OK, several folks have stepped up and offered some funds to buy some contracting time from Herbert - since he also appears to be at a temporary impasse to do continue development it seems like a good time to try and crystalise that. I think to make this workable the spec needs to be simple, but also I have to ask Herbert to be considerate to a situation which is poorly defined and not easy for businesses to get their head around. I propose that the spec is to "advance development of the next stable vserver release, with the goal of a "released" patch suitable for production use against kernel 2.56.26 or newer". I would request that Herbert offer a private "timesheet" to those sponsoring the effort to show good faith that the money has been spent as requested. It might also be sensible to request daily checkins or patches to some repo again to satisfy any management types that a real product was produced (details TBA). I hope also that Herbert will offer us a sensible daily rate for this work since I suspect it's all off unless we can get a sensible amount of work done. The sponsorship will be paid 50% up front and 50% in arrears or some other arrangement agreed privately with Herbert Can I ask all those who previously offered funds to get in touch with Herbert directly and arrange what is reasonable. Herbert can I ask you to coordinate this and "make it work" if you are interested in the job? I will pledge 1,000 EU to the pot straight away and depending how the pot looks later I may top that up with an additional sum. Can I ask everyone else to dig deep and see what we can pony up Herbert can you please respond with a credible target that we can achieve. Please understand that many folks will not contribute except to something with a reasonable fixed price goal and an easily observable target. So I hope you can describe a goal more concrete than simply "will spend 2 weeks hacking" ! I will pick some arbitrary dates and suggest that we "try and wrap this up by the end of next week". Herbert to come back privately to those interested with a schedule of work and some estimated times Can we make this work? Regards Ed Wildgoose http://www.mailasail.com tel: +44 20 70432832