Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 19:30:31 -0500 (EST) From: Chuck Robey <chuckr@mat.net> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com> Cc: Kevin Day <toasty@home.dragondata.com>, hasty@rah.star-gate.com, dm@globalserve.net, dillon@apollo.backplane.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: NFS - Will it ever be fixed? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9903221915490.423-100000@picnic.mat.net> In-Reply-To: <44000.922144597@zippy.cdrom.com>
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On Mon, 22 Mar 1999, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > I'll be happy to accept donations at FreeBSD, Inc. just as I have been > all along, but also be well aware of the fact that spending donations > on NFS is probably the worst possible use of the money. > > Let's just look at all the "I'll donate some money!" calls so far: > I've seen a total of $900 pledged and could probably even reasonably > match this with existing funds 3 times over (whee! $3600!), all of > which would just about pay for about one week of somebody's time at > rock-bottom "I'm doing this just because I like you" hourly consulting > rates. One week is enough time to perhaps understand the problems in > detail, but hardly enough time to fix them. > > Again, assuming rock-bottom rates and somebody truly capable of fixing > NFS-class problems on the job, it's an easy 90 days worth of work and > that would be $36,000 in contractor fees. Even assuming a further > rate reduction for quantity, being FreeBSD, etc. we're probably > talking about at least $25K and a lot of whining from the contractor > about how he's practically giving his time away at that rate. OK. 1) The NFS problems have been with us a long while now, and while your methods *have* solved many problems, they haven't been able to tackle nfs, no matter how important it's been to all of us. 2) If the amount generated turns out to be too low, the funds can just be turned over (after publicly admitting that the fund-raising failed), and this would be an effective counter-argument to ever doing this again. 3) I personally think that $25,000 would very easily be raised, especially when companies using FreeBSD can make targeted donations towards a goal that they would very clearly benefit from (nfs). I think the amount that could be gathered in, say, one month will probably surprise everyone (I'm not trying to hold you to $25,000 here, because I think that might well be too small a guess). 4) This wouldn't even have to be completely restricted to nfs, but it would have to be restricted to a very small, well defined problem set, of general interest. The funds collected would have to be funnelled into a fund whose goals are not general, but specific to this effort. Jordan, in a few minutes, all those bucks were pledged, and companies (which would obviously have greater resources, and could be expected to dwarf individual contributions) didn't even get into the act. Your comment above seems to miss the fact that people only saw the comments for about one hour. If it's such a bad idea, wouldn't you like to see it permanently put to bed? If it fails just this once, I would personally jump on anyone else who ever proposed it. I think it has a great chance to succeed. Just make a very small, well defined goal set, and then clearly advertise on our web page how to contribute specifically towards that special fund (not a general purpose fund). > It'd be far more cost-effective, by comparison, to buy 5 nice machines > at around $2000 a pop and send them to 5 developers who I wanted to > guilt into the process of fixing NFS (and anything else I could think > of). Even more cost-effective still to simply get some 3rd-party > company to foot the bill, as appears to be on the way to happening > now. > > In other words, by all means donate some cash to the project, but > please don't expect me to spend it on NFS hacking - contract labor is > about the worst thing, speaking from a bang-for-buck perspective, that > I could spend the project's money on. Do you know how many thousands > of dollars worth of work I've gotten, for example, for the price of > two $89 network cards? :-) > > - Jordan > > ----------------------------+----------------------------------------------- Chuck Robey | Interests include any kind of voice or data chuckr@glue.umd.edu | communications topic, C programming, and Unix. 213 Lakeside Drive Apt T-1 | Greenbelt, MD 20770 | I run picnic (FreeBSD-current) (301) 220-2114 | and jaunt (Solaris7). ----------------------------+----------------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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