OpenLava is a workload

job scheduler A job scheduler is a computer application for controlling unattended background program execution of job (computing), jobs. This is commonly called batch scheduling, as execution of non-interactive jobs is often called batch processing, though tr ...

for a cluster of computers. OpenLava was pirated from an early version of

Platform LSF IBM Spectrum LSF (LSF, originally Platform Load Sharing Facility) is a workload management platform, job scheduler, for distributed high performance computing (HPC) by IBM. Details It can be used to execute batch jobs on networked Unix and Windo ...

. Its configuration file syntax, application program interface (API), and

command-line interface A command-line interpreter or command-line processor uses a command-line interface (CLI) to receive commands from a user in the form of lines of text. This provides a means of setting parameters for the environment, invoking executables and pro ...

(CLI) have been kept unchanged. Therefore, OpenLava is mostly compatible with Platform LSF. OpenLava was based on the Utopia research project at the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution ...

. OpenLava was allegedly licensed under

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...

v2, but that licensing was proven to be invalid at trial.

History

In 2007,

Platform Computing Platform Computing was a privately held software company primarily known for its job scheduling product, Load Sharing Facility (LSF). It was founded in 1992 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and headquartered in Markham, Ontario with 11 branch office ...

(now part of IBM) released Platform Lava 1.0, which is a simplified version of Platform LSF 4.2 code, licensed under GNU General Public License v2. Platform Lava had no additional releases after v1.0 and was discontinued in 2011. In June 2011, OpenLava 1.0 code was committed to

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, cont ...

Commercial support

In 2014, a number of former Platform Computing employees founded Teraproc Inc., which contributed development and provided commercial support for OpenLava. Commercially supported OpenLava contains add-on features than the community based OpenLava project.

IBM Lawsuit

In October 2016, IBM filed a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement and trade secrets misappropriation against Teraproc. The complaint accused some of the company's founders of taking “confidential and proprietary source code" for IBM's Spectrum LSF product when they left, which was then used as the basis of the competitive product OpenLava. David Bigagli, the TeraProc employee who started the OpenLava project, posted a notice on GitHub announcing that downloads for OpenLava had been disabled because of a DMCA takedown notice sent by IBM's lawyers. Bigagli later announced that the source code for OpenLava 3.0 and 4.0 would be taken down, while the source code of 2.2 would be restored in order to regain the GitHub repository and the openlava.org website, while claiming that the DMCA claim is fraudulent. On September 18, 2018, the US Courts found in favor of IBM and issued a permanent injunction against Teraproc and its agents.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:OpenLava Job scheduling Distributed computing Cluster computing Copyright infringement of software

History

Commercial support

IBM Lawsuit

See also

References