allow other organisations to see FileSender in their native language too – and this has a broader impact than the R&E community you may initially have in mind. Through mere availability for the community, your translation can improve the user experience of all FileSender users with the added benefit of allowing others who don’t have time to do a full translation to build on yours.
Translation coordinator. It would be wonderful progress for the FileSender community if we were to find a volunteer able to work on translation policies with the community. This would be someone who could trigger an update process when language labels are added or changed, who would make sure core languages are up-to-date, etc. We could then recognise a core set of translations as ‘officially supported by the project’ in the same matter as how we mark particular branches of the FileSender codebase as ‘officially supported by the project’.
FileSender federation. Another role we are hoping to fill is for a project management capability for investigative work around new directions/features/concepts. Right now, what’s pressing and exciting is the concept of an NREN FileSender federation. The plan is to build infrastructure that can present the collective of known FileSender deployments as an organisationally coherent R&E file transfer infrastructure, as opposed to the current situation where the NREN deployments appear as no more than a collection of unrelated dot points. If such a federation were in place, it could facilitate future collective efforts: to simplify service delivery, to coordinate security responses, to conduct policy alignment (e.g., minimum security baseline), to deliver aggregated statistics of total use of infrastructure, etc.
Sustainable funding. FileSender is free to use, and is financed through contributions borne by institutional community members. The FileSender funding strategy is to spread the financial burden by collecting many small contributions in preference over a few large ones. We do need to ensure the project remains financially sustainable – and with every institutional user that decides to join the chorus of contributors, we are one step closer to that goal. Another volunteer role we are keen to fill is the coordination of attracting more funding according to this strategy.
We are grateful to AARNet (Australia), ACOnet (Austria), Arnes (Slovenia), Belnet (Belgium), CSC (Finland), DeiC (Denmark), GARR (Italy), HEAnet (Ireland), REANNZ (New Zealand), Switch (Switzerland) and to the German Cancer Research Center – 11 organisations in total – supporting FileSender financially with active contribution agreements. RNP (Brazil) provides substantial amounts of in-kind help with implementing the new user interface. SURF (the Netherlands) assists Filesender considerably with both financial backing and in-kind resources. Also, current Silver-level contributors – AARNet, Belnet, HEAnet, RNP, SURF and Switch – benefit from their logos appearing in the banner at the bottom of the new FileSender user interface.
If you think the work on the FileSender development is valuable and you could contribute to any of the four areas described above, please let us know by sending an email directly to the FileSender Board.
If you have any questions regarding FileSender, register to participate in the upcoming FileSender Online Infoshare on February 24, 2025, where different topics will be covered, such as the current status of the new user redesign process, recent releases and plans for the software, security updates, FileSender in EOSC EU Node, priorities and the future roadmap.
