BeeGFS looking for the right licence

Code is public, yet not under an open source licence

The source code of the BeeGFS cluster file system has been published by its developers, the Fraunhofer Center for High Performance Computing in Kaiserlautern (Germany). The project is hesitating to making the code available under an open source licence, but is encouraging others to download and use the software.

Last week Tuesday, the Fraunhofer research project announced that the project had become ‘open source’. However, the End User License Agreement does not come close to providing the freedoms that come with open source licences. Code may not be redistributed, and is also prohibiting others to provide services for the code.

“BeeGFS is currently not made available under a license that would match the Free Software Foundation’s definition of free software”, confirms Sven Breuner, leader of the development team. He points out that the developers are making available under the GPLv2 the BeeGFS client, a module for the Linux kernel.

Mend the gap

The institute fears that making the code open source would cause a drop in contracts for commercial support, Breuner explains in an email. The team also wants to protect the quality of their work, and that makes them hesitate to accept contributions from others.

The computer scientist knows that there are many arguments in favour of open source. Internally, the discussion is ongoing, so making the code available under a free and open source software licence might happen, he says. “But for the moment, it seems good the way it is, literally open and free of charge.”

BeeGFS is part of the European Union‘s DEEP-ER project (Dynamic Exascale Entry Platform - Extended Reach). This FP7 research project aims to find a way to close the growing gap between compute speed, I/O bandwith and system resiliency for large scale systems.

More information:

BeeGFS
DEEP-ER