Shuttleworth Tosses $1M Behind Open-Source Project

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Shuttleworth Tosses $1M Behind Open-Source Project

Mark Shuttleworth is investing one million dollars into an open-source project to support its rapid growth and community...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTE4MTg

[schmidtbag]

How do you make something like a file system so fail proof? I thought most data miswrites were due to hardware failures.

Also, $1 million? isn't that a bit much for a FS that most Linux users won't care about? Even half that amount seems like an unnecessary investment to me. I think that money is much better spent on nouveau debs who have little to no corporate backing and are doing an insanely good job considering how little they have.

[bartek]

http://www.inktank.com/news-events/n...artup-inktank/

[Veerappan]

How do you make something like a file system so fail proof? I thought most data miswrites were due to hardware failures.

When you've got multiple computers, multiple drives, and multiple network links distributed across multiple physical locations, hardware failures become something that you can recover from, if you have a filesystem that is able to handle it.

Also, $1 million? isn't that a bit much for a FS that most Linux users won't care about? Even half that amount seems like an unnecessary investment to me. I think that money is much better spent on nouveau debs who have little to no corporate backing and are doing an insanely good job considering how little they have.

I'm thinking that something like this file system is useful to Canonical with regards to the Ubuntu Software Center, Ubuntu One, and any other cloud storage initiatives that they want to get behind. No user would be happy if Canonical's cloud storage service lost their data.

[0xCAFE]

Also, $1 million? isn't that a bit much for a FS that most Linux users won't care about? Even half that amount seems like an unnecessary investment to me. I think that money is much better spent on nouveau debs who have little to no corporate backing and are doing an insanely good job considering how little they have.

You can't make money from a desktop Linux user.

[md1032]

Because of one of English's numerous stupid exceptions, the phrase, "doesn't possess a single point of failure," implies that it is incapable of failing. Probably not what you meant.

[boast]

How do you make something like a file system so fail proof? I thought most data miswrites were due to hardware failures.

Also, $1 million? isn't that a bit much for a FS that most Linux users won't care about? Even half that amount seems like an unnecessary investment to me. I think that money is much better spent on nouveau debs who have little to no corporate backing and are doing an insanely good job considering how little they have.

He should also toss another mill to wayland. Because, well, its wayland...

[Teho]

lso, $1 million? isn't that a bit much for a FS that most Linux users won't care about? Even half that amount seems like an unnecessary investment to me.

You need to understand that most of Canonicals paid users and hardware partners are from server side. They have also made big investment on OpenStack and ARM servers too. It kinda makes sense for Shuttleworth to invest in technologies that benefits him and his companies finansically and keeps Linux stong on markets that they actually have a good chance of succeeding on. File systems require huge ammount of testing and that doesn't come cheap.

[Nite_Hawk]

Hi Guys,

I'm the resident performance engineer at Inktank working on Ceph. Let me know if you have any questions.

Mark

[schmidtbag]

You need to understand that most of Canonicals paid users and hardware partners are from server side. They have also made big investment on OpenStack and ARM servers too. It kinda makes sense for Shuttleworth to invest in technologies that benefits him and his companies finansically and keeps Linux stong on markets that they actually have a good chance of succeeding on. File systems require huge ammount of testing and that doesn't come cheap.

Well I did have that in mind but $1 million for a project that likely would have (eventually) been completed without any donation? I'm not against his motives or decision, I just think that the amount was excessive.

As for servers being their main source of income, canonical didn't get popular because of servers, whether that be their own or for other companies. I'm not saying hes obligated to pay for a project like wayland or nouveau, I'm just saying that if he's going to throw that much money to a relatively uncritical project, where does he draw the line of whats considered worth his money and how much of it?