[OpenAFS] Funding the formation of an OpenAFS Foundation

[Russ Allbery]

Troy Benjegerdes <hozer@hozed.org> writes:

> I respect the judgement and leadership of the elders, but I also have no
> obligation (or interest) in following the leadership of an unincorporated
> loose association which, as near as I can tell, has not produced any code
> to solve the problem I need solved (IPv6 and working rxgk).

I think everyone is on the same page about this.  You indeed don't have
any obligation in following the leadership of anyone.

I think what everyone is trying to say to you mostly boils down to two
points:

1. The people currently involved in the OpenAFS project are not idiots.
   They have, by and large, already thought of the obvious things that are
   apparent to anyone who spends some time thinking about the governance
   of the project.  If something that semes like a good idea hasn't
   happened, it's for some sort of reason.  Maybe you can be more
   successful than others have, maybe you can't, but it's probably a good
   idea to try to understand the reason why things haven't happened rather
   than just loudly complain that they haven't.  Furthermore, some of the
   reasons are complicated and can't be easily reduced to a simple
   paragraph, and they're going to require a bit of effort and patience to
   understand.  (The exact relationship between the project and IBM, for
   example, I despair of explaining properly.  I'm not sure I completely
   understand it myself.)

2. You can do whatever you want, in the open source way, with the code.
   You don't, however, get to dictate to other people what *they're* going
   to work on, and you've been doing quite a remarkable amount of
   dictating, demanding, threatening, insulting, and volunteering the time
   of other people.  It's really quite annoying, and has left me, for one,
   with little desire to help you and quite a bit of desire to say snarky
   things about you in public.  If you think you're just trying to be
   persuasive, well, you're failing horribly and should rethink your
   approach.

You of course don't have any obligation to care about how that comes
across to others, but presumably you think that being part of a community
is more useful than just striking out on your own or you wouldn't continue
to participate here.  So I assume that you don't *actually* hold most of
the people currently working on the project in contempt and instead are
having a failure of communication.  But that's really how it's coming
across right now, and no one feels particularly motivated by contempt.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>