Condor Computing

Let’s consider how a business model can be radically altered based on stakeholder priorities. Professor Miron Livny (Link 7.6) is a globally-recognized expert on distributed computing. In 1988, he developed a system for high-throughput computing on distributed resources. Now called HTCondor™, the system incorporates more than 450,000 hosts and more than 3,000 pools worldwide (Link 7.7).

Condor distributed computing pools and hosts

Source: Original analysis published in Douglas Thain, Todd Tannenbaum, and Miron Livny, "How to Measure a Large Open Source Distributed System", Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, volume 8, number 15, December 2006.

When Livny first launched Condor, he could have applied numerous value prioritizations. For example, he could have identified himself as the primary stakeholder, and either used the software as a basis for consulting services or formed a start-up company to commercialize the system. Alternately, he could have prioritized his university status and the financial benefit of the university by encouraging the technology transfer office to patent or otherwise protect the software and license it to large commercial data processing and integration companies. Either of those were very real possibilities.

There was another group that offered us money in terms of having a partnership, but we weren’t interested because part of the motivation of Condor is that the software should be available for everyone to use, because that’s the only way you can enable small groups to come together to create a significant computing environment. Livny, interview 2006