I worked at Locus Computing for seven years on their cluster technology, which is a contemporary of MOSIX. These are both single system image (SSI) systems that make a collection of Unix workstations appear to be a single computer. We actually shipped this technology successfully as subcontractors for a large hardware manufacturer (and indeed it still lives on across several business units of yet another large hardware manufacturer).
We discovered, however, that not many end users cared very much about total SSI semantics. They typically wanted only the distributed file system, or the DFS plus process migration, or remote device support, but seldom did they care for the whole ball of wax. Locus never lost money on the technology, but it never gained the market acceptance and market share we had hoped for.
So SSI is nothing new. The question I'd like to ask Mr. Murdock is, what has changed in the marketplace that makes SSI now a viable product on which to base a business? I don't believe that "because it's open source" is a credible answer.
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We discovered, however, that not many end users cared very much about total SSI semantics. They typically wanted only the distributed file system, or the DFS plus process migration, or remote device support, but seldom did they care for the whole ball of wax. Locus never lost money on the technology, but it never gained the market acceptance and market share we had hoped for.
So SSI is nothing new. The question I'd like to ask Mr. Murdock is, what has changed in the marketplace that makes SSI now a viable product on which to base a business? I don't believe that "because it's open source" is a credible answer.
Ciao....