Subject: Sponsoring VServer getting up to date with mainline
From: Ed W <lists@wildgooses.com>
Date: Thu, 07 Aug 2008 11:33:04 +0100


> Ed W wrote:
>> Wilhelm Meier wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> is there any timeline to get the vserver patches ready for newer 
>>> kernels than 2.6.22?   
>>
>> There are some development patches in the experimental dir on the ftp 
>> site - however, the key developers would work harder if there was 
>> sufficient sponsorship to purchase a month or so's full time 
>> consultancy to pay for some substantial development
>>
>> I would be happy to foot a reasonable fraction of that bill, but I 
>> would like to canvas to see if some others will split the cost?
>>
>> Anyone up for that?
>>
>> Ed W
> Hi Ed
>
> How much are we talking about ?

OK, I wrote to Herbert a month ago to discuss the above and I will quote 
part of his answer (without his permission - hope this is OK)

>  - 5000+ EUR you have my full attention and at
>    least a month worth of Linux-VServer development
>    (and trust me, that's some progress  :) 

I am just a small business (1 person), but I would be happy to fund a 
fraction of this.  My budget doesn't really extend to the whole price, 
but I could tip 1-2,000 Euros into the pot (I hope that other businesses 
might offer something similar?)

I have copied this to Herbert - I would personally be happy for him to 
coordinate funds this if there are a few others who will contribute.  I 
don't want to get bogged down in speccing the work, but I would leave 
the spec as "development and release of code which can be called the 
next stable release of vserver to run on a more recent 2.6 linux kernel"


As an aside - I have no idea how others will look at these numbers, but 
just as a thought: yesterday I had to buy one new licence for MS Office 
which cost a nice £350 GBP.  Whilst there I noticed that "Office 
Ultimate" (whatever the hell that is) is > £500 !  The Vista ultimate 
licence which actually allows you to re-install it (non OEM) is around 
£350 ish...  Now my point is not about MS licencing prices, or whether I 
could get them cheaper elsewhere, but the point that really we can hire 
developer for a significant period of time to advance this project for 
about the price of 4-5 desktops with a fully loaded retail copy of Vista 
and MS Office - I don't know about you, but I have a lot more than 4 
servers running vserver  code...

Ed W