[OpenAFS-devel] openafs / opendfs collaboration

[Tom Keiser]

Hi,

Given that OpenAFS and OpenDCE have been released under different licenses
(IPL versus LGPL), is there any chance of code sharing, or other forms of
collaboration?  If there is possibility for code sharing, is it
bidirectional or unidirectional?

One particularly fruitful area for collaboration would be development of a
DFS client for modern OS's.  OpenAFS could potentially provide a lot of
help for jumpstarting the necessary kernel support.  For instance, m4
macros for modern OS support detection, an updated osi layer, afs_syscall
support for modern kernels, and I'm sure there's plenty more that I
haven't mentioned.

Secondly, I know this is a rather drastic proposal, but is it time to
consider splitting the cache manager out of individual filesystem clients?
If the interfaces are abstract enough, we should be able to have multiple
distributed fs's using the same cache manager API.  Yes, there's tons of
little details to be worked out (e.g. credential management, access
control, etc.) , but it seems at least remotely feasible.  If OpenAFS,
OpenDFS, and possibly NFSv4, could share a single cache management
codebase, that could drastrically reduce the duplication of effort.  It
would also help reduce the amount of in-kernel code for which each
project is responsible.  Anyone else think this is feasible?

Finally, I know Derrick Brashear has been talking about building
multiprotocol fileservers for a long time.  This seems like a very
interesting project, and a great way to combine efforts.  But, what
licensing impediments must be overcome to make this a reality?


-- 
Tom Keiser
tkeiser@psu.edu