[OpenAFS] Proposal: OpenAFS foundation to develop AFS server appliance

[Troy Benjegerdes]

> In my opinion, it is not necessarily too late for an OpenAFS Foundation.
>  It is too late for an OpenAFS Foundation to market the existing
> implementation.
> 
> Jeffrey Altman
> 
> 

I completely agree that marketing the existing implementation
is a waste of time.

What does seem to be worth marketing are two things, to two 
(superficially) very different audiences:

1) the YFSI implementation, to 'enterprise' users, with the laundry
 list of required enterprise features

2) A Debian-free-software guidelines compliant implementation, which
could, in theory be derived from the existing implementation, or from
a release of a subset of the YFSI implementation in, say 5 years.


As far as I am aware, AFS has the longest history of operation of any
'enterprise' class filesystem, and if we can actually pull together
a foundation with sufficient funding to show a roadmap for 5 to 10
years with both enterprise and free software components, we have
an extremely compelling story for long-term file storage which no
other filesystem or product can come close to matching.

I will also argue that any enterprise user that is interested in
recovering data being stored now in 15 to 20 years will see the
value of (2) above.