With the addition of this project to BOINC, it seems the basic idea of Boinc is changing.

Users are suppose to contribute their computer time and feel good about doing it as a contribution to the betterment of the world.

With Eternity2.net, Bionc is being used to make money for some entity as the user is being asked to purchase the puzzle.

Whats next? POP UPS. Advertizing? Is making money going to take over the basic goodness of BOINC?

Lets keep Boinc pure for contributing free time for the good of all.

I hope you don't mind my stepping in at this point considering how you have opened the floor to this topic.

I myself have been asking this same question because I have a project in mind that would solve two problems: Finding the shortest path between two verticies in graphs where edge availability is determined by time, and coming up with rent money. The idea is to use BOINC to distribute the brute-force computations and then "sell" access to the results to the general public on a subscription basis. I hope you will indulge me a few paragraphs to deliberate commercial closed-source projects and not-for-profit open-source ones.

We have seen how opening the source for projects have produced applications for unsupported platforms as well as optimizations in the number-crunching process. These project libre are (as far as I can tell) the minority as it requires backers with large wallets to fund the project in full, such as the case with SETI. Even so, funding does not guarantee that a project will be fully open: the vast majoriy of the projects are closed-source (such as Einstein and Rosetta) to the point where the project is platform-specific (such as PS3GRID and XtremLab).

I do realize that there are advantages to this in that the project administrators have tighter quality control, can devote their full attention to a well-established platform, and are not distracted from the project's upkeep. After all, Free/Net/Open BSDs, SunOS, HP-UX, OS/2, AIX, IRIX64, OSF1, IRIX, and OS400 combined account for less than 0.5% of all hosts so why bother spending the effort, right?...

As much as I would like go on about platform specificity, I'll reserve this particular tangent for a more appropriate moment.

Needless to say, the cost of hosting a project has to be absorbed somehow by someone, open source or not. It is possible that projects could be operating on credit until they can cash in on their work unit results, as is the case (or at least potentially so) with Proteins, Predictor, TANPAKU, and World Community Grid.

A quick glance at the top ten most subscribed-to projects seems to correlate the common wisdom that the community prefers that money not enter the equation. Since older projects naturally enjoy greater popularity than younger ones, and since the older projects tended to be non-profit to begin with, this assumption may be coincidence. In either case, the number of projects that could turn a profit from their work unit results do seem to be lower down in the popularity polls than those projects that produce [monetarily] worthless results (if anyone can think of a way to "sell" Pirate and Belgian Beer results, please do not hesitate to illuminate me).

And so, we come to the matter for discussion: The closest any other project has come to recognizing a volunteer (aside from the randomly-chosen "user of the day" status) is SETI's acknowledgment of a volunteer crunching a signal-bearing work unit. Unlike any other project, Eternity2 is open about its for-profit goals - both for the project maintainer(s) as well as a volunteer. I would hate to think that millions of volunteers would be scrambling over to Eternity2 to join in on this lottery, just as much as the repugnant thought that it bars the 13% of our volunteers who do not run Microsoft Windows from participating.

I cannot overemphasize that Eternity2 must make good on their obligation as failing to do so affects all BOINC projects. I can imagine a scenario in which a "winning" cruncher is disqualified from his/her award because the volunteer's account was used on a third party's computer without the owner's awareness, or another scenario where the project operator(s) "cannot locate" the winner. Such publicity would certainly cause prospective volunteers to reject BOINC outright, regardless of a given project's goals, reputation, and profit-status. There must be accountability, and this the BOINC framework does not provide.

I am not a lawyer nor am I as familiar with license agreements as I would like to be. Yet, as far as I can tell, it is Eternity2's right to do so even if we find it unethical. Though BURP's April Fool's Day announcement was in jest, I do not joke when I say that all projects could be privatized, possibly without prior notice. This is a serious and likely possibility for my own project (which is why I am interested in what the community's reactions are). The profit motive does not faze me as much as the liability should Eternity2 fail to deliver on their promise.

With respect to my own project, the back-of-the-envelope estimate puts the average monthly cost of running a full-fledged BOINC project at several times my annual rent, not including one-time costs or wages. At the risk of repeating myself, the cost of hosting a project has to be absorbed somehow, even if it is through user donations, advertising revenue, ransomware, outright purchase, or a combination thereof. Recall that unlike the European experience, radio and television in the United States was developed entirely through commercial means. The Internet follows in this American tradition.

Also on my mind is the possibility of using a project's by-products to turn a profit. As long as there is a MySpace, Google, and Acxiom, there is a price tag on every volunteer's preferences, message-board conversations, dates and times of contact, bandwith and IP address, and quantity and models of their computer(s). This information, in my opinion, must never be sold or exchanged. Considering the regrettable state of the United State's privacy policy (specifically that the markets will provide) this too cannot be guaranteed. The recent privacy-breach headlines from unwarranted NSA wiretaps, through the outing of dissidents by Yahoo! and Microsoft, to the sheer stupidity of losing a laptop containing millions of VA medical records, all illustrate the possibility even without a profit motive. As with Eternity2's promise, we have only a project's maintainer(s) assurance that privacy will be respected.

If my view is a minority opinion that flies in the face of a majority consensus, then the only action we can take is preventative. As is, we are a toothless ad-hoc body. We cannot prevent BOINC from being used for profit just as Linus Torvalds cannot prevent for-profit organizations from using Linux. If this indeed poses a problem to BOINC, then we could add a "commercial use" clause to BOINC's license to preclude future profiteering (if memory serves MySQL has such a clause).

