Ahh, the real reasons:
3. The HPC community is quite small, and the competition is quite
fierce...
Open Source tends to weed out the weaker competition (i.e. users decide
the winner). If you have the best solution, competition shouldn't be a
concern.
6. We're still working through the legal issues....
This is the hardest part, agreed.
Please adopt a release-early, release-often strategy.
Actually, this is something that we will desperately try to avoid...
<cut>
...However, to accommodate both kinds of users in LAM/MPI (those who
want
stability and those who want bleeding edge), we adopted a dual-headed
strategy:
1. Slow formal release cycle. LAM/MPI typically has 1-3 releases a
year. Usually one major release with a small number of bug fix
releases following it.
2. Nightly tarball snapshots available. Anyone who wants to can grab
either a Subversion checkout or a nightly snapshot tarball, but no
guarantees are made about its stability (because it represents active
development).
I anticipate that something analogous will occur for Open MPI.
Well that pretty much meets my criteria for release-early,
release-often. :)
We will show you the code soon, I promise. We've come too far to *not*
do so! :-)
Thank you for your hard work. I've been in your shoes. Trying to get
into the rhythm of Open Source when you have IP and legal issues is
hard. Good luck in overcoming these issues.
-scott
