perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Jason Zurawski <>]

All;

One of the great cruelties of open source software is that while it is free 
to use, it is not free to develop and maintain.  From time to time it becomes 
necessary to tap the 'tip jar' that sustains the perfSONAR-PS project.  

In years past we have asked for help in developing, testing, and even 
evangelizing the software to make things stronger and more reliable.  We have 
a different request this go-round: we simply need statements from the 
community (U.S. Based, as well as International) that perfSONAR is a useful 
(perhaps even vital) part of your campus/lab/regional/backbone 
infrastructure, and life would be more difficult if this software were to 
fade away.  Perhaps additional comments if you have used the tool to fix a 
hard problem, enable a complex activity, or if it is critical to day to day 
operations.

This request does come with a caveat - while the words/praise of a 
network/software engineer or researcher are important, the words/praise from 
a Director/Executive/Chief matter a lot more to the parties that control the 
purse strings.  Since the majority of subscribers to this list may fall into 
the former category, we would ask that you please talk with your supervisors 
(perhaps even draft them some text they could lend their name to) about 
making a statement regarding the usefulness of perfSONAR.  Naturally, we need 
as many statements as we can, so if you can't get the ear of your management, 
your own personal account would be most helpful to this request.

This simple act will go a long way to ensuring that the project is able to 
keep up with the demand of software updates, bug fixes, and feature 
enhancements in a down economy; to do this it is vital that we can convince 
our own management chain that there are passionate and active users out 
there.  By our count we know of nearly ~600 deployed instances of the 
software spanning numerous domains and countries.  These letters of support 
can be addressed and sent to both Steve Wolff 
()
 and Wendy Huntoon 
(),
 who will aggregate them into a cohesive report.  If possible these notes 
should come in the next 1-2 weeks.  

Thanks again for all of your support for this project, and we do appreciate 
all users and want to ensure that we can continue to delivery for the needs 
of the networking community into the future;

-jason