It's been a bit quiet on the Qubes development front for the last 2 months. The reason for this was that Rafal and myself got fully engaged in a new commercial research project. After all, we do need to make money somehow, so that we could later spend them on funding Qubes development :)

But this new engagement is actually closely related to what we do with Qubes (i.e. how new hardware technologies allow to build more secure OSes), so it's not like we're abandoning Qubes, as the experience we get with this research project will surely be useful for us when designing and implementing the Qubes 2.0 architecture.

In order to continue with Qubes, we've decided to hire some Linux programmers, while Rafal and I will continue with our research project over the coming months. We've decided to start a cooperation with another Polish computer outfit, TLS Technologies, who specializes in advanced systems design and implementation.

There are a couple of people people from TLS engaged in Qubes, and you will soon "meet" them on qubes-devel, in our wiki, and of course, you will see their contributions in our git repos.

The plan is to have Beta 1 released sometime in January 20102011. The two important features that will be implemented first, and that will make it into Beta 1 (apart for the long-awaited installer) are: Firewall VMs, and support for templates for service VMs. Stay tuned for more details soon!

If everything goes smoothly, then we should expect Qubes 1.0 sometime at the end of Q1 2011...