[Beowulf] General cluster management tools - Re: Southampton engineers a Raspberry Pi Supercomputer

[Prentice Bisbal]

On 09/24/2012 10:42 AM, Joe Landman wrote:
> On 09/24/2012 08:31 AM, Hearns, John wrote:
>> Andrew Holway<andrew.holway at gmail.com>  writes:
>>
>>> Your saying that open source software is somehow less risky than
>>> proprietary software. I dont see any evidence for this.
>> But it is!
>>
>> Through the years, I have been screwed n times by commercial vendors
>> saying "No, we will not sell you our proprietary solution anymore. We
>> are discontinuing it. We don't want your money". And I have been stuck.
>>
>> I have never experienced the same with open source. In the OSS world, it
>> is more likely than not that somebody else will take over the project.
>> And even if that doesn't happen, you can alway pay somebody to do the
>> support you need.
>>
>>
>>
>> Indeed. Look what happened to Gridengine.
>>
>> http://gridengine.org/blog/
>>
>>
>> Now you can get a commercial supported version from Univa.
>> If Gridengine were closed source, it would have withered and died.
> Univa's is closed, but there are two functional open source forks ...
> Dave Love's and Scalable Logic's.
>
> Unfortunately, the transition from (partially) open to full on closed at
> Oracle left many high and dry.  The forks began in earnest shortly after
> this.  Sadly, they haven't been as closely cooperating in the community
> as one might wish ... that is, there are two open builds, both with
> value and support, but two different visions and directions.  With the
> third build (Univa) sadly sniping at both of these.

One important thing to remember about the SGE example is that SGE was 
not under a GPL license. It was under a different open-source license 
created by Sun, SISSL (Sun Industry Standards Source License)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Industry_Standards_Source_License

I don't know the details of this license, but I do recall that this 
license did create some issues with forking that lead to some of the 
acrimony between the 3 forks. I'm no license expert, but I think the 
forking of SGE would have gone much differntly if it was under the GPL 
instead.

--
Prentice