Rclone Services Ltd has slowly become more and more of a family affair. Nick first started developing rclone way back in 2012 before Pepper even existed. Thanks to the hundreds of contributors and thousands of users, rclone slowly became more and more popular. After Nick left his job as CTO of Memset in around 2020, he began working on rclone full time.
Nick and I first sat down together in 2023 to discuss what he was working on, Nick wanted to keep providing for the open source community but also needed to keep providing for his family. So he hired me, his son, and we decided to start a company centered around rclone in order to get sponsorship from the cloud providers that rclone has been tirelessly uploading data to and to help organisations that were trying to harness the full power of rclone to do amazing things.
Since then, we have had great success helping out different organisations and companies with all sorts of interesting rclone problems, added many new features and started collaborating with cloud providers. We would also like to take a moment to thank all the cloud providers who have sponsored us. The open source ecosystem is a truly amazing thing and we are so proud to be a part of it.
More recently, we have hired my younger brother Dougal (he has just turned 18!), if you keep a close eye on our GitHub, you will have noticed a lot of contributions recently from @roucc. That is him, and needless to say, he is absolutely smashing it. I think he is already a better developer then I think I will ever be.
So where does Pepper come into this I hear you cry.
Pepper has been in the "office" everyday for the last 7 years, providing Nick with emotional support whilst he tries to review PR's, close issues, fix bugs and not pull his hair out. Recently Dougal has taken the emotional support dog to the next level and is basically incapable of doing anything useful without her nearby. One walk a day with Pepper gets Nick out of his chair and provides him with some time to think. He often returns from his walks with the solution to a problem he has spent the whole morning thinking about. On top of all that, Pepper makes us smile everyday and never asks for anything in return, except her ball.
So yes, essentially, there would be no rclone if there was no Pepper.