As seen on LinuxProgramming.com:
“IBM is making its AFS enterprise file system product
available to the open source community under the IBM Public License
(IPL). AFS is a very scalable, highly available, and secure file
system with a very robust data management model for ease of
administration.”
“AFS, which has been commercially available from IBM’s Transarc
Lab for over 10 years, has a strong following of commercial,
government, university and research customers. Through these
customer installations, files stored in AFS are accessed by
millions of users worldwide.”
“IBM is making AFS available under open source to speed the pace
of innovation in the product and to make it easier for our
customers to collaborate in the area of enterprise file sharing.
Many AFS customers are involved in other open source initiatives,
and they are very enthusiastic about an ‘Open AFS’.”
“IBM realizes that while some customers will use ‘Open AFS’,
many of our customers will still require a commercially supported
version of AFS. Therefore, IBM will continue to sell, develop and
support its version of ‘IBM AFS’. This will give our customers
additional choices and flexibility on how to deploy AFS in their
environments. However, please note that, because IBM will not
control the development of Open AFS, IBM will not be able to offer
support services for Open AFS. IBM will commercially support only
its version of AFS.”
(The text above is from the
Open AFS FAQ.)