New Seti@Home Client to be Open to Other Projects

An anonymous reader writes "Seti@home is preparing to make a major change to their client and backend. The new system "boinc" will be a general purpose client and accept work units from other projects (selected by the user). This will open-up Seti@Home's millions strong user base to academic projects that cannot afford supercomputers. As boinc is an open source framework other distributed projects (think!, folding@home etc) will also be able to use it giving boinc a larger installed base than Seti@Home."

Comments

License review, not Free Software or OpenSource

[ciaran_o_riordan]

yeh, I just had a read of the license-1.0.txt

2.1. The Initial Developer Grant.
Subject to the restrictions on commercial use set forth below, the Initial Developer hereby grants You a world-wide, Royalty-free, non-exclusive license, subject to third party intellectual property claims:


(a) to use, reproduce, modify, display, perform, sublicense and distribute the Original Code (or portions thereof) with or without Modifications, or as part of a Larger Work, provided, however, that You are not permitted under said license to create, sell, or distribute commercial products based on the Source Code;

So, without permission to sell it or to sell derived works, it's not Free Software, or OpenSource.

(this is important, because it means you can't integrate the code into existing commercial software, and it's incompatible with the GNU GPL, so you can't integrate this code into the majority of the software packages that come with a distro)

Re:License review, not Free Software or OpenSource

[Lord Prox]

Do you know why? United Devices filed a law suit over some bullshit IP non-sense. BOINC did not have the $ to fight so they had to give in. One of the stipulations was that it could not be used for commercial purposes for the next 18 months. I tried to find the page on BOINC's web site that had the lawsuit info but can't. Rest assured that they will make it OpenSource (OSI approved) as soon as possible.

Re:Authentification

[Lord Prox]

BOINC is not a Distributed Computing Program. It is a architcture for running DC apps. Good crypto will be used to ensure that a system (server) gets clean data and clients only run apps from that server. You the user will select what DC project you will run on BOINC.
Really all boinc does is help reduce development time for DC projects by establishing a common framework to work within. Someone could run a "Build a better Smallpox program" to build a super Bucket-O-Death (tm) and advertise it a traveling salesman NP hard app to help the girlscouts sell cookies more efficently. There are no safegaurds (AFAIK) on that type of No-NO use.

Is mankind ready for this type of supercomputer (UltraComputer? Hypercomputer?) Seti@Home already blows away all other supercomputers on the planet (I think by at least 1 order of magnitude or so I was told), now with all these different DC projects runnning under the same framework things should get interesting.
Perhaps the IETF will formalise a protocol for DC and take the next step toward a global grid processing system. Think Jabber protocol turned RFC proposal/standards track.

Are you serious?

[LothDaddy]

First, Folding@Home is specifically working on protein folding - the science of proteomics, not genetics. That's Genome@Home, which is an associated, but distinct project. Second, Folding@Home is run by a researcher at Stanford University. Which is, of course, a public institution and not a "monolithic corporation". See the link!

Or am I just missing the sarcasm?

Re:I think theres better distributed computing cau

[De Lemming]

Indeed. And there are dozens of distributed computing projects, so everyone can find one to his likings.

Click here for an overview of active distributed computing projects. Also have a look at the lists at the bottom of the page: these are projects you donate some of your own time to, instead of spare CPU cycles (from Distributed Proofreaders to The Hunger Site).

Further info on distributed computing: Bottomquark has reviewed a number of projects.

Alterior Motives?

[Nerdgasm]

It may also be important to note that Robert was the person that authored the first nano@home proposal. So he has a vested interest in seeing users move from seti@home.

nano@home proposal