It's probably worth being clear, just in case anyone missed it, that I stepped down from being an Elder and Gatekeeper a while back, and all of my comments on this thread are purely as an individual. I'm intentionally dropping some of the filters that I was applying when I was formally part of project governance and being a bit more direct than I probably otherwise would be, since I'm less worried about having everything I say taken as a statement on behalf of the project.
So y'all should also update the filters with which you read me. :) Ted Creedon <tcree...@easystreet.net> writes: > If IBM wants backward compatibility they should pay for it. They're > coasting on your work. > What's in a name? Who cares? I was one of the people who from time to time suggested that we just rename AFS to get away from the trademark issue in discussions among the Elders. So to some extent I'm sympathetic. There are some strong arguments against doing so, though. AFS has quite a lot of name recognition outside the set of people on this mailing list. There are decades of mentions, discussions, blog posts, and so forth out there in the world, articles in Wikipedia, mentions in file system comparisons, and past experience with AFS by everyone who has graduated from Stanford, MIT, CMU, UMich, etc. There's a lot of name recognition that we lose by changing the name, and given that one of the things we're struggling with is convincing people that AFS is a viable enterprise file system, losing that name recognition is a problem. But, somewhat more significantly, it's not like we're in a position to increase the pace of development all that much by abandoning the things that IBM wants but that other people don't care about. Sure, we could take kaserver out of the tree (which would actually hurt a few sites other than IBM), but that isn't really going to help people develop new code faster. It simplifies things a bit, and removes some old code, but it's not that huge of a change. Most of the things that IBM cares about we've been told are important by many other people in the community as well, such rxkad support remaining until people have a chance to migrate to something else. I think if we were in a position where there was something that we could actually ship, or at least feasibly develop in a short time frame, that IBM were blocking, the situation would look much different. But it's far from clear to me that this is the case. Most of the problems that people want to solve by breaking backward compatibility probably shouldn't be solved that way for reasons entirely separate from IBM's concerns. -- Russ Allbery (r...@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> _______________________________________________ OpenAFS-info mailing list OpenAFS-info@openafs.org https://lists.openafs.org/mailman/listinfo/openafs-info
