[OpenAFS] Funding the formation of an OpenAFS Foundation (fwd)

[Russ Allbery]

Troy Benjegerdes <hozer@hozed.org> writes:

>> Backward compatibility is a requirement for the entire community.  The
>> only criteria that is specific to IBM is that we cannot turn off older
>> RPCs for which there already are replacements and we cannot completely
>> get rid of rxkad or kaserver from the code base.  There are also some
>> implications for the rx transport.

> I'll have to respectfully disagree with that.

> When I get around to it, I'm going to rip out rxkad, kaserver, and
> pretty much any other encryption than AES out of the TFS fork.

I think Jeff's statement isn't true of absolutely everyone in the
community.  It is, however, true of a rather large number of us, which is
what he's trying to say.  For example, the above is true of Stanford.  A
version of AFS with better encryption but no rxkad would be effectively
undeployable and hence useless to us.  You cannot make a large
organization turn on a dime; we need some sort of meaningful migration
strategy, and that means supporting both for an interim period.

> And we are in a circular dependency.. we can't move forward because of
> lack of funding, and the compelling features that would attract new
> users and new funding are blocked because of the cost of doing new
> features and being compatible with old clients.

> How do we break this, and get some new users and new funding?

This is an intensely irritating question, given that Jeff has already told
you, at great length, exactly how he is attempting to break that deadlock,
an approach that he believes in so strongly that he's invested vast
quantities of his time and an appreciable amount of money.  Clearly,
that's his answer, and clearly he's thought a lot about it.  You can
certainly disagree with it, but acting like he hasn't answered the
question is disingenuous.

It's very hard to read your repeated asking of the same question that's
already been answered as anything other than an attempt to get a different
answer that you like better.  If someone else had a different answer that
we liked better, we would have done that a long time ago.

Maybe you'll come up with a great answer that we've all missed, or be able
to implement one of the solutions that we weren't able to implement.  If
so, great!  I eagerly await your success.  But my guess is that you're not
going to succeed by pissing off everyone who had previously tried, or by
refusing to even listen to their experience so that you know where the
pitfalls are.

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