Comment by jabl
7 years ago
I work in HPC, and, well, it's VERY hard to make a good profit there.
- Customers are stingy (think academic labs, supercomputer centers etc.), are not typically married to your solution architecture so for every purchase they will put out a tender that you have to bid for and win.
- Performance is king, which means very expensive R&D, and customers don't spend much on all these "enterprise value-adds" that enterprise focused businesses use to pad their bottom lines.
Same here. I'm a HPC admin. We carefully avoid vendor lock-in because it gets too expensive too easily.
Performance is king, and we don't buy into the kind of sales bullshit that IBM is famous for.
Sadly, we just standardised on CentOS 7 for our new cluster and I am nervous about its future considering IBM involvement now.
The HPC community have forked cantos before(scientific Linux) and make up a big enough fraction of the centos volunteers to do so again.
A big part of the open source appeal is the the vendor who owns the trademark cannot unilaterally kill a product.