Is anyone or a group of people able to maintain appl/bsd better than MIT

[Miro Jurisic]

>Maybe this is the incentive we need to finally get
>http://www.kerberos.org functional.  Finding a server to host it
>should not be a problem.  The main barrier that I've seen to its
>existence has been that as long as MIT has been the official source
>most people outside MIT have not wanted to step on their feet.

I completely agree with the direction that the MIT Kerberos team is 
taking. They no more need to maintain telnet, ftp, and rlogin than 
they need to maintain a Kerberized IMAP client or a Kerberized AFP 
server.

Maintaining additional software which uses Kerberos should not be the 
job of the MIT Kerberos team. They provide the libraries and the 
utilities needed to manage Kerberos, both on the server side (kadmin, 
etc) and the client side (kinit, etc).

They should not spend their time maintaining a body of code which 
mostly has nothing to do with Kerberos, such as ftp, telnet, or 
rlogin. It takes away from their time to work on the core Kerberos 
functionality.

In addition to that, social and political separation of clients and 
the libraries is likely to further the cleanliness of the API design 
and the reliability of the API specification. Historically, almost 
every application maintained in the Kerberos tree called private 
APIs, thus causing sever long-term problems with compatibility and 
maintenance. This problem should be solved, and separating the 
clients from the library is one way to solve that problem.

That said, if there is community demand for those clients to be 
maintained, the answer clearly seems to be that a group of people, 
possibly with some help from the MIT Kerberos team, should take over 
the maintenance of those clients.

These days, starting an Open Source project has a very low activation 
energy. Start a project on SourceForge, make kerberos.org point to 
it, and off you go. I am sure you all know that.

meeroh

PS. You can call it Kerberos Extras
-- 

<http://web.meeroh.org/> | KB1FMP

A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
Q: Why is top posting frowned upon?