Your points are certainly valid; thanks for the input.
I hope my post from a few minutes ago sheds like on our rationale and
our future directions.
One of the reasons that has been discussed among the Open MPI team for
not opening the tree to everyone is the fact that at least some of us
are academics and we need to be able to publish about what we have
done. The unfortunate reality of today's academic environment is that
that necessitates at least some level of secrecy until you publish.
Although we have not made a final decision yet, given that community
involvement is a *strong* goal of this project, we've actively
discussed several models of how to bring the community into Open MPI.
One possibility is to have a minimal registration mechanism where
anyone who registers can get anonymous/read-only access. This would
likely be a suitable deterrent for someone to take our work and claim
it as their own (because there would be a paper trail).
On Jun 15, 2005, at 9:54 AM, Philip Mucci wrote:
Yes, I agree.
At the very least, it sure would be nice to have a read-only source
tree
available. It's understood that many things will be broken, but without
a visible source base that tracks active development, you're not
getting
any of the benefits of an 'open' development model.
Personally, I don't follow the concept of only releasing a stable
source
tree as mentioned on the OMPI web site. If I want a stable source tree,
I'll download a tar-ball or a tagged version of the tree. Unless you
have some compelling reasons that make this different than the rest of
1000's of 'open' projects.
If not your release strategy, then perhaps the OMPI folks could at
least
revisit the issue of having a more transparent development
cycle...there's not even a devel or commit mailing list.
Looking forward to the release.
Philip
Please adopt a release-early, release-often strategy.
Could not agree more!
"Show us the code!"
-scott
--
{+} Jeff Squyres
{+} The Open MPI Project
{+} http://www.open-mpi.org/
