Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised May 27, 2026

OpenAFS

OpenAFS is an open-source implementation of the Andrew distributed file system (AFS). AFS was originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University, and developed as a commercial product by the Transarc Corporation, which was subsequently acquired by IBM. At LinuxWorld on 15 August 2000, IBM announced their plans to release a version of their commercial AFS product under the IBM Public License. This became OpenAFS. Today, OpenAFS is actively developed for a wide range of operating system families including: AIX, Mac OS X, Darwin, HP-UX, Irix, Solaris, Linux, Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, NetBSD.

Last revised
May 27, 2026
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OpenAFS
Original authorCarnegie Mellon University
DevelopersTransarc, IBM, OpenAFS Foundation
Stable release
1.8.15 / February 26, 2026 (2026-02-26)
Written inC
Operating systemCross-platform
TypeDistributed File System
LicenseIBM Public License
Websitewww.openafs.org
Repository

OpenAFS is an open-source implementation of the Andrew distributed file system (AFS). AFS was originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University, and developed as a commercial product by the Transarc Corporation, which was subsequently acquired by IBM. At LinuxWorld on 15 August 2000, IBM announced1 their plans to release a version of their commercial AFS product under the IBM Public License. This became OpenAFS. Today, OpenAFS is actively developed for a wide range of operating system families including: AIX, Mac OS X, Darwin, HP-UX, Irix, Solaris, Linux, Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, NetBSD.

Licensing

Copyright on many original source files is attributed to IBM and other contributors. Most of the source is covered by the IBM Public License 2, however several files in the tree are covered by university vanity licenses..

On Feb 5, 2026 Brad Topol (IBM) announced3 4that IBM approved license changes of IBM Developerworks OpenAFS 1.0 from IBM Public License to GPLv2.

Releases

OpenAFS releases are announced on the OpenAFS Announcements mailing list 5. The current release is OpenAFS 1.8

Release versions of OpenAFS
Version Initial release Latest release
Unsupported: 1.0 2000-11-046 2001-06-247
Unsupported: 1.1 2001-07-168 2001-08-239
Unsupported: 1.2 2001-09-1210 2004-10-2911
Unsupported: 1.3 2002-02-1612 2005-07-3013
Unsupported: 1.4 2005-08-2114 2013-07-1415
Unsupported: 1.6 2010-12-1616 2024-11-1217
Unsupported: 1.7 2011-09-1618 2015-10-2819
Latest version: 1.8 2016-12-0720 2026-05-1321
Preview version: 1.9 2020-10-0222
Future version: 2.0
Legend:
Unsupported
Supported
Latest version
Preview version
Future version

Deployment

The existing user base includes small single server cells as well as large multinational deployments spanning academia, private research laboratories, government, and commercial entities. A small snapshot of the deployed AFS cells can be found by reviewing the contents of the file distributed with OpenAFS.

References

References

External links