[OpenAFS] re: my afs wish list

[Dean Anderson]

> From: Ken Hornstein <kenh@cmf.nrl.navy.mil>

> 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?

That would include a fair number of servers and a lot of clients. But,
yes: What were they thinking?  A lot of the pricing was driven by Transarc
and HP, which thought they were really going to hit the jackpot with DCE.
Most of the fees went through the vendor, to OSF, to Transarc & HP.

> >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.

Err, not if you were at the Olympics. The servers crashed frequently, and
it took a long time (if you were waiting, trying to meet a deadline) to
get them back up. So scores sometimes weren't available right away to the
press.  IBM provided the servers, and took most of the bad publicity.  An
event like that needs fast turnaround. The press don't want to wait 45
minutes.

Shows you the power of "spin" though. Spin only works on those who are
getting their facts from the spinner. If one knew the whole story, spin
would never work.

> 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.

This is true of just about anything. Kernel source, etc. Its always easier
to figure out what's wrong when you have source to look at. I think that
part of why the open source movement was discounted for so long. Some
people get this right away, others just can't grasp the value. The latter
group are happy with proprietary software.

		--Dean