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Modern projects are asking whether things like a contributor agreement, which creates the copyright aggregation, is too much of a barrier to entry, because they're optimizing for contribution instead of optimizing for long-term legal viability. But you've gotta remember that IBM famously stuck through a lawsuit that th... |
\[01:08:21.07\] If you know about the UNIX wars, establishing who owned UNIX is a pretty tricky thing to do, but IBM, instead of settling that suit, instead of doing anything else, actually saw it all the way to its bitter end - at least we think it's done - and it was proven that SCO didn't have a claim, and that Linu... |
So they actually spent an enormous amount of money on figuring out exactly who owned all the parts of UNIX and Linux and all the other IX's and making it clear that SCO's claim was spurious, right? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** To bring us back in push towards wrapping up a little bit - we talked a bit about why it's now just more important than ever to increase adoption and then get contributors, right? And I think one of the things that you're seeing in these news communities as pushback is that what they are feeling and ... |
**Danese Cooper:** Well, we don't know yet what the legal challenges to all of that are gonna be; it's gonna be interesting to see. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, but that's such a hundredth-order problem from the problems that they're dealing with, right? And in particular if you're talking about establishing who wrote the work with these utilities, who would need them from day one. And in reality, we have them with zero of day one software, right? Nob... |
**Danese Cooper:** Well, there are a couple of really famous projects that are not aggregated, and one of them was a challenge to J2EE (Java Enterprise Edition), and that software -- the guy (Marc Fleury was his name) was an ex-Sun employee, and he was very concerned that he was gonna get sued personally, and his lawye... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** This was the Linux model for a long time too, right? |
**Danese Cooper:** Well, they didn't do it intentionally; they did it because they thought it was gonna be a barrier to contribution, I think... Or they just didn't think of it. I think initially it wasn't a high-order issue. The whole contribution question didn't really come into being until about the time that Mozill... |
\[01:12:00.12\] I mean, I'm immensely encouraged because there's now gonna be (it seems) a formal legal challenge to the GPL. We just found out that GPL was a good enough contract that they were willing to let it be tried in court in the U.S., which is -- every other time in the U.S. that that's happened, it's been set... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So we're thinking about this from the point of view of these open source projects on a somewhat individual basis, and I think that we have an assumption that over time it gets more adopted and it becomes more of a target and so on, but if you actually take a modern application and work through it and... |
**Danese Cooper:** Well, but then you see people who are getting sued for stealing trade secrets and stuff between industries, right? That stuff expresses itself in open source, too, so... It's a thornier problem than you think, but I understand the reordering of the issues based on what feels like the most important t... |
I think that contributors to projects like Node realize that, but again, when I said at the beginning "Money changes everything" - most of this stuff came up around the money, not around the contribution, right? So I think as with everything, if you follow the money, you can understand the motivations for things, so... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I think that people tend to think of money as being directly flown into the project, but money is flying around all the time, and if you don't think about how it's influencing stuff, it'll just sneak up on you, right? |
**Danese Cooper:** Yeah, and it takes a lot of vigilance to keep that from happening. Keeping the same people involved -- so the BDFL model I think is pretty difficult to sustain for any length of time, because people get old, and you can't pass on that right... I mean, you really can't; we've seen it tried many times ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** They get bored quicker than they get old, but yeah... |
**Danese Cooper:** Right. Well, there's been some hacks on it. The Debian people vote in a leader every year, which is kind of an interesting thought... Because there was a BDFL, but then there's also a Debian leader. The BDFL is gone, but he's also not been involved for a really long time. |
So the consensus model seems like it's winning just because there's no way to live long enough to keep the BDFL thing going... Although some of the most powerful software is still BDFL software. |
All of these -- you notice that there's two ways to go always in open source, or in this whole conversation? There's free software and open, there's permissive and inherited, there's BDFL and consensus, there's foundation and not foundation... It's really interesting how there's always two choices, and just like seeds ... |
\[01:16:08.10\] And we've gotta remember - 20 years seems like a long time; it seems like a long time to me, but really, it's just a blip. There's gonna be a lot more time that people try on these different structures. |
There's a bunch of people who think that open source is doomed because software will change in a way that means that it isn't created this way anymore and it doesn't matter, but I still think that the moment in history that we took advantage of to create it and bring it this far - it ws worth doing, because... I think ... |
