[Beowulf] The end of Sun Grid Engine?

[Joe Landman]

Douglas Eadline wrote:
> Is there someone on the list who is following the Oracle/Sun Grid Engine
> situation that can explain what the plan is?
> 
> I have read that it is no longer freely available.
> 
>   http://insidehpc.com/2010/08/20/sun-gridengine-now-100-less-free/
> 
> Although previous version up until 6.2u5 are under the SISSL
> 
>   http://www.opensource.org/licenses/sisslpl.php

Short version as I understand it

1) binaries are 60 day evaluation limited by license.  You want 
different options you either a) pay Oracle (a reasonable thing to do, 
and no, I am not in their employ), or b) build your own.

2) Source is SISSL.  This goes copyleft if things don't work out the way 
the "standards board" decides.  Not sure what this means relative to 
patching.

3) Patches won't be publicly available before the paid support has them 
(again, this is reasonable ... you want the people paying for support to 
have first crack at them).

The license change actually happened in 2009.

Note:  this hit the gridengine lists on Monday-ish, and I didn't notice 
until Thursday, when I started seeing talk of the fork.

I am not sure the issues is as problematic as it seemed at first glance, 
it depends upon the license cost, terms, etc. for commercial support.

Some on the list have noted that the libdrmaa isn't GPL, so you can't 
link it against GPL based code.  I think (sadly) this might make the 
Perl DRMAA modules problematic.  I'll go back and look.  I think there 
may be issues with the Python modules as well.

In short, ugh.  Its a little bit of a mess, but largely because the 
community wasn't prepared for the changes.  Some folks are re-evaluating 
their usage over this, some are taking a wait and see.  I'd advise the 
latter.  I don't think its the end of the world.  Its SISSL, so in 
theory anyway, its open.  You just can't admix it with other good open 
tools, the vast majority of which are decidedly non SISSL.  At least not 
easily admixed.



> 
> 
> 
> --
> Doug
> 


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Joseph Landman, Ph.D
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