[OpenAFS] Re: [OpenAFS-announce] fin

[Derek Atkins]

Dear Daria,

I remember those early days with much fondness, and I'm happy then (as
I'm happy now) to be able to call you my friend.  While I haven't been
extremely active in OpenAFS for a while, you have certainly been a rock
of the project.  However I'm also sure that it will, somehow, survive
with your departure.  Regardless, you will be missed.

Please keep us aprised of your future endeavors.

Yours,

-derek

Daria Phoebe Brashear <shadow@gmail.com> writes:

> It's been two years, today, since one of the defining moments in my recent
> life. As I picked myself up from my toppled bicycle, some folks pulled up, and
> shortly I was speeding across the city. I couldn't see what was passing
> outside, but I knew where I was every inch of the way. This is my city. A
> friend jokes that the person I used to be died in the hospital that night so I
> could be born. He is not far off the truth. Not all such defining moments in
> my life have involved broken bones and being bandaged like a mummy, though:
>
> I've never seen a computer with such a large monitor, I thought, as I sat down
> in front of a 19" monochrome display. Just a hair over twenty-four years ago,
> I found myself sitting at a DECstation 3100, typing the username and initial
> password of the form all students received, and having an unfamiliar graphical
> user interface come into view. Until that point, the single Macintosh with
> System 7 at my high school was the extent of the GUIs I'd come in contact
> with.
>
> I don't remember what I first typed up, but the custom-built computing
> environment that had preceded me at Carnegie Mellon by only a few years
> offered its own rich text editor. I'd become quite familiar with it while
> doing assignments over the next few months. I saved my file, and logged out.
> Curious as to what would happen, I logged in again immediately to confirm that
> things looked the same as they had moments earlier. But it was time for work,
> and I again logged out so I could go into a back office in the library and
> spend several hours cataloging new books. Later that day, though, I chose a
> different computer, and tried again. My files were there, too. The concept was
> completely new to me.
>
> By my second year as an undergraduate, I was well-acquainted with AFS. I had
> acquired a workstation of my own, a Sun 3/160, and had set it up as a hybrid
> between the university's computing system and standalone. AFS was a commercial
> product, but I was able to find binaries the university had licensed that I
> could use. Weeks later, in a moment that would presage work I now do in
> helping to improve security and usability, I realized that source code
> probably could be found in a readable place somewhere in this giant global
> filesystem, and soon had something only slightly obsolete that I could build
> myself.
>
> My first full time job was with the university's academic computing
> organization. When the previous Transarc/IBM site contact left for a job
> elsewhere, AFS became my responsibility. By this point, I knew how the pieces
> worked, even if I was not familiar with every detail of the internals. So, six
> years from when I discovered the wonders of a distributed filesystem, I found
> myself in a position to push to legally develop for what was essentially a
> closed source commercial product for most of the world. The community
> grapevine suggested the DARPA grants used to fund some early work on the
> product could be used to obtain public domain copies of some of the source,
> and I used my new-found role as site contact to ask hard questions. After all,
> I had been given a bully pulpit.
>
> The first piece to be thus freed was Rx, the RPC system layered above UDP. A
> copy of the letter I received from the corporate attorney describing what was
> legally available has been online since shortly thereafter. I passed the
> source along, and a group of developers at a university in Stockholm picked it
> up for their project: an AFS protocol-compatible client called Arla. I soon
> found myself working on it, but at the same time I still had access to the
> fully-functional closed source product, so I had to exercise care in what I
> did.
>
> Just a couple years later, after increasingly-scattershot support of the
> product, IBM announced their intended end-of-life for AFS. I was one among
> many voices who started nagging immediately. And so, when in summer 2000 I was
> at an academic computing forum in Seattle, the call we received from IBM
> provided news that was welcome and relieving: AFS would be open-sourced just a
> few months hence. My peers at other institutions that used AFS and had source
> licenses joined with me to help create an organization which would be ready to
> take the code drop and do something great with it. I proposed an organization
> modeled roughly on the one that had hosted the forum where the call had been
> taken. To insulate against member organizations trying to sink the product,
> their employees would be individual members of our board, and represent the
> interests of their employer in the way they felt best captured it. For better
> and for worse, the open source organization I proposed then is the one we have
> had ever since.
>
> OpenAFS, as it would come to be called, was released just about the time
> Subversion was. Transarc had built their own version control on top of RCS,
> but our code drop would not include that. We got code representing a distinct
> point in time, and had to build a new means of managing it. Again I drew on
> what was familiar, and built a partial toolset above CVS to mimic the best
> parts of the way in which Transarc had managed their source. Among the first
> things that happened was the need to apply the IBM Public License to the code
> in a way that correctly represented what rights could be ascribed to which
> files. There, again, I can tell you that the group of us who did the work made
> some unfortunate mistakes. We did the best we could in the face of limited
> accommodation from IBM's legal staff, who felt they'd spent too much time
> already in getting to the point we were at.
>
> In hindsight, the license OpenAFS was saddled with has been its biggest issue.
> IBM never used that instance of the license again. Ongoingly, its
> incompatibility with the GPL has combined with other factors to make Linux
> support a heavy burden: sometimes free isn't *free enough*.
>
> In spite of the issues facing us and the bare shoestring of resources
> available, we were able to support and improve OpenAFS on a variety of
> platforms. The common ones, Solaris and Linux, got more love than the exotic
> enterprise System 5 variants, to be sure, but we released and supported
> platforms including AIX, HP/UX, and IRIX. We added support for NetBSD and
> eventually MacOS X. Just under a year into the project, I found myself on a
> train to Boston. Over the course of the long ride, I built the first autoconf
> support OpenAFS ever had. Mobile internet was not in my grasp, and laptop
> drives were considerably smaller. I took some documentation and examples with
