Slashdot Mirror
IBM Releases AFS
Raleel writes: "IBM has released the source code to AFS for AIX 4.2, Digital/Compaq UNIX 4.0, Red Hat Linux 6.2, Solaris 2.6 and 2.7, and Windows NT 4.0. You can download it from here. It is under IBM's Open Source license." This was supposed to be released a while ago, but it's good to see IBM following-thru. For more information, see our article regarding the open sourcing of AFS and the article from 1998 regarding the porting effort.
One of the things nice about what happened here is that a slew of documentation was released with the software - in general, I have noticed relatively sparse documentation around new open software. Not a complaint, just something I noticed.
It's nice that IBM has released OpenAFS two or so months after they said that it would be released, but a Free (libre) clone .
called ARLA has existed for sometime, and in my experience hasn't caused me any problems on several platforms, and is GPL'd
Also, arla supports many platforms, including (Free|Net|Open)BSD, and non x86 Linuxen, which Transarc (the IBM owned
company which actually develops AFS) hasn't bothered porting AFS to.
Arun
Someone moderate this bloke's post down as stupid.
Buddy, AFS might be old but that doesn't mean it is "dead".
AFS is a superior distributed file system which has a _proven_ track record. It has extensible ACL's. It has redundancy. It has fault tolerance. It is scalable. It has backing up built into its architecture. Kerberos fits nicely into the picture.
Let's say you have a large corporation, maybe you merged with other corporations. So now there's one corporation with all these departments that trust/might not trust eachother. Unix file permissions _break down horribly_ here whereas AFS shines. Just make groups for each corporation, add group names you trust to the ACL list of your directory and you're done. But that's not all, you can add individual users to your directory.
AFS is perfect for today's dot-coms who are now merging and forming huge corporations. And now that it is open source, it will be improved upon hopefully - not too familiar with the license.
Please read about AFS before posting ignorant-bad-big-corporation posts such as yours.
We should stand up and demand that they fully support Open Source by releasing code to viable products. If hundreds of thousands of programmers can do it every day we should expect the big guys to find a way to make it work.
lmao. Thank you for amusing me.
Actually, the best model for open sourcing your code is exactly what IBM is doing here -- release the code, sell the support.
Why shouldn't the do what they've done?
-C
"This above all, to thine own self be true"
I don't get it. First they scrap their plans for the Crusoe laptop, then the open source AFS. And then they use an obscure prprietry license on their open sourcing which makes it next to useless for most Open Source apps.
Do they support Open Source or not?
In case you don't know what AFS is (wink, wink) and would like to know more, here is the AFS FAQ:
/afs. At the time, changing the root of the filesystem
was a non-trivial undertaking. So, to save the early AFS sites from having
to rename their filesystem, AFS remained as the name and filesystem root.
...
What is AFS?
AFS is a distributed filesystem that enables co-operating hosts (clients and servers) to efficiently share filesystem resources across both local area and wide area networks.
AFS is marketed, maintained, and extended by Transarc Corporation.
AFS is based on a distributed file system originally developed at the Information Technology Center at Carnegie-Mellon University that was called the "Andrew File System".
"Andrew" was the name of the research project at CMU - honouring the founders of the University. Once Transarc was formed and AFS became a product, the "Andrew" was dropped to indicate that AFS had gone beyond the Andrew research project and had become a supported, product quality filesystem. However, there were a number of existing cells that rooted their filesystem as
What are the benefits of using AFS?
The main strengths of AFS are its:
+ caching facility
+ security features
+ simplicity of addressing
+ scalability
+ communications protocol
Here are some of the advantages of using AFS in more detail: ( see FAQ for more)
The IBM public license doesn't specify HOW you are supposed to get hold of the source, but that you do have a right to get it.
If there is something atrocious about this license, I'd love to hear about it. It looks a whole lot like the Mozilla license, actually.
---
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
IBM isn't doing this? What about:
- SashXB (LGPL)
- JFS (GPL)
- Jikes (IBM Public License)
Or how about all the money IBM is pouring into Linux?- IBM invests $200M in Asia-Pacific Linux
- IBM Linux Wristwatch
- IBM's Overview of Linux (for investors)
- IBM banks on Linux
This has been but a selection of articles I could find in five minutes.---
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
I've never understood this attitude. Especially in the context of the article, this strikes me as extremely ungrateful, rude and even childish. Something about Gift Horses and Mouths springs to mind.
You seem to be saying "Large companies whose business models include the concepts of selling and servicing software should immediately release their entire source code to the world at large". Without getting into the ethics, or the value of one business model over another, this attitude appears to be saying that the whole world should just stop what it's doing and obey the commands of a particular group of people.
Open Source / Free Software is a wonderfull, valuable, empowering movement. It's not the totality of the field, and it probably never will be. When corporations whose entire mindset involves the concept of exchange of cash for goods or services rendered embrace even a fraction of the values of these movements, it is indeed a cause for celebration. Not a time for beating them over the head that they haven't come all the way over from the Dark Side.
--
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
Because of the licencing, this can't be included in the core distribution of our favorite Linux flavours.
It's open, but not free.
---
Desperation is a stinky cologne