On 09/24/2012 10:42 AM, Joe Landman wrote: > On 09/24/2012 08:31 AM, Hearns, John wrote: >> Andrew Holway<andrew.hol...@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 _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