> me, and learned as I went. It was characteristic of my experiences getting to
> that point: my formal education was in engineering rather than computer
> science.
>
> Over the course of the next several years, there would be a community to grow
> and sustain in addition to simply caring for code. The community was comprised
> of the end-users of the product, the developers -- volunteers from the
> perspective of OpenAFS, and the organizations which deployed it. As with any
> mature technology, we had many people you'd consider to be 'characters'
> involved. Certainly at the time I was one of them. My personal life was one
> high in stress and low in happiness, and so anyone who perceived me as
> miserable probably wasn't far off the mark. It was made no easier by being,
> effectively, the provider of last resort. If no one else would do something
> that we absolutely needed, I marshaled the only resource I controlled: me.
> Still, I tried with varying success to be involved in positive change.
>
> Four and a half years into the OpenAFS project, I had reached a point where I
> felt that my relationship with Carnegie Mellon had reached the point of
> diminishing returns. We were bad for each other, even toxic. I moved on to a
> full time position with Sine Nomine Associates, for whom I had been doing
> contract work on OpenAFS for several years already. More personally, I took
> the largest leap of faith I'd ever done in my life. By the time I hosted the
> 5th birthday of the project at my house, I had unloaded much of the misery as
> well as about 90 of the pounds on my person, meaning the weight thus lifted
> was both literal and figurative. For the next 3 years, I continued to work on
> growing OpenAFS while also supporting a number of corporate and academic
> customers in my new-found role.
>
> Again, though, I felt the need for change, and moved on to try my hand
> independently. I considered again, as I had when I left CMU, if the time was
> right to do something else with my life. As previously, though, I felt I had
> more to give to OpenAFS, and I did not want to let the community down. So, I
> kept contributing, and ended up getting onboard at Your File System, Inc.
>
> Much as when things started with AFS, the global filesystem product we have
> been developing is just one piece of a suite, the fabric which can and will
> tie together many uses. Auristor was built from the start to be compatible
> with the AFS protocol shared with the original IBM product, OpenAFS, Arla and
> Linux kAFS, while still offering new security, reliability and performance
> features not previously available in any of the others. It has been an
> exciting time, again, to work on a distributed filesystem.
>
> As you have possibly also noticed, though, it has also been an exciting time
> to be me. Forty years into my life, I finally came to grips with something I
> knew but did not fully understand on the day I sat down at that DECstation so
> many years ago. I did not learn much of the reality of what it meant to be
> transgender until I found the Internet. Even in its primitive state, the
> indexes to information I was able to find when I was finally introduced to
> Gopher far dwarfed what I could learn simply from perusing the card catalog at
> the vast library across the ravine from me. What I learned, early on,
> contributed to the hopelessness that would continue to accumulate. So when at
> last I realized it was time for a second giant leap of faith in my life, I
> again jumped.
>
> My new epoch came just about when my unplanned hospital visit did. It was very
> trying to explain the situation repeatedly at the time. I had to carefully
> pick about in the world, ensuring I would find support to sustain me in the
> face of possible devastation, and it took many months to again patch together
> my life in a manner where I felt like I could safely just exist. And there
> would be damage unintentionally inflicted upon me even more often than when
> deliberate malice was in play.
>
> In spite of that, just weeks after beginning hormone replacement therapy, I
> found myself in a lecture hall at CERN with some of you, and spoke as I always
> had about the status of our progress. My self-awareness as I did so was
> certainly far greater, though, than it had been for any other time, and the
> blazing red dress that clothed me was a statement of self-embodiment I had
> never made in a public forum before. I had no idea what to expect, but what I
> got was pretty much the same as always: the respect you'd hopefully accord any
> peer.
>
> As I continued to work both on filesystems and on myself, I was afforded many
> opportunities to see shortcomings that I had managed to overlook before. The
> journey to becoming externally congruent with the person I always was inside
> lifted a lot of extra weight from my shoulders, and so unburdened I could take
> on things I might previously have glossed over. The OpenAFS community had
> never had much consideration for diversity, as in many ways we were not so
> much recruiting new members as trying to sustain and support the ones we
> already had. This is probably my greatest personal regret looking back. And
> while I was not and have not been made to feel unwelcome, I felt it best for
> others to ensure that going forward, a code of conduct for contributors was in
> place, something OpenAFS has just adopted. We also, for the first time, had a
> code of conduct for attendees at an AFS Workshop just weeks ago. To my
> knowledge, there was no inappropriate behavior, but having a framework in
> place to deal is like with anything else a good idea.
>
> My spouse, my colleagues, my family and my friends have all been wonderful and
> supportive regarding my transition, but it has imposed new needs in my life,
> as well as allowing me the opportunity to see new ways to contribute to the
> global good. I can honestly tell you that the present is the happiest I have
> been in my life. But there is still much work to be done personally,
> professionally and globally, and I am but one woman. I will have additional
> stresses in my transition. Auristor, our signature product, will require yet
> more of my time. And there are so many injustices in the world that I feel I
> need to help right.
>
> So it is with great regret that I now tender my resignation from the OpenAFS
> project as an elder, a gatekeeper, and a member of the foundation creation
> committee. It has been a great run over these past nearly 15 years, and as
> someone who works at a vendor supplying AFS-compatible technology I shall
> continue to be part of the community. However, I have been increasingly unable
> to devote sufficient time to OpenAFS, and rather than give far from the best I
> have to offer, I feel it is best to move aside and give those who might step
> up and do better the full and unburdened opportunity to do so. I hope to run
> into you at future AFS events, and please know that I will continue to
> contribute in the ways I feel I can.
>
> All the best,
> Daria Phoebe
>

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord@MIT.EDU                        PGP key available