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."

Comments

Re:If it's really necessary...

[ozphx]

That is the theory of open-source. In practice the set of core contributors to a project are its foundation. As these people are leaving it will be extremely difficult to find others with the knowledge and motivation to continue its maintainance.

As with any project requiring something a lot more than a hobbyist the level of expertise required to work on the codebase is rare, and not cheap.

The only real hope is that a company or university using it is happy to pick up the tab and pay someone.

Unfortunately the "everyone can see the source code" line doesnt give any comfort when you are talking specialised things like clustering. I probably know a total of one person with the skill to work on such a system, and last I spoke to him he was contracting at 130 an hour - for comparitively easy (and less stressful) .net/c# work.

Imagine a

[Tablizer]

and they lack the means or motivation to continue

See what happens when you *stop* imagining a Beowulf Cluster?

Re:well you aren't in that line of work

[r00t]

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)

Re:well you aren't in that line of work

[bladesjester]

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.