[Linux-cluster] rhcs product management

[Steven Dake]

On Sat, 2010-02-13 at 06:46 +0000, Martin Waite wrote:
>  
> I have a few questions about how the RHCS product / project is
> managed.
>  
> Is paid-for technical support available ?  Are consultants available
> for hire ?
>  
> What are the goals of the product ?  How are these decided ?
>  
> Is there a road map ?
>  
> Are any Red Hat staff dedicated to this product ?  If so, how many ?
>  
> There is a surprising lack of this sort of sales information available
> - at least none that I have found outside of the scant RHEL AP
> documents.
>  

Martin,

This list is for the discussion of community related issues for those
people using cluster2/3/4 and gfs2 rather then company specific product
issues.  Company specific product issues should be directed at your
vendor of choice.  Distros are encouraged to adopt the upstream sources
generated by this project to their liking and sell/support/give away
however they choose.  This is a community project first and foremost.

The goals of the cluster project are to deliver a best of breed
community driven cluster stack.  The project objectives are decided by
the community based upon typical open source process - write patches,
submit them, they are merged, project increases quality/features,
repeat.  Influence over the project direction is directly related to
effort done by contributors, as is typical with any type of community
activity.

Roadmaps are difficult to generate for community driven projects,
because it always depends on what community members want to work on.
There is no centralized "command and control" as is typical with
proprietary software development.

Regarding your business-related support questions, many distros have
adopted the software provided by this project.  If your looking for
commercial support and consulting, I suggest you speak to your software
vendor of choice - they likely have options for you.

Regards
-steve