Rodney M. Dyer wrote:
At 11:42 AM 5/11/2008, Esther Filderman wrote:
There have been mechanisms in the past to directly fund OpenAFS; the
AFS & Kerberos Best Practices Workshop raises money for OpenAFS, and
there is a fund through Usenix, to take advantage of it being a 501c3.
As it's own 501c3 corporation OpenAFS would be able to accept
donations without a third party, something that would probably make it
easier -- and more comfortable -- for many sites to do. Additionally,
there are resources that neither company can always directly provide,
especially things like hardware.
I have personally donated to OpenAFS, but quite simply, as I am not
independently wealthy, my donation isn't worth more than a few hours
of consulting. My point was that if any IT shops are like ours, we
can't just "donate" money. Especially as a state funded institution,
we can only "buy" products or services that fulfill our needs. When
it comes to OpenAFS consulting, we actually need to create a
justification. OpenAFS, as open source software, is competing against
commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software, the traditional "cost" in IT
computing. Maintenance contracts are typically purchased with the
COTS software which is implied justification. Consulting costs are
much easier to push through purchasing channels in most companies than
donations.
I think there is a subtle but important difference in the two cases
described.
1. There are some sites that want maintenance or support contracts, but
others may want to have support contracts for the support and to help
OpenAFS. Some of these sites, as Rodney described, cannot make donations
for the sake of donating.
2. There are other organizations like google that can and do give
straight donations. This is the case where the OpenAFS consortium would
make things easier.
For support and maintenance contracts, I would think that sites would
continue to contract directly with Secure Endpoints, Sine Nomine, or
someone else, unless the contracts were too big and needed the OpenAFS
non-profit to sign the contract and subcontract the work to both Sine
Nomine & Secure Endpoints.
In addition to donations, the non-profit would also help as a central
place to consolidate shared resources like hard
ware, the website, and trademarks. This saves individuals from taking
the burden on themselves of hosting these resources.
Jason
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