Open Letter to the SciDB Community
January 6, 2010
SciDB will enter the new decade with a strong new corporate sponsor – Zetics Incorporated. This email to the community introduces Zetics and lays out the mutually supportive relationship between the two organizations going forward.
March 2010 will be the 2 year anniversary of the Asilomar meeting that led to the formation of the SciDB organization. The community of scientists, academics, and industrial contributors actively engaged in the development of this open source software platform is growing fast. We doubled the development team in the past few months. There is strong interest internationally, including a team of European academics also seeking funding to help with the SciDB effort. We have more volunteers than we can "consume". There are weekly scrum meetings moving the software development forward from the August ’09 demo of LSST use cases at VLDB towards a functionally-complete V1 (alpha) system in April 2010.
While the technical side has been making steady progress, the financial side has not. Since its inception, the SciDB organization has struggled to sign up financial sponsors to provide sustained funding and has relied solely on volunteers to host the web site and development tools, provide conference call services, and the like. And the community’s expenses will grow as the product is released and widely adopted in the coming years.
Now, following the model set by Red Hat and Linux, R and REvolution, as well as many others, there’s a new, venture capital backed company – Zetics – that will provide sustained support for the open source community endeavor, both in dollars and in dedicated management and development resources. Zetics’ founders are Marilyn Matz (CEO), Mike Stonebraker (CTO), Andy Palmer, and Paul Brown. Zetics’ developers, when hired, will contribute to the open source SciDB code base in addition to supporting enterprise customers.
As with Red Hat and REvolution, we believe there will be tremendous synergy and mutual benefit between the non-profit SciDB organization, and the commercial company Zetics. The software functionality that has been specified to meet the challenging database and analytical requirements of the toughest ‘big data’ science problems aligns well with the requirements for many commercial and industrial applications such as sophisticated clustering and feature detection in financial services, web log analytics, and others.
Zetics is and will remain fully committed to open source and collaborative development. The SciDB software will be publicly available and released at no charge under an open source GPL license. In parallel, Zetics will charge for and release a supported, enterprise version.
The SciDB organization will continue functioning as it has since its start. In particular,
- SciDB.org will continue to be the main portal for the open source product, for releasing the open source version, for community support, and for mailing lists, etc.
- SciDB will continue coordinating input and use cases from the community, with the main focus on science.
The Zetics team is delighted to join and support the SciDB community in creating a new database management platform for ‘big data’ in science, business, and industry. We’ll be posting updates to the SciDB website regularly as well as creating a Zetics website. Please contact Marilyn Matz with your questions, comments, and suggestions.
Here’s to the SciDB community for an extremely productive 2010!
Mike Stonebraker and Marilyn Matz (Zetics & SciDB)
Jacek Becla (SciDB community)
