[9fans] inquiry about project sponsorship outside GSoC

[Caleb Malchik <cmalchik@gmail.com>]

Greetings 9fans,

I am a senior studying computer science at Tufts University. I'm
interested in Plan 9 and frequently read this list. As seniors at Tufts
we are required to do a year long capstone project; it's fairly open
ended but must be motivated by some external sponsor. If sponsoring a
group of 3 university students to do a year-long project around Plan 9
sounds cool, read on!

What project we choose to do (Plan 9 or otherwise) is still up in the
air, and depends on our sponsor. In the Plan 9 vein, the GSoC wiki page
has a nice selection of projects that are of comparable size:

http://www.plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/gsoc-2014-ideas/index.html

Some projects from that page that seem particularly intersting and
in-scope:

* alternative window system
* create additional modules for pq
* Kernel lock analyzer for amd64 kernel
* Kernel lock timing analyzer for amd64 kernel
* a per-processor scheduler
* Implement TLS 1.2 in libsec
* Add support for OAuth2 Login authentication to factotum
* 9p on Arduino Yun
* Teach Plan 9 to speak mDNS

We're also very open to other project ideas.

Your role as a sponsor would look something like this: fall semester
(between now and mid-December) you would help define requirements and a
deliverables timeline, and approve design documents. In the spring you
would monitor progress and optionally provide support to the
implementation. There are resources for in-house support at Tufts, but
nobody here knows Plan 9 well enough to provide Plan 9-specific
support, or clarify requirements such that the project will be useful
to the community. If you are worried about the time commitment, a
couple emails per month would be sufficient once we get the ball
rolling (more frequent communication could be necessary at first to get
us to a place where we can write and test code).

If this seems at all interesting, feel free to contace me off-list.

Best,
Caleb Malchik