OpenAFS is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

implementation of the

Andrew Andrew is the English form of a given name common in many countries. In the 1990s, it was among the top ten most popular names given to boys in English-speaking countries. "Andrew" is frequently shortened to "Andy" or "Drew". The word is derive ...

distributed file system A clustered file system is a file system which is shared by being simultaneously mounted on multiple servers. There are several approaches to clustering, most of which do not employ a clustered file system (only direct attached storage for ...

(AFS). AFS was originally developed at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technolog ...

, and developed as a commercial product by the

Transarc Transarc Corporation was a private Pittsburgh-based software company founded in 1989 by Jeffrey Eppinger, Michael L. Kazar, Alfred Spector, and Dean Thompson of Carnegie Mellon University. Transarc commercialized the Andrew File System (AFS), ...

Corporation, which was subsequently acquired by IBM. At ''LinuxWorld'' on 15 August 2000, IBM announcedos-afs
archived their plans to release a version of their commercial AFS product under the

IBM Public License The IBM Public License (IPL) is a free open-source software license written and occasionally used by IBM. It is approved by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and described as an "open-source license" by the Open Source Initiative. The IPL diff ...

. This became OpenAFS. Today, OpenAFS is actively developed for a wide range of operating system families including:

AIX Aix or AIX may refer to: Computing * AIX, a line of IBM computer operating systems *An Alternate Index, for a Virtual Storage Access Method Key Sequenced Data Set * Athens Internet Exchange, a European Internet exchange point Places Belgiu ...

, Mac OS X, Darwin, HP-UX, Irix, Solaris, Linux, Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, NetBSD.

Foundation

Th
OpenAFS Foundation
was established on May 20, 2013 as a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering the stability and growth of OpenAFS.

Governance

Governance of the project is split between the board of elders who consider issues of strategic direction, and the gatekeepers who control the source repository.

Licensing

Although there is no legal entity that owns the OpenAFS source code, copyright on many files is attributed to IBM. Most of the source is covered by the IPL, however several files in the tree are covered by university

vanity license License proliferation is the phenomenon of an abundance of already existing and the continued creation of new software licenses for software and software packages in the FOSS ecosystem. License proliferation affects the whole FOSS ecosystem neg ...

s. All applicable licenses are listed in a file in the source repository calle
openafs/doc/LICENSE

Development

Th

over the last five years have mad

to both the implementation and the AFS3 protocol without breaking interoperability with the IBM/Transarc releases. Since that announcement was written, several large development projects have been integrated, such as: 64-bit MS-Windows support, MS-Windows 7 support, Apple-Mac OS X v10.4-v10.9 support, and th
demand attach fileserver
Many development projects are at various stages of completion. The following are several prominent examples: * Fileserver backend utilizing object storage
rxtcp

rxgk
* rxk5
Instrumentation framework

Byte-range locking support

Deployment

The existing user base includes small single server cells as well as large multinational deployments spanning academia, private research laboratories, government, and commercial entities. A small snapshot of the deployed AFS cells can be found by reviewing the contents of th
CellServDB
file distributed with OpenAFS.

References

External links

OpenAFS websiteAFS Wiki
{{IBM FOSS Network file systems Free network-related software IBM software File systems supported by the Linux kernel