Slashdot Mirror
openMosix Is Shutting Down
jd writes "Despite having one of the largest user-bases of any clustering system for Linux, openMosix is to be shut down. Top developers have left and they lack the means or motivation to continue. Their official claim of multicore CPUs making clustering redundant is somewhere between highly improbable and totally absurd, as has been pointed out elsewhere. Why is this shutdown so important? Well, from a technical standpoint, the open-source bproc (the Beowulf process migration module) is ancient, MOSIX is very hard to obtain unless you're a student, and kerrighd is (as yet) immature. From a user standpoint, openMosix is the mainstay of the Open Source clustering world and has by far the best management tools of any. The ability of this project to continue will likely have a major impact on the future of Open Source in the high-end markets — if the best of the best couldn't survive, people will be more careful about anything less."
someone else will pick it up.
Isn't that kind of the point of open source?
There's a similar project named 'Open Single System Image'
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ssic-linux
FTA: "Moshe Bar, openMosix founder and project leader, has announced plans to end the openMosix Project effective March 1, 2008."
Wikipedia: Moshe is founder of the company behind the Xen software, XenSource, Inc. Moshe is also founder of the company Qumranet which is behind the development of the KVM virtualization technology in the Linux kernel.
Looks like Moshe is to busy for that old fashioned mosix stuff...
From the summary it seems that the people who've contributed most to the openMosix code have moved on to other things.
Well, that happens. People's lives don't stand still, they change: they take on other commitments at work, have relationships, travel the world, etc.
But that doesn't mean that openMosix is dead.
On the contrary. This is open source software.
The code isn't lost. Others can pick up the slack and join the effort as they see fit. openMosix can still move forward, perhaps not at the same pace as before, but forward nevertheless.
It seems to me that the summary misses the point of OSS. If this was a closed source project and the lead developers had walked away then, yes, openMosix would almost certainly be dead and buried.
But, unless I'm missing something huge this isn't the end of the line for openMosix, precisely because it is open source.
It hardly seems appropriate to look at this as a failing of OSS development. On the contrary, it's arguably an example of one of its strengths.
This a baton change not a retirement. At best, the new holder(s) of the baton will soon hit the same stride as the previous holder(s). At worst, the baton has fallen to the ground and it simply needs to be picked up.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
What a ghastly overreaction, but hey, this is slashdot.
Best of the best? I may get flamed for this, but I'd barely heard of OpenMosix.
When Apache, the Linux kernel, Eclipse and (name a popular GNU project) look like "shutting down", then maybe we can bleat about the failure of open source.
And as some have said, there's not real reason the baton can't be passed on to interested new parties.
I agree, there's a degree of optimism in my argument but the summary is plain flawed.
Its message and tone is that openMosix = dead, openMosix = OSS, therefore openMosix dying = OSS solutions are bad.
What it completely fails to address is that the situation would be no better, and in fact would be a lot worse, if this was a CSS tool. Indeed, the ray of light for openMosix users comes from the fact that it is OSS.
Bashing OSS solutions because one is dead/dying/in limbo/whichever way you want to look at it is patently ridiculous because it's not the openness of the code that's at fault here, or even the open source development model.
To put it bluntly, CSS projects that lose their core development teams don't exactly fair any better do they?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
The article summary was certainly an eye grabber... but, the truth is, I've deployed quite a few linux HA and load balancing clusters. I have also installed a couple openMosix clusters. While it may be sad that openMosix is closing, the vast majority of clustering cannot be handled by openMosix. It is designed as a parallel processing cluster. I would say 99% of clusters are of the HA/load balancing variety. IE, I've got 3 web servers and I want to distribute the load between them. openMosix cannot do this, it isn't designed for it. Or I have 5 DB servers and I want to distribute load/perform replication. again openMosix does not do this. It is a "processing" cluster. IE I have this huge data set, and an application which will split up that data set and do some processing on it. Think SETI@home except, you don't want to send it to people's homes, you just want to run a single process which will send jobs off to other nodes for computing. The only thing I ever successfully used openMosix for was a compile cluster, and for that it was nice, but even for regularly compiling KDE, it wasn't much worth the effort to get the cluster running for the time it saved in compiling.
At the time I used it it couldn't migrate web server processes or db server processes, so it was useless for what I do most of the time.
They'd look down on it like a typical C++ developer looks down on HTML or Visual Basic development.
Yes, I'm sure they'd look down on a very well paying job that was far far less stressful.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
and they lack the means or motivation to continue
See what happens when you *stop* imagining a Beowulf Cluster?
Table-ized A.I.
Some utility bits of open source of course do not need a lot of maintaining and reach full maturity pretty early and only require the odd tweak for hardware compatibility, for those projects maintaining a team is difficult, logically speaking those projects get pick up and carried by another open source project that can run them as a side line.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The really good hackers:
a. don't want their minds and skills to rot
b. get bored by the easy stuff
c. are not stressed by difficult hacking (stress comes from office politics)
d. like to be admired for their ability to do the difficult stuff
e. like to be in the company of peers who can do the difficult stuff
You might get a great hacker doing lame stuff, but you'd have to pay him much MORE than you'd have to pay him to do the difficult stuff. The extra pay would compensate for the extra boredom. Since you can get a warm body for much less money, you're unlikly to hire the great hacker.
Since C#/.net is very lame compared to the challenges of something like OpenMosix, we can pretty reliably conclude that the supposed hacker is not really qualified to hack on OpenMosix. (alternate theory: his dad is the CEO and so the pay is quite absurd for the job being done)
Let me explain the reason for their decision in a sane way as I see it.
*MOSIX was supposed to provide an EASY way of doing clustered worth. Low over head in terms of coding and administration. It was aimed at MODERATE clusters not massive beasts as it lacked performance/efficiency. While two extra machines may be worth the lower overhead two hundred probably are not so the immense clusters used other methods.
Advanced in computing, multiple cores and so on, have killed this low-to-medium cluster market NOT clustering as a whole.
Yes there are tons of things that still need clustering, think web data for example for a new one, but they are large and even larger. They need performance and so *MOSIX is not what they are looking for.
In other words the market for *MOSIX is effectively dead thus the project is joining it.
Let me let you in on a little secret. Even the best people eventually realize that there's more to life than working no matter how "cool" you think what they're working on is. They look at their lives and realize that living to work is a bad idea because life is for actually living.
For a lot of people, that happens about the time they have their first kid. For others, it happens sooner. Yet others experience it later, to the detriment of their families if they have them.
I also have to tell you that it's not uncommon for a good independant contractor to be paid more than $130/hour because most consulting companies bill out their contractors at that much or more. Honestly speaking, my top hourly rate thus far has been more than $130/hr.
You may learn that your ideal of the "great hacker" is rather off the mark some day. The truth is that the really good people often don't care about how great others think they are. They get things done, and move on with what they have to do.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
any enterprises relying on openMosix to run their operations are in a pretty bad spot right now, i agree. their enterprise quality support has evaporated.
of course, this would be a completely different story if it were a close-source program they were relying on... because... ?
companies go out of business, too. and when their close-source programs are no longer supported, *no one* has the ability to pick up where they left off.