SGEEE easily mistaken as commercial version

hanzl at noel.feld.cvut.cz hanzl at noel.feld.cvut.cz
Thu Oct 25 02:22:40 PDT 2001


Prospective SGE users could very easily be mistaken and suppose that
Enterprise Edition is a commercial close source version. If you
download the three tarfiles from "Binary Downloads" page, unpack them
and look around, you will install non-EE version. There is no way to
find easily (from unpacked files) that you could install EE. The pdf
manual will tell you about EE features but your instalation is missing
them. No hint at all that EE is also opensource.

This IMHO seriously harms the SGE project and should be corrected as
soon as possible by including inst_sgeee script in tar files.

Potential SGE users and opensource co-developers are likely to know
PBS, which exists in both opensource and commercial version. During SGE
test-install many of them will be systematically driven into false
assumption that SGE project is organised the same.

I wish all the best to Veridian and PBS and everybody making free
versions of commercial software. This setup of things however
inevitably makes opensource users to assess danger that core
developement team will be torn between opensource and commercial
version support, will be reluctant to port commercial version fixes to
opensource version (cause it takes time) and will be unable to
integrate opensource-community created patches cause without knowledge
of the commercial version source these patches will diverge.

It is very sad to have these worries about SGE by mistake.


Only after lot of hacking around I found that all you have to do to
install EE is to rename inst_sge to inst_sgeee (and it behaves
accordingly). Only after this I looked around once more and found this
at the bottom of binary download page:

 Only for Grid Engine Enterprise Edition you have to make slight modifications:
 % cd $SGE_ROOT 
 % ln -s inst_sge inst_sgeee 
 % replace inst_sge with inst_sgeee in the last line of the files install_qmaster and install_execd 
 Then you can proceed as with the standard Grid Engine installation. 

Well, you may say it is my fault not to notice this before. Sure it is
but I think this fault is quite common and harms SGE a lot. It is
worth it to include inst_sgeee in tar files now as many Beowulf
maillist readers might be prompted by recent SGE discussions to go and
try SGE - and maybe forget about it if they make the same mistake as I
did.


With all the best wishes to SGE team (and thanks for all the work done
so far)

Vaclav






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