Dear Lustre Developers & Users, It is with great pleasure that we write to tell you that the High Performance Cluster File Systems Software Foundation (HPCFS Software Foundation) has been incorporated in the United States. Oracle is being invited to become a member of the Foundation and to grant the originating foundation permission to do business as the ?Lustre Foundation?. HPCFS is also creating a UK affiliate foundation in order to have a non-profit affiliate in the European Union. The originating US foundation, by collaboration amongst all future members, is set up to provide the forum for sharing requirements, experience with deployment and use, education and training, a single integrated software repository and development tree, quality assurance and testing infrastructure, and a single point of worldwide approved software release and documentation distribution for the GPL Lustre File System, as does the Open Fabrics Alliance (OFA) for its OFED software. The OFA has enabled the vendor and customer communities to collaborate in evolving the interconnect software for HPC from a highly fragmented to a unified software approach. We have every reason to believe that HPCFS will have a similar successful trajectory as the IP, patent and collaborative working and voting relationships that work in OFA have been replicated in the originating foundation bylaws. Initiation and annual dues are intended to be modest ($10,000 and less), After the first year, Board members will be elected by the members annually. The foundation does not intend to deliver development or support services itself, to avoid competition with established vendors that perform these services as part of their business operations. Instead, it will be a forum for collaboration among such vendors and the Lustre user community. The HPCFS was formed as a result of the discussions initiated in by Prof. Thomas Lippert in Juelich concerning the availability of Open Lustre Support. An initial approach to the formation of a Lustre Foundation was presented there. Since then the foundation initiative has received overwhelmingly positive reactions from many government and industrial organizations, including support from Lustre leadership at Oracle Inc, who is the copyright holder of the Lustre code and the owner of the trademark. After much discussion with Oracle and many others, and leveraging the OFA experience, the foundation has been incorporated and it will apply for IRS 501(c) 3 tax exemption for its activities/operations. There are two ways the originating foundation can work internationally:- 1) The originating foundation can accept memberships from vendors, government, academic institutions and individuals living and working anywhere in the world, or 2) The foundation is also set up to work with affiliate member foundations in other countries or regions, which can be formed to represent their interest and collectively inter-operate with the originating foundation. Each affiliate can work with any entity in their locality to achieve its own self interest as well as participate in the originating foundation. We are inviting you to become an early member of the Foundation by filling out and returning the attached Memorandum of Intent. During the coming months this initial Board of Directors, together with Bill Boas who intends to act as Acting-Executive Director, will finalize the bylaws and will form Working Groups in charge of collaboratively setting up and managing the Foundations work. Examples of the functions of such working groups might be - Requirements, File Systems Architecture, Engineering, Testing and Quality Assurance, Bug Tracking and Sustaining Engineering, Marketing and Promotion, Documentation and Discussion, Education and Training. The Board will be searching for and recruiting volunteers from members who agree to chair, contribute and participate in these working groups. We anticipate coming together in Europe in early September and intend to have a full face-to-face meeting of the members in the SC10 timeframe in New Orleans in mid November. We look forward to working with you. Please complete and return the memorandum of intent indicating your interest in joining, contributing and participating in the Foundation. Thank you, Regards, Bill Boas Peter Braam -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.lustre.org/pipermail/lustre-devel/attachments/20100809/a4f29ed4/attachment-0001.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: HPCFS Memo of Intent, membership and Sponsorship.doc Type: application/msword Size: 32768 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.lustre.org/pipermail/lustre-devel/attachments/20100809/a4f29ed4/attachment-0001.doc