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Lustre's good fortuneLustre's good fortunePosted May 20, 2004 4:43 UTC (Thu) by snitm (guest, #4031)Parent article: Goodbye to old code I have been fortunate to get really good support for the Lustre project. So I have focussed on that. Lustre 1.X has become really solid. Ahem, yes Peter and Cluster FileSystems (CFS) were able to get good support for Lustre; but they have now taken Lustre's stable 1.2.x series closed (aka dual-licensed); Lustre 1.2.x adds support for Linux 2.6 (1.0.x is bound to 2.4). Lustre 1.0.x is all CFS is willing to make available via the GPL (well until the staggered GPL release of 1.2.x happens a year from now). CFS isn't even making the various Lustre 1.2.x in-tree kernel changes widely available (also Lustre 1.2.x modules still claim to be GPL as per modinfo.) CFS is doing some good things with Lustre but they have pulled a bait and switch with the notion of Lustre actually being purely GPL'd. Everybody needs to make money (there were all sorts of GFS-like warning signs) but it still leaves a bitter taste in one's mouth. Hopefully CFS makes gobs of money (shouldn't be hard given CFS's per client pricing) and can then justify making the core Lustre filesystem purely open. Maybe their closed administrative tools, consulting/support and such will be the value add they would need to remain successful? All this said, CFS is a good company just trying to keep on keeping on. FYI, CFS is working with SUSE to get Lustre integrated in SUSE SLS9. Apparently, SUSE and CFS are Still working on it. Chance of readiness and inclusion is 50%. So there is hope, if this were to happen Lustre could very well be re-released with a GPL license that actually sticks (e.g. code makes it into Lustre that isn't sole-sourced from CFS).
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Lustre's good fortune Posted May 22, 2004 20:35 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] aka dual-licensedThe situation here isn't what's normally called "dual-licensed." The situation with Lustre is that old versions of the code are offered under GPL but the current version is not. CFS professes an intention to make all code available under GPL when it is no more than a year old. "dual-licensed" means the very same code is offered under two different licenses at the same time. Some licensees will take it under GPL; others will take it under some other license. An example of why someone would want the non-GPL license is that he wants to extend it and ship object code only. But he probably has to pay money for that non-GPL license.
Lustre's good fortune Posted May 25, 2004 1:13 UTC (Tue) by snitm (guest, #4031) [Link] fair enough, but CFS also licenses, the very same software that will be GPL'd in a year, to customers at a premium so those customers can integrate the software into proprietary software. CFS can do this because they hold the exclusive copyright of the current Lustre codebase.Regardless, CFS is playing games with software that was originally billed as open-source in its purist form (Braam even scorned software that wasn't "free" as in speech; playing games with guilt trips during discussions). BUT now that Lustre has reached a certain level of quality/success CFS is getting greedy. The initial funding from the Govt Labs enabled them to raise their quality of living, now that Govt funds are drying up they need to maintain their quality of life somehow, right? e.g. the Lustre User's Group meeting was in Hawaii and next year supposedly in the Carribean. Bait and switch engineering of closed-yet-"open" projects is a craptacular way to develop GPL'd software.
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