Hi all!
Here's a small plan that could help Mandrake get out of some of its financial woes and
possibly help to make Mandrake an even larger force in the Linux community and help
Linux in general (but Mandrake specifically) to make some serious inroads into the
business desktop market.
This idea is is just that--an idea--and would probably take some serious work on the
part of Mandrake and their contributors to make it a reality, as well as some serious
corporate politics, to make it a reality.
By now I'm sure all of you have heard of Grid Computing, the new plan to turn
processor cycles into a commodity resource that can be resold. Grid ideology borrows
heavily from Open Source ideology, namely, that each individual works to enhance the
whole. Part of the Grid ideology is that of shared resources--each processor only does
a small amount of work, but added together multiple processors can create an entire
working application/processing platform.
IBM has already announced the beginnings of their Grid network. HP has just released a
set of Grid toolkits for creating Grid applications. There is an important item
missing in all these systems, though, and that is the Grid itself: the computers that
will act as the distributed Grid computing platform. IBM has the beginnings of a small
one, a series of Unix Mainframes networked together into a small cluster.
What I believe Mandrake may be able to do is to work with HP, IBM, Sun, or even SGI to
help them build their Grid networks. HP can provide the toolkits and the coproate
clout while Mandrake can provide the client-side Grid processing. In essence, HP would
be like an electric company and Mandrake would be like the actual power plant that the
electric company buys power from.
This is where we, as Mandrake users, come in. If Mandrake is able to find a partner
like this, it will be the *users* whose spare cycles will be going to the Grid.
Mandrake provides us with an excellent OS and fantastic support, but how many of us
have actually paid for anything that we have gotten from Mandrake? I think that
continuing to release Mandrake Linux as a free download, but requiring the use of the
built-in Grid Computing Client, would be more than a fair trade. Those of us who
actually purchased Mandrake Linux could then have the option of turning the Grid
Client off.
HP or Sun provide the corporate cover, sales force, and network access like an
electric company. Mandrake supplies the raw power to run the system (through those of
us who run Mandrake Linux with the Grid Client on) much like an electric power plant.
What do the rest of you think?
Jon 8^)
-----
Where is the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West, behind the hills into shadow.
How did it come to this?
-- Theoden King, The Two Towers
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