SciDB - A Science-Oriented DBMS at 100 Petabytes

highscalability.com

25 points·seven··4 comments

Not to sound too much like an ass, but I looked at their website:

1. Open source, but no public source repository?

2. No link to download a working release, even though their site claims one by March 2010 (it's almost May)?

3. A list of ambitious goals about what the project will do, but no working code?

Sounds like vaporware.

You might find this interesting: http://lists.scidb.org/archive/scidb-news/2010-January/msg00... - about the corporate sponsor who will make an enterprise version.

Anyways, I went to the site hoping to find a nice lead, but they've got the developers list private, and it seems that access to a real system is locked down.

I'd say it seems less like vaporware to me, but I'd have to say that while they say the codebase is GPL (or course, where is the proof for that?), the development process is extremely closed. It doesn't have the feel of any open source project I've ever seen.

After participating in a few of the XLDB meetups, at which the requirements for and design of SciDB were debated and discussed, I was quite excited about this project. I was kicked off of the mailing list unceremoniously once they decided they wanted to make it a business, and I haven't been allowed back on since. They're certainly abusing the term "open source" for marketing purposes here.

The reason they don't want people looking behind the curtain is that the rhetoric far exceeds the reality.

The first public SciDB release is coming soon - before this summer. It'll be announced through scidb-news and other channels early next week.

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