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Date: Fri, 10 Mar 1995 09:29:15 -0800
From: karant@gallium.csusb.edu (Dr. Yasha Karant)
Message-Id: <9503101729.AA11675@gallium.csusb.edu>
To: freebsd-hackers@freefall.cdrom.com
Subject: BSD Consortium and extra-consortium funding
Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk

Folks,

For some time I have been toying with the following idea.  In fact, I
proposed this to one of the FreeBSD organization honchos, who rejected
it for reasons which seem primarily political and social; however, it
might be worthy of consideration by a larger audience.

The various consortia out there which accomplish useful work
(including X, FibreChannel, and others) [and the name of the
organization is not always "consortium" -- other titles are also in
use, but the effective structure is always the same] are generally
based on a mix of private and public (read Federal grant/contract)
money, with one or more universities involved.  These
"Industry/University/Government" consortia are encouraged by Federal
agenda (both Clinton and Congress, in slightly different forms).  I
can outline the details of several approaches for implementation if
there is interest, along with realistic funding goals.  The resulting
work can by GPL'd, FreeBSD'd, copylefted, or whatever distribution
covenants (or lack thereof) we mutually desire, although *if* we port
from / develop to proprietary applications and/or devices, *some*
restrictions will probably have to be applied to the resulting
source/binaries.

I have contacts with industry and have a reasonable track record of
success with external funding.  As a university base, I can provide
disk storage and Internet access, along with the usual plethora of
student workers (much of the actual coding in the "professional"
consortia is done by students at the various academic institutions
involved).

A consortia would annouce FreeBSD (or whatever we decide to call the
OS and its APIs to avoid any infringements, difficulties, etc.) as a
"real" entity to be given serious consideration, and would allow us to
develop a real support team.  We would *not* be competing with
the proprietary implementations (Novell UNIX SVR4, OSF/1 DEC ALPHA,
etc.) for those customers who wanted proprietary cradle-to-grave full
service, but would be providing an innovative *production* *stable* test
bed (as was done with the original UC CSRG BSD).

Yasha Karant
karant@gallium.csusb.edu