On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 12:28 PM, Fritz Ferstl <[email protected]> wrote: > Sure we can merge things but is that the spirit of an open source project? > That one party only touches the code?
Hi Fritz, (I always respect you when it comes to things related to SGE, as you are the one who took the DQS source from Florida State University and commercialized it, which became Gridware & Grid Engine that a lot of people rely on in their infrastructure. However, I need to provide a different view in this "fork" discussion.) There are always forks in free software, as "free" is not just the price, but the freedom to modify & distribute the modifications, and the freedom to fork. Most (if not all?) of the free software licenses recognized by FSF & OSI allow forking. As different people have different opinions, priorities, and goals, software forks are there even in the early stages of the free software era, such as BSD Unix from Berkeley -> 386 BSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and the commercial BSDi. And the Open Grid Scheduler was the one who tried to reduce the number of forks in Grid Engine. I was not given full access of the Open Grid Scheduler until Oracle finally announced that they were ending everything on gridengine.sunsource.net late last year. The Open Grid Schedule project was there as a place holder from Aug 2010 to Dec 2010 with the intent that in case Oracle closes the project, there would still be a free version available, but it is not to compete with Oracle Grid Engine. However, I discussed with Ron before related to merging, and besides the reason of not seeing the contributor agreement and thus we will "stay put", and the other reason Ron raised is that Univa did not acquire the intellectual property from Oracle, so Univa's branch is one of the 3 forks of SGE. Last but not least, Dan wanted to join the Open Grid Scheduler project, and we will need to check if he is willing to contribute to Univa's branch or our branch. Some are more willing to contribute to open-source projects than open-core projects, and this is a well known fact that a lot of the open-core projects are mostly backed by the company-hired developers. Rayson > > Cheers, > > Fritz _______________________________________________ users mailing list [email protected] https://gridengine.org/mailman/listinfo/users
