[Beowulf] Beowulf Digest, Vol 100, Issue 10

[Greg Keller]

> What about an easy to setup cluster file system such as FhGFS? As one of
> its developers I'm a bit biased of course, but then I'm also familiar
> with Lustre, an I think FhGFS is far more easiy to setup. We also do not
> have the problem to run clients and servers on the same node and so of
> our customers make heavy use of that and use their compute nodes as
> storage servers. That should a provide the same or better throughput as
> your torrent system.
>
> Cheers,
> Bernd

We've been curious about FhGFS but the licensing did not leave us confident
we would always have access to it if we integrated it into our business and
made available to our users.  Serious success could essentially cause an
epic failure if the license made it expensive to us (as commercial users)
suddenly.  As a "cloud" based hpc provider I thought it was too risky and
have been happy with Lustre and it's affiliates.

Specifically this clause could be a problem:

3.2 LICENSEE may NOT:

...

- rent or lease the LICENSED SOFTWARE and DOCUMENTATION to any third party

...

Does anyone think the license was intended to block cloud providers
making it available as part of a cloud based HPC solution?  Am I
mis-interpreting this?  Not looking for a legal-ese battle but I am
wondering if other licenses commonly used in cloud contexts have
similar language.  Anyone think the FS is fantastic enough that I
should fight (spend money on lawyers and licenses) to put it in front
of "Cloud" HPC users?

Cheers!

Greg
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