Corporate involvement and contributions to HPCng will be essential to driving adoption and creating robust infrastructure for the future of HPC. To encourage and invite corporate support, there needs to be paths for products and services built on top of HPCng. In the same light, there must also be paths that do not require any proprietary or commercial products. This allows commercial entities, big and small, to participate and contribute to create a level playing field with opportunities for differentiating through innovation on top of HPCng. It also ensures that the base benefits of HPCng are freely available and provide significant value to all users without the need for commercial or proprietary components. With commercial extensions and service opportunities, HPCng can expect more inputs and contributions from technical and business resources from corporate entities in HPC.
No open source project will have non-OSI licensed or restricted software or API requirements without an exemption from the HPCng Board of Directors (e.g. NVidia Cuda). HPCng will always leverage open API requirements and ensure that an open source path exists, even if that is a limited reference implementation. HPCng requires that all APIs and interfaces of hosted projects are open source and freely available (e.g. OSI approved licenses). The process for requesting an exemption will be determined at a later time.
We ask that all other people and organizations who wish to be part of the HPCng community to do the same. Companies who benefit from the discussions and insights from the community should also release any resulting projects, software, and/or documentation which was inspired by this community as open source, preferably within this community’s GitHub organization. In doing so, the contributing leading organizations will be administrators of that project and have a delegate membership in the HPCng organization. All developers will also be able to leverage infrastructure that will be built up for all projects, and founders of projects will maintain authority.
HPCng is designed to be community focused, and any participating corporations should not use HPCng as a marketing opportunity to drive products and sales, but rather as a platform to drive features, capabilities, and collaboration.