[OpenAFS] Re: the notion of "site" is not always well-defined / "project cells"

[Adam Megacz]

(sorry if this appears twice)

"Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH" <allbery@ece.cmu.edu> writes:
> Er, no.  AFS was originally developed to serve the needs of Carnegie
> Mellon University, which still has multiple cells.  IBM helped fund
> its development (much as DEC and others helped fund MIT's Project
> Athena whose most famous offshoot is X11), then asserted license
> rights over the result.

Huh.  I thought it was a deal between Transarc (company started by
early Andrew Project faculty) and the CMU OTL, and that Transarc was
later bought by IBM to become "IBM Pittsburgh Labs".  Did IBM have a
stake in this from the beginning?  Interesting...

> That said, the design model is perhaps not what you're looking for
> --- but demanding that unpaid volunteers reengineer it to fit your
> particular requirements is not going to accomplish very much.

I think you've misunderstood.  I'm not demanding anybody actually do
anything.  I'm arguing that a certain use case is beneficial, and that
it should be kept in mind as a compatability concern when future
changes are made.

I've seen a lot of things posted here that come perilously close to
making "project cells" much more difficult to set up and use, and I
want to try to make people aware of this.

I would actually love to contribute as such a volunteer (as I have
done for gcc and other projects), but my desire to do so has been
totally nuked by the sorts of assumptions ingrained in those who
decide which contributions get accepted and which don't.  The gcc
project has very good cultural mechanisms for working around and
avoiding this sort of situation, and I now appreciate that quite a bit
more.

  - a