[OpenAFS] re: my afs wish list

[Ken Hornstein]

>So it was hard to get vendors to pickup both DCE and OSF/1.  Also making
>things difficult was the dot-zero nature of the changes. Like most new or
>radically altered code bases, the code wasn't stable, and its hard to get
>commercial vendors to ship something that might not be stable, but if they
>don't, bugs won't get found and fixed.  Pricing constraints from the
>component vendors (Transarc mostly, and HP) made it hard to get things out
>to the "wanna play with it" crowd. The "early adopters", the people who
>love to play with new stuff, don't have 10 or 20K to spend on what might
>be a toy until they prove otherwise. It was expensive and had to be sold
>as "mission critical" to justify the price.

The prices were much worse than the 10/20k range.  Back in the day, NRL
was quoted a price of a little more than a _million_ dollars for DCE/DFS,
that only covered two platforms (unlike our "everything under the sun"
AFS license, which was loads cheaper).  Talk about ridiculous ... what
in the hell were they thinking?

>Of course, we saw what
>happened at the Olympic Games to "mission critical". Sigh.

I remember seeing a Decorum talk that touted how the Olympics were a big
success for DCE/DFS, but I guess the implication here is that it wasn't.

>In quite a lot of ways, DCE was ahead of its time, and was then shot in
>the head by its creators.

This may sound odd, but DCE had the wrong ... "culture" from my
experience.

I gave a talk back in 1998 at my one and only Decorum about the
AFS-Kerberos 5 migration kit.  I believe my talk was the most
technical presentation at the entire Decorum, and that's not saying
much.  _Every_ presentation I attended was basically either blatant
site plugs for DCE ("look at all of the cool stuff we did"), or
thinly disguised marketing drivel.  No one was really doing anything
interesting, and it crystalized in my mind that if people weren't
doing interesting things with DCE at Decorum, then likely nobody
was.

Also, I don't think people ever realized the value of the AFS source
code license; we used it not to make changes to AFS, but to figure
out what the hell was going on with AFS.  Since DCE was like 10x more
complicated than AFS, the source license would have been even more
essential, but was not an option.

>Yes, I think that's right. This was a known issue that was to be
>resolved/decided later.  How tightly integrated to make Kerberos had been
>a question for both DCE and AFS. Many people wanted to run generic KDCs.
>You couldn't possibly do that if you changed the protocols used by
>Kerberos. As I recall, you couldn't use a generic KDC with either DCE or
>Transarc AFS, but I think they wanted to have that capability some day.
>Looks like OpenAFS can just about do that.

As Derrick already pointed out, you could do that with AFS since day 1.
Of course, it wasn't a supported configuration, but it's not like Transarc
support was really worth that much in the last five years of it's existance
anyway.

--Ken