[melicerte]

Thanks for the quick anwser. Any chance to have a download version anytime? I mean, a pay to download is totally acceptable. I'm asking this from a European points of view as Personal information could be stored into trello and Personal data protection laws in Europe are somehow different and more binding than the US ones.

[spolsky]

I think I can confidently say that we will never offer that. The engineering costs are prohibitive and not cost-effective, even if you can charge the companies that need it.

That said, if there are things that we can do to increase privacy while still hosting Trello on our own servers, we'll certainly consider those. I never want to commit to any particular feature, but it is not impossible that one day we will provide IP whitelisting (so a given board is only available from approved IPs) or even client-side encryption. I should reiterate that neither of those features are in our near-term plans, but at least they are not completely out of the question. Having been in the downloaded software business for ten years, I can safely say though, that we are never doing that again.

[pifflesnort]

I can confidently say we'll never use Trello if we can't host it locally; integrate it into our directory system, back it up and manage upgrades on our own timeline, and have the assurance that it will continue to be accessible even if you as a company are not.

It's unfortunate that there's no meeting in the middle.

[mhp]

Some of the planned business features would be able to meet you in the middle, but like Joel said, we have no plans to ever sell a self hosted version. We understand that means some companies' policies will prevent some people from using Trello, but its a tradeoff we made.

As an aside, I suspect a few of the companies who, in the past, could "never" use software that wasn't installed on their own systems are probably using Salesforce now.

[pifflesnort]

It's not that we have inflexible arbitrary rules, but rather, considered reasoning as to why we don't want to depend on externally hosted services, and sufficient competitors in most spaces that are willing to provide self-hosted products. Companies such as Atlassian even go so far as to provide the source code, as do others, which has allowed us to maintain critical (non-atlassian) services well past the time they were discontinued by their parent company.

[atesti]

How many years do we have left with FogBugz before you kill the download version?

[mhp]

We are in the middle of getting Safe Harbor certified, which allows us to comply with all EU Data Protection laws, so that should no longer be an impediment for you.