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Funding Open Source (Was Re: Accessing cn=config)



--On Thursday, February 16, 2006 9:35 PM -0800 Howard Chu <hyc@symas.com> wrote:

Quanah Gibson-Mount wrote: 
--On Friday, February 17, 2006 12:30 PM +1100 Dave Horsfall
<daveh@ci.com.au> wrote:

So, is anyone actually using it? 

I've tested it, but so few things in 2.3 actually support cn=config, I
found it impossible to apply in a real world situation.

Of course, you know exactly what's required to improve the situation. 

Yes, I know what is required.

Either:

(a) Stanford does the work
or
(b) Stanford pays someone to do the work
or
(c) Stanford waits and hopes someone else does the work.


What is frustrating to me, is that there are so many institutions out there benefiting from the work being done on OpenLDAP, and yet I see few of them contributing to the OpenLDAP project. While Symas, SysNet, PADL, and Kurt's parent organization definitely make consistent and ongoing contributions to OpenLDAP through the time invested by its employees, there are few organizations outside of that I see that are particularly involved. I know HP has contributed some functionality, and I apologize to anyone I may have missed.

The basic thing here is, Open Source does not mean "free of cost". Whether it is Howard's, Pierangelo's, Kurt's, or Luke's time involved in doing the development, something somewhere is paying for that time being spent in development. Stanford has been happy to contribute to this since OpenLDAP 2.1, with:

(a) Making 2.1 stable (back-bdb, sasl handling, Cyrus SASL improvments, and Heimdal improvements) all funded through hiring Symas
(b) Having dynamic groups supported to 2.2, again funded by hiring Symas
(c) "star" cert support via a patch that I wrote
(d) The value sorting attribute overlay, funded by hiring Symas.
(e) The time and effort I spend regularly testing various OpenLDAP features, etc.

And Stanford is currently working with another organization on having GnuTLS support added to OpenLDAP (via funding once again).

I think cn=config is a major enhancement to OpenLDAP, and I would love to be able to use it. At the moment, however, as far as funding priorities for Stanford, other things come first. However, there are many other institutions out there using OpenLDAP right now who also could benefit from cn=config, and certainly from the interest on the list, know they could benefit from it. I would love to see some of these other groups step up and join in with contributing to the development of OpenLDAP, whether it is time from their staff or money to fund the work via one of the primary developers. Not only will they enjoy the benefit of having those additional features (as will everyone else), they will then be contributing to the ongoing life and growth of the project.

Anyhow, my 2c.

--Quanah

--
Quanah Gibson-Mount
Principal Software Developer
ITS/Shared Application Services
Stanford University
GnuPG Public Key: http://www.stanford.edu/~quanah/pgp.html