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Solutions build on Solutions.
Why is my bias important? Because I am writing this paper, and you are reading it. If you cannot understand where I have been, then you will not understand where I am going with my logic and reasoning. When a software project is in demand, it will find funding by whomever needs it to provide a solution. When enough users combine their wants with purchasing power, demands are created that can be fulfilled by industrious individuals looking to make a profit. Industrious guys like me such as your humble author can fit in and contribute to either the closed source or open source projects, ; but this paper is written for an open source course, so lets focus on how I can contribute to the open source world, and get rewarded for doing so.
I do not yet know specifically how to fit into the process yet, therefore this paper will be an analysis of two talks given at FSOSS with the intention of trying to understand how a guy like me should proceed if he wants to earn a living in the open source world.
=== Who am I (to pass a judgement, or have an opinion)? Why should someone read this page ===
I am a young developer, a green novice. Do I have experience? You judge:
''warning, this little use case is my position, and not necessarily Ross' this is how I understood things...''
eg. Company XYZ has 100 client machines running for employees during the daytime, and a powerful server running massive amounts of batch processing to run during the evening. Along side of these two main tasks, are other services such as intranet web hosting, company VoIP management, etc, all on dedicated machines
Q: Instead of this model described above, which will have varying levels of CPU consumption on the individual machines, why not have one piece of software in control of all cpu consumption (a giant server, or cluster of smaller machines)?
A: Because the processes being run all demand different Operating Systems, or demand dedicated Environments for security purposes.
Virtualization can give you the dedicated Operating System needed AND it can provide one piece of software to control all CPU cycle time. One virtualization core can spawn off guest machines as needed for employees during the daytime, reharvesting re-harvesting their cycles during the evening for another guest machine spawned to run batch during the evening. Separate virtual machines can be spawned for the intranet and other services as needed.
''end of example''
If Google could get behind something like this and display road conditions on gMaps, I would use it. A third party using METRo output to host several on-board driving advisory car devices might be very lucrative.
The important thing to consider with METRo is that it is small in terms of project size. With only one dedicated developer (who is admittedly spends very little time on the project) there is a lot of room to become a 'player' in this project. The problem with the small project size is the maintenance/upgrade demand for this software needs to be marketed and cultivated before it can sustain any dedicated developers. If I, or someone like me, were to dedicated dedicate a few months of time towards METRo, they could very well become one of only 5 experts on this code base; if any work were to be commissioned on it, their name would be considered for the commission. This commission idea is a very big *if * though. Is anyone really going to start demanding maintenance and upgrades to this code-base?
Everything about the METRo project contrasts starkly to XEN and the work Novell and Microsoft are doing.