The 2009 MIT fiscal year ended on June 30th. The end of one year’s budget and the beginning of a new one is always a good time to take stock of how much progress has been made. FY 2009 was our first full year of operations since the Kerberos Consortium was founded in October 2007.
We started out FY 2009 with ten basic things we wanted to make substantial progress on by the end of the year. In guess my assessment isn’t that we got an “A”, but probably at least a “B+”. Here’s a recap, broken up into ten parts.
1. An organization
This might seem like an odd goal, given that there has been a Kerberos development group at MIT for over 15 years. However, that group was funded by MIT specifically to support MIT’s deployment of Kerberos. MIT still uses and needs Kerberos, but as the technology matured, demands on the group were reduced, head count was cut, and releases became less frequent. With the creation of the Kerberos Consortium, we needed a new type of organization. We needed an organization that was externally focused, customer-centric, and execution oriented. We also needed an organization that could do more than just development work on the MIT implementation of Kerberos. We needed to provide for the interoperability testing requirements of our sponsors, and provide expert advice on all levels. Most importantly, we needed to provide the intellectual leadership that our sponsors expected of MIT, and that was required to move Kerberos into new areas, such as the web and on mobile devices.
This change required an enormous cultural shift, and it took its toll. But I’m pleased to say that we have a given the core MIT team an infusion of fresh blood. Tom Yu, who has been working on Kerberos for 15 years was promoted to Development Team Leader. We scooped up Zhanna Tsitkova from Novell, who has 15 years experience in commercial IT security. We also convinced Greg Hudson to join our team from another area at MIT. Greg is an amazingly productive and clear thinking engineer with lots of open source development experience. Thomas Hardjono joined us as Strategic Advisor in December, after years at Verisign and as a long-time chair at the TCG. Thomas is leading the evolution of Kerberos to the web. Lastly, we also started hiring MIT undergraduate computer science students to work with us part-time. So many of the most experienced Kerberos engineers in the workplace today got their first experience as students at MIT. We now have two students working with us, so this important pipeline of new talent is getting refilled.
Next installments;
2. Knowing the customer
3. Documentation
4. Database support
5. Better coding practices
6. A good test suite
7. Kerberos for Mobile
8. Release Kerberos 1.7
9. Simpler revenue model
10. Community Building