In short, I am of the opinion that Eternity2 has the right to do as they have stated, but I am very concerned about the ramifications to existing projects, future projects, and to BOINC itself. I do not believe that we can appreciate Eternity2's effect on BOINC or any of the projects until after the you-know-what hits the fan, but I am sure that the volunteer community will have a great deal to say about it.

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World Community Grid isn't planning, or even able to cash in on their results. The results are guaranteed to be released into the public domain. IBM are well aware that money goes in, science and credibility and positive publicity com out.

For the projects that do want to make money - well, BOINC is LGPL for a reason. Of course, anyone with half a moral will avoid these projects like the plague, but they have every right to exist.

Members who attach indiscriminately to every project are going to have to rethink their strategy.

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Thanks for the correction, Didactylos.

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I agree with everything said here about this subject. I am not asking for censorship, just discretion on the part of the users and not take advantage of the goodness that has been accummulated by BOINC.

The solution might be for the BOINC developers to build another sister mechanizism to handle only monetary projects and charge the projects for its usage as well as some compensation for the users who run the projects. Something like EBAY and PayPal.

I leave it to the lawyers to determine how to license this and inforce it..

Every user should look at the projects they are running and determine to the best of their knowledge that the projects are not being run directly for profit. I further suggest that BOINC not advertize the existence of the new money for profit projects on their present site as they violate the spirit of BOINC.

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from the article in the Financial Times awhile back, it looks like the Sony PS3 efforts on BOINC or BOINC_style work on the PS3 will be "for profit." As long as participants know what they're getting into, I don't really have a problem with it (it would be nice if Sony or other "for profit" places put something back into BOINC & the community as IBM WCG has done).

I get a little more worried with "false advertising" or "false hopes" using BOINC, i.e. I personally feel a little uncomfortable with all the hype that some projects are "curing cancer @ home" etc, as the drug discovery process is quite far off from any BOINC biochem project (from what I've heard from friends in the pharm biz for example). At least SETI & Einstein & CPDN you get what they say -- try and find aliens or quasars or run climate models. I also get worried that there seem to be so many "senior project" or "grad student" projects jumping on the boinc bandwagon -- and all it takes is for one programming & security screwup to make everyone else look bad. But maybe I'm just paranoid! :-)

I get a little more worried with "false advertising" or "false hopes" using BOINC, i.e. I personally feel a little uncomfortable with all the hype that some projects are "curing cancer @ home" etc, as the drug discovery process is quite far off from any BOINC biochem project (from what I've heard from friends in the pharm biz for example). But maybe I'm just paranoid! :-)

Cure Cancer, isn't that one of the WCG projects? ;-)

Predictor@Home has its own Wiki (apparently) showing you the other Protein crunching projects. What are proteins.

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Your comment was quite interesting, Carl - specifically when you said "| I also get worried that there seem to be so many "senior project" or "grad student" projects jumping on the boinc bandwagon". My experiences in the past have shown that university/college policies tend to be unsympathetic to student projects that require heavy processing, so I can see why many graduate/senior students turn to BOINC. But I wonder if projects of a scholarly nature in which third parties (volunteer crunchers) do the brute-force calculations could be considered cheating and/or plagiarism, since the project's operator is expected to do his/her own work and not copy verbatim from others' work.

Your comment that "| it would be nice if Sony or other "for profit" places put something back into BOINC & the community as IBM WCG has done" also stuck a chord with me. I agree that it is not sufficient for students to simply run a BOINC-enabled project to answer a question without (at least) documenting the experience. This, I believe, would be invaluable for improvements to BOINC itself, since my observation is that most of a project's discussion board suggest improvements that are more of a cosmetic nature rather than implementation-related.

Finally, one cannot predict if a given student-based project will outlive the project maintainer's graduation. For some reason (and I don't know entirely why) I view open-ended projects with greater legitimacy than those with clear-cut goals. Does anyone think that longevity should be a consideration for new projects?

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I don't think longevity necessarily implies legitimacy in the sense of not-for-profit and for public benefit. The Zivis project from Zaragoza was quite short in its initial phase (it may return with a new phase) but its very name shows it tried to recruit computer owners with a sense of civic pride and generosity. It certainly conformed to the traditional expectations of boinc crunchers.

I know the boinc download page already warns new crunchers to investigate boinc projects before attaching, but I think that project and team forums will have to help educate and inform as many crunchers as possible.

I wonder what would happen if Boinc discovered that a project was not describing itself honestly?

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I agree that longevity should not be a factor -- in fact I wish/think some projects would have a definite end-point and know when to stop other than going on and wasting people's time; or have bona-fide new workunits and apps to keep things going. United Devices springs to mind; I know they have run their biochem simulations about 40 times each; a total waste of energy and the public's altruism. I'm afraid this will backfire eventually and volunteer computing looks like we don't have an "exit strategy" (like Bush & Cheney ;-)

I was quite dismayed to find the boinc front page giving space to this gambling project in its news and announcements. The boinc Choose projects page makes it clear that none of the projects running on the boinc platform are endorsed by Berkeley, but if the news announcement isn't an endorsement, it's certainly an advertisement.

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Unless Eternity2 paid for that blurb, it's not an advertisement. Strictly speaking, it's publicity.

Sorry to be a nit-pick about that.

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Whatever we call it, to me it looks like an invitation to run the project.

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