Plans for 1.8+ (2.0?)

[Peter Serwe]

Michel Talon wrote:
Of course it is none of my business, but i have always wandered about the
real usefulness of a clustering OS in the context of free systems, and you
post allows me to explain why. People who have the money to buy machines by
the thousands, run them, pay the electricity bill, etc. should also have
the money to pay $$$ to IBM, and not count on the generosity of unpaid
developers. Small installations are the natural target of free systems, and
in this context i remain convinced that the clustering ideas have an
utility next to null. And frankly, i doubt they have any utility for big
systems if you don't use high speed, low latency connects which are far
more expensive than the machines themselves. And even with this highly
expensive hardware, if you don't have high brain programmers able to really
make use of concurrency.
On the contrary, the disks of Joe User are becoming bigger and bigger, his
processor is getting more and more cores, so there is clearly a need for
file systems appropriate for big disks and sufficiently reliable ( ZFS
being an example ) and operating systems able to use multicores
efficiently.
  
Open source software in a business context is about business 
applications that a small company
can fire up, scale up, and run for the longhaul.  A lot of the 
'generosity of unpaid developers'
you refer to is actually funded by the companies they work for, where 
working hours are
left available for the people to work on pieces of 'free' code while 
maintaining a place to live,
food in their stomachs, and a lifestyle of their choosing.

For very small companies, who might have a core team of innovative 
people, and don't want
VC financing to dictate the use of Micro$oft or other, shall we say, 
typically less functional,
less customizable, and less friendly platforms on the basis of 
'protecting the investment' or
funneling money into another investment, 'free' software is critical.  
The less software my
company has to use that is proprietary, closed source, and licen$ed at 
often ludicrous fees
to pay for a marketing arm and the CEO's Porsche, Ferrari, Bentley, or 
whatever, the more
money we have to hire people and pay $alaries.  Which gives us more time 
to innovate.

Lastly, where there's an application that a business needs, there's 
resources to develop it.

I can't count the number of projects that benefit from a given company 
doing customization
work, and then releasing the non-proprietary bits out via some sort of 
'free to use' license.

If it weren't for some notably large companies using open source 
software, open source
software wouldn't be nearly as far along as it is.  Academia can only 
take it so far.

Peter

--
Peter Serwe <peter at infostreet dot com>
http://www.infostreet.com

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