I'm so happy to have spent the time that I've spent supporting this work, and trying to connect the dots where it looked like a dot needed connecting, and I've really had a good time talking to you guys about it, too. I don't know if it's unintelligible still, or if it helps to hear these stories... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** No, it's been perfect. And that was kind of a perfect wrap-up as well. |
**Danese Cooper:** Okay, I do what I can. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** This has been great, Danese. Thanks for coming on. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, thanks for chatting with us. |
**Danese Cooper:** Of course, of course. |
• Todd Gamblin's job role at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory |
• Overview of Lawrence Livermore's missions and responsibilities |
• Todd's specific work on Spack, DevOps, and machine learning for parallel performance |
• The lab's history with open source, including the development of Linux for HPC machines and popular open-source projects like ZFS and Slurm |
• Collaboration across the DOE, universities, and other laboratories |
• Slurm is used on Linux clusters at Lawrence Livermore Lab, including a 1.5 million core IBM Blue Gene machine |
• ZFS file system is used in industry and has been ported by Lawrence Livermore Lab for use with Lustre parallel file system |
• Spack package manager was open sourced by Todd Gamblin as part of his work at Lawrence Livermore Lab, but it's not the first project he open sourced |
• CRAM tool splits jobs into smaller ones to manage large-scale computing tasks on the lab's clusters |
• The lab has a policy document from 2004 requiring software developed under Advanced Simulation Computing Initiative to be open source unless there are reasons not to |
• Todd Gamblin notes that while some projects may generate royalties, others like Spack are more suitable for open sourcing and sharing resources among computing sites |
• The lab's IP organization reviews software releases, including a tedious process involving burning CDs and filling out paper forms |
• Spack is a package manager for high-performance computing (HPC) environments, specifically designed to build and manage software on large machines. |
• The project was created by Todd Gamblin at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to address specific challenges in the HPC software ecosystem, such as complex dependency management and reliance on vendor libraries. |
• Spack is a "functional" package manager that builds software from source and assigns a unique hash to each dependency graph, allowing for reproducibility and versioning. |
• The project's primary audience is not the general public but rather a smaller community of HPC researchers and developers who require high-performance computing capabilities. |
• Contributing to Spack requires specialized knowledge of HPC environments and software development, limiting its contributor base. |
• Growing the contributor base could involve expanding outreach to industry partners and other stakeholders in the HPC community. |
• Structure of HPC communities with multiple roles (users, developers, center staff) |
• Spack deployment model vs cloud-based models |
• HPC centers' varying approaches to open source software and community building |
• Influence of industry on government's open source practices and adoption of GitHub |
• Challenges in implementing open source practices within government labs |
• NumFOCUS affiliation for the Spack project |
• Democratizing package management in HPC through Spack |
• Cultural differences between cluster maintainers and casual users |
• Spack's design choices (Python, Homebrew-based format) to make it easy for users to contribute |
• Comparison with other HPC package managers (EasyBuild) |
• Funding models for Spack (programmatic funding, grants from the Office of Science, LDRD) |
• Challenges in navigating funding opportunities and the gap between research funding and production funding |
• Importance of socializing projects to obtain programmatic funding |
• Challenges with maintaining software projects due to lack of funding stability |
• Importance of exit plans for research projects, including programmatic funding options |
• Differences in how government organizations and private companies approach software maintenance costs |
• Benefits and limitations of using grants versus programmatic funding for research projects |
• Strategies for sustaining software products through community building and contributor engagement |
• Impact of academic cycles on contribution rates to software projects |
• Success stories, such as Exascale, where focus is placed on developing software rather than just writing papers or getting funding |
• Development of software stack for large-scale scientific applications |
• Coordinating releases of multiple applications within the stack |
• Balance between open-source and proprietary components in the stack |
• Involving industry contributors and expanding HPC adoption to smaller companies |
• Addressing support needs for industry users and potential solutions (e.g. support contracts, small companies) |
• Lessons learned from open-sourcing Spack and importance of thinking beyond one's own use case |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Todd, you work for the government... Tell us what your actual job is. |
**Todd Gamblin:** Okay, so I work for a specific part of government... I work for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory - it's part of the department of energy. I'm a computer scientist, that's my job title (we don't really have official job titles here). Effectively, I'm a researcher, I'm a project lead, and I'm also... |
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