Adam Beberg Leaves Distributed.net to develop Cosm

BigJim.fr writes "Adam Beberg announced on the Distributed.net list that divergence of views on the further goals of Distributed Computing Technologies Inc (DCTI) have led him to go on developing independently Cosm, the distributed computing engine that was known as V3 to members of Distributed.net."

Comments

Client Data

[Delphis]

I wonder, if COSM is what the v3 project was going to be then multiple modules will be available to run different tasks. With these different modules you could get a computer working on any project you choose, but if it's going to be like the SETI client thing it might require lots of data to be sent VERY regularly and make it almost prohibitive to the home user. (Esp. in England with non-free home dialup internet access)
If think you'd have to be careful not to have too many projects requiring lots of data to be moved, that is one of the nice things about the RC5064 project, the data involved is small and basically negligable, unlike a 3MB / night download with SETI.

Just my tuppence worth, yes I'm English ;)

what *is* d.net's vision for the future?

[rillian]

Adam Beberg (duncan) wrote:
it has become apparent that the goals of DCTI have changed considerably over the years, and are no longer the same as what they were.

David McNett (nugget) wrote:
It has also become clear to us that Adam's goals for Cosm and distributed.net's vision of its future differ enough to justify this parting of ways. Adam is very motivated about seeing the system he's designed, Cosm, implemented and put into production. True to its name, distributed.net is more focused on seeing what can result from a truly open and distributed continuing development effort. While each of these respective approaches is viable in its own right, attempting to co-mingle them has proven to be counterproductive.

What's the division about? It's clear from these carefully worded pieces that they've decided to split, and they've put an amiable face on it. However, the announcements are so vague I can't tell what the real issues are.

One of the problems I've always had with the d.net project was their closed decision-making style. On the one hand, they've build this wonderful thing for running the DES/rc contests, and made it fun to participate. I think that's really nifty. On the other hand, they've been advertising 'v3' for a over a year now, with its plug-in architecture promising a wide variety of clients to choose from, and an open interface so one may write one's own. But it never arrived, partly, it seemed, because Beberg wouldn't let anyone else work on it. Sometimes I felt like they didn't want to allow any other clients because they'd lose people from the rc effort, which is what they're really interested it. I think this might not be such a problem given rc5's microscopic bandwidth, footprint, and tolerance for latency compared to alot of other distributed computing projects If you think seti@home is bad, try cg rendering, or scientific simulations! Even the Mersenne prime client is more efficient with a large (>~16MB) memory allocation.

Nugget speaks of "a truly open and distributed continuing development effort." Their hot new client is the OGR project, and still closed source. Beberg is at least publishing a programming interface, but hasn't specified a license yet.

I've always been bothered by d.net's interest in using my processor for their particular project, paying only lip service to giving (control) back to the community they created. I've always been bothered by their failure to grok open source development.

I guess what all this boils down to is that I'd like to think that either Beberg or others at d.net have seen some light in this vein, but I can't tell which of them it might be. Comments?