At 06:50 PM 5/9/2008, Brian Sebby wrote:
I think it would be a great idea to have some sort of membership option in an OpenAFS non-profit organization. OpenAFS has been asking for donations, but unfortunately, Argonne and a number of other organizations (mostly government and academic) simply can't donate money without any benefit back to our organization. We could contract with some of the folks providing AFS support if there was a feature we needed, but it's simply out of the question for us to be able to just donate to AFS.
Your "benefit back" is the continual improvement and debugging of OpenAFS. You should have already contracted with either "Secure Endpoints" http://www.secure-endpoints.com, or "Sine Nomine" http://www.sinenomine.net/openafs/ for a "maintenance contract". We have one, and it has served us well. Since OpenAFS is essentially "free", the "maintenance contract" is more of a consulting contract really, but it serves the same function. Talk to Jeffrey Altman about these arrangments at the workshop, or call him directly. I'm sure he would be happy to work with you.
If you care about whether OpenAFS sees a future or not, then you NEED to do this.
Rodney Rodney M. Dyer Operations and Systems (Specialist) Mosaic Computing Group William States Lee College of Engineering University of North Carolina at Charlotte Email: rmdyer(a)uncc.edu Web: http://www.coe.uncc.edu/~rmdyer Phone: (704)687-3518 Help Desk Line: (704)687-3150 FAX: (704)687-2352 Office: Cameron Hall, Room 232 _______________________________________________ OpenAFS-info mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openafs.org/mailman/listinfo/openafs-info
