Open Sourcerers go with yucky draws

YOU THINK ONLY the big software vendors with Big Brother agendas, like Microsoft and, increasingly, Google, can give away stuff in yucky draws and such? You're wrong, pal - the Open Source community is catching up. At least those in the supercomputing arena...

If you happen to visit www.hpccommunity.org and download Kusu, you can then anonymously register your cluster for a chance to win one of twenty $75 Amazon vouchers - yes, not one, but 20.

What the heck is Kusu? It happens to be the foundation for Platform Open Cluster Stack (OCS), a standardised approach to easily build, manage and use Linux clusters for simplified cluster management, operation and deployment. Platform claims faster time-to-market and cost reduction on in-house engineering resources. And, I assume, Amazon is already an user?

The point here is not so much about Kusu or the benefit they get from having oh so many clusters registered as their base, but about the increasingly aggressive marketing push for the Open Source software, something that can only be greatly welcomed. What's the next step then? Free Whole Foods organic supermarket vouchers for downloads of Fedora or OpenSUSE would sound about right.

Non polluted foods for non polluted computers and their owners. As for Blighty or its ex crown colony Singapore, Marks & Spencer gift vouchers would do fine, thanks. µ