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Progeny Debian Halts The NOW Project

Posted by Hemos on from the bad-econoomic-times dept.

nicedream writes "Debian Planet is reporting that Progeny is killing the NOW project. " A reader also submitted the actual e-mail from Ian Murdock ? . It appears that the current economic climate has had an adverse effect on Progeny - which is not surprising. Ian's also got some musings on the state of computing/networking, which outline some of the thoughts behind the NOW project.

5 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. From Article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Project has been renamed 'LATER'"

  2. The Value of Progeny by TellarHK · · Score: 4, Interesting
    About two days after the release of Progeny for download, I grabbed a copy. It immediately became my distro of choice, beating out Redhat, SuSE and Mandrake soundly. I really like the Debian package management, and apt-get is just wonderful. But the thing that impressed me most about Progeny was the simple, but still capable install process. I can get a machine up and running with Progeny quite a bit quicker than with my SuSE distro, and it's a lot less of a hassle to upgrade using the Debian packages.


    I really didn't even know what NOW was, until... well, now. But I think Progeny offers plenty of value even without something that ambitious on the horizon.

    --
    My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
  3. Question. Did anything come of it? by mcc · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Interesting. I have never heard of this "NOW" thing, but wish i had.

    The direction i would like to see this /. discussion take is this: So, what came out of NOW? How far did they get, and is it far enough that there's something interesting there for the hobbyist faction to take up and continue work on as a volunteer project? Is there any code written, are there any design documents that have been released..? Does Progeny's withdrawal from this project mean it is dead, or simply that work will not be continuing at the same sustained rate? If there are design docs out there, are they complete enough that semiprofessional volunteers could finish the project from here without buggering it up horribly?

    Just curious.

    --
    Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
  4. NOW is more than just Progeny... by cperciva · · Score: 4, Informative

    Progeny may have terminated their NOW project, but Progeny was not the first, and will not be the last to build NOW clusters.

    Please, when refering to this, call it the Progeny NOW project, to distinguish it from the NOW project.

    --
    Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
  5. Yeah, but not all that much... by raulmazda · · Score: 4, Informative

    When most of the developers were moved off of the project the only real code that was in a state that it was done was nullfs. The design of the rest of things had been done, and John Hartman had a rapid prototype of the token system done in tcl, but very little other coding was accomplished.

    I don't think that the code that exists is interesting enough (or substantial enough) for a hobbyist to pick it up and run with it.

    I'm not sure if Progeny will release the design docs...

    Though I may have a negative outlook on things... I ended up being reassigned to doing Web Monkey stuff instead of working on NOW (which was the whole reason why I left my prior job and went to work at Progeny).