openMosix Is Shutting Down 252
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."
orly? (Score:1, Interesting)
No ulterior motive or competing interest then... (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
Skill retention is not easy (Score:3, Interesting)
There are many very valuable projects that get very little funding - insufficient to pay the programmers who give that value. If the contributors cannot live by their work then they have to go find payment elsewhere.
As open source matures, people will come to understand that taking without giving back is not a sustainable model.
Re:Uh, I think the summary misses the point of OSS (Score:3, Interesting)
In theory, you're right. It'll continue. But will reality live up to theory? Only time will tell.
Re:OpenSSI (Score:4, Interesting)
OpenSSI was part of one-stop solutions, if I remember correctly, the doomed Compaq foray into clustering before HP took them over. Doomed? Well, HP has not exactly been Linux-friendly. Their efforts to be more so by hiring Bruce Perens never panned out and you certainly don't see them porting any of their HPUX security to Linux.
Re:a little inflammatory (Score:5, Interesting)
The point of mosix is to avoid using a library (such as an MPI implementation) to handle parallel apps, and to make managing a cluster 'easier'.
The problem is that the performance just isn't there, and that the 'industry' as a whole has overall chosen to use MPI to handle parallelism, and use various other methods to manage the cluster.
Bottom line: The industry they targeted didn't move in the direction mosix was headed (which is exactly why the developers are shutting it down).
Re:a little inflammatory (Score:5, Interesting)
And it's no fun to develop something you know isn't going to be used, as the supercomputing 'industry' isn't moving in the same direction that Mosix was heading.
Re:Uh, I think the summary misses the point of OSS (Score:3, Interesting)
To put it bluntly, CSS projects that lose their core development teams don't exactly fair any better do they?
Probably they do. How much of the original development team do you think is still left for things like Windows NT(/Vista), Office, Solaris, NeXTSTEP(/OSX), etc ?
OSS projects tend to "die" when they aren't popular or "interesting" anymore - and the OSS world can be fickle. CSS projects, tend only to die when they aren't *profitable* any more.
It's a hell of a lot easier to hire more programmers for your niche-but-highly-profitable CSS product than it is to get OSS programmers working on a codebase that is no longer popular or "interesting".
Awesome 2.4 RPMs (Score:2, Interesting)
Two Problems with OpenMosix (Score:3, Interesting)
By that time, though, I'd already come to be uncomfortable with OpenMosix for two reasons: