Since summer of 2007, Fura is available at fura.sourceForge.net. The Fura