[252] in magellan
Linux/Athena Discovery Team minutes from 28 July 1999
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)
Tue Aug 3 13:44:22 1999
Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 13:44:16 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <199908031744.NAA347686@pusey.mit.edu>
From: tb@MIT.EDU (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)
To: linux-disc@MIT.EDU
Cc: magellan@MIT.EDU, vkumar@MIT.EDU
Linux/Athena Discovery Team
28 July 1999
Present: Thomas Bushnell, Oliver Thomas, Abby Fox, Bill Cattey, Greg
Hudson, Emil Sit, Karl Ramm.
We discussed human resources we might need and funding issues.
Resources and issues for development:
* Adding a 3rd platform for release engineering (about 10% FTE)
* OS Support person (50% - 100% FTE, prob about 75%)
* It'll be easy to find people who are good Linux OS people as needed
* We might want a vendor liaison or two, one hardware, one software
The following resources for support:
* Public cluster, private ws support: hire up to about 10 more OLC students,
for a total of about 1.5 FTE.
* Training of consultants
* Time to investigate and license, etc., various 3rd party software
[ The second and third bullets here have no estimates, they would be
absorbable costs. If extra resources are needed but not supplied,
then the effect will be an increase in general sluggishness of
responding to support inquiries and problems. ]
The following resources and issues for hardware service
* Existing models are fine.
* Might be increased load; PC hardware might be less reliable
* People might install other OS's on top of installed cluster
machines, requiring more cluster services work
* Greater theft demand for PC hardware
"Opportunities": Things we might want to do but don't envision having
the resources to do soon:
* Onsite private workstation support
* Dual boot
* Support for specialized hardware
* Fee-based support for layered Athena
-------------------
We talked about the following fee groups--categories of workstations
that should be considered in making fee decisions.
Students: workstations owned and managed by students (RCC, etc.)
Clusters: Athena public workstations in Athena clusters
Labs/Depts/Staff/Faculty: Workstations owned by people with institute
budgets
We agreed that the first two categories should continue to pay no
fees, and the third should continue to pay fees.
We noted that with a layered release there might be people who don't
want hardware support or hotline support, and it might be good to have
a lower fee for those people to pay. Users of layered Athena should
have some fee-based mechanism to have access to licensed software.
Licensing arrangements need to not ignore the needs of students and
other privately owned workstations which are fully part of the Athena
model, or which are running a layered release.
--------------------
We proposed the following outline of a business model, including
without repeating the previous scope and deliverables discussions:
Public clusters:
A pilot of about ten workstations in a single cluster, to be payed
out of the new projects academic budget.
Ongoing, to be folded into the existing Athena renewal amounts.
Note that we are not proposing any additional cluster sets, but
rather a reconfiguration of how many for what kind of hardware.
Staff commitments:
Development resources are substantially already in place.
Increased consulting resources would be drawn perhaps from the
Athena/RCC budget.
