[OpenAFS] Re: [OpenAFS-devel] An open letter from the OpenAFS Council of Elders

[Troy Benjegerdes]

[snip]

> To that end, the OpenAFS Council of Elders has proposed the incorporation 
> of a not-for-profit foundation to perform tasks necessary to sustain and 
> further the development of the OpenAFS product and user community.
> 
> We would like your feedback on this proposal, and suggest community 
> discourse on the openafs-info@openafs.org mailing list. You are also 
> welcome to bring specific concerns to the attention of the Elders via the 
> openafs-elders@openafs.org mailing list.


I fully agree that the creation of a non-for-profit foundation is
absolutely necessary. 

I would like to suggest that the foundation adopt an open membership
structure like many electric co-op and other types of co-ops.

(
  http://www.weci.org/principles.html
  http://mea.coop/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=98
)

If you think about it, a filesystem is a lot like an electric utility..
You never notice it when it's working. But if anything goes wrong,
everything stops. It's a critical piece of infrastructure that few
people understand, but everyone depends on.

Membership should be open to both individuals, as well as corporations 
and organizations. I would be happy to individually pay between $5 and
$25 a year membership dues to support OpenAFS. I also think that anyone
contributing code should be granted membership without a fee.

Corporate or large organization dues should be substantially larger, and
have some sort of marketing/branding/trademark benefits associated with
it.

Finally, from a developer point of view, I believe it is quite important
that the first project of the new foundation be to migrate from the 
existing CVS source code repository to a distributed open-source based
version control system. (This would mostly likely be either Git or
Mercrial.. once in either one of these formats, conversions any other
source control system of choice should be a lot easier)