From the mails on this list in the last couple of days on dCache and
DPM, I suspect that not everyone is aware of the GridPP Storage Group.
GridPP funds people doing development and support work on Storage at RAL
and Edinburgh and on Data Management at Glasgow. The GridPP Storage
Group doesn't just mean these people but is a SIG within GridPP to which
anyone is welcome. There are certainly people from other sites attending
the phone conferences and the workshop at RAL. It has been described at
at least the previous two GridPP Collaboration Meetings but I guess not
everyone can always make those.
See for information http://www.gridpp.ac.uk/deployment/links.html . If
you lose this URL it can always be reached from the GridPP Deployment
page. http://www.gridpp.ac.uk/deployment/links.html
Update on the information I mailed the other day :-
It now looks like we will never get an open source licence for dCache.
We are in the process of agreeing a licence with DESY that will give us
access to the source and will give us
permission to distribute the binaries to GridPP.
*Our* contributions will be owned by us (i.e. the copyright) and we will
licence what we contribute, and this will be the GridPP licence. This
still needs to be ironed out in the licence agreement with DESY.
Meanwhile RAL has been given access to the source. Their use of this is
unlikely to be to build new releases but to investigate and fix
problems. These fixes will be fed back to DESY/FNAL but we can release
GRidPP releases so we are not subject to delays in bugfixes.
The GridPP effort isn't sufficient to commit to building new releases.
Anyone who feels that they need support for other OS should discuss with
DESY whether they can get access to the source as part of a
collaboration with DESY and contribute to the distribution. I will be
happy to broker any such discussion.
The main requirement that is left unsatisfied is that of folk who wish
to eyeball all code they run on their systems. I don't think this should
be left to individual sysadmins. All of our middleware should be subject
to external security review, gLite: for example. I have no solution to
this.
John
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