high-performance computing
code was open-source, then users could (and indeed unfortunately, do) take the code and use it without paying or under conditions it is not licensed for, such as commercial use vs. academic use.
Misleading pseudonym I suspect that for the majority of scientific computing users, ‘open-source’ is being used as a (poor) pseudonym for ‘free’. No-one likes paying for something if they can get it for less or for free. Of course, no soſtware is truly free. Someone, somewhere, is covering the costs of development, installation, testing and maintenance. In a curious twist of the ridiculous, it is oſten those who develop soſtware themselves who expect other soſtware to be free! Yes, they want the product of their daily efforts to be valued by their users, research reviewers and customers, – but have a contrary reluctance to acknowledge that they should in turn value (and pay for) the soſtware outputs of others. However, leaving aside those researchers
who seem to have perverse moral objections to paying for soſtware, for most people it is probably just a case of avoiding the effort involved in buying soſtware and working through the corporate/institutional buying process. It doesn’t help that many of those selling
soſtware, either commercial vendors or academic groups, oſten impose restrictive licensing conditions – for example, limiting usage to ‘research purposes’ not ‘commercial purposes’, which merely burdens a typical user with risk when many workloads are a blend of the two. Neither does limiting the amount of compute power that can be used by the soſtware using per-core licensing models. Tis per-core licensing is oſten quoted as
one of the top problems with commercial soſtware – the rapidly scaling costs prohibit use on any computer system of scale. Te counter argument goes something like this: if you double your compute power by deploying twice as much hardware, then you’re happy to pay twice as much, so surely if you double the solver capability by using more cores, then it is reasonable to pay twice as much for that soſtware? Tis is a really good argument – as long
as the soſtware vendors are willing to accept the other side of the comparison – that the cost of a given amount of compute power halves every year or so with Moore’s Law and associated advances. So, to all those vendors
MIGHT ONE CONCLUDE THAT THE DEBATE IS LITTLE MORE THAN IDEOLOGY VS. COMMERCIAL INTERESTS?
still pursuing wholly per-core licensing models – are you also intending to halve your per-core price each year? Of course, the costs incurred by the
soſtware provider in developing, testing and supporting scalable code are non-trivial, so a premium for using more cores is fair. However, those costs are not linear with the number of cores – not even close – so that premium does not support the case for a wholly per-core licensing model. It does however support a case for users to pay more for a scalable or a GPU version, or a Phi version of the soſtware, than for the desktop version.
Beacon of distrust Te most disgraceful of these restrictive licence conditions – and there is zero excuse for this – is soſtware licences that ban benchmarking the soſtware on various platforms, or against other soſtware products. Tis should be taken by prospective customers as a huge noisy beacon of distrust on the part of the soſtware vendor in the quality and capability of their own product. Open-source vs. closed-source is oſten
taken to imply something about the quality of the soſtware, and the availability of support. Rather amusingly, both sides of the debate claim that their model is the one that assures quality soſtware and support, while the opposing model leaves the user at the mercy of cowboys. Te soſtware vendors and other proprietary
soſtware advocates work hard to imply (or even outright assert) that open-source soſtware is generally of poor quality and untested. Tey claim that support for open-source soſtware is rare, or is reliant on a vagrant army of volunteers. Indeed, the proclamation is that any sensible commercial user will want to pay for proper soſtware where the vendor has a commercial incentive to assure quality, continue development, and provide support contracts. Te open-source advocates fight back with
the observation that open-source enables the user to see the quality for themselves – (unlike just having to trust closed-source) – and maybe even directly improve the quality if the licence conditions allow it. And, they will argue that the good open-source soſtware enables the best of two support models – support through community and collaboration, plus specialist providers who will take a contract to support open-source
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@scwmagazine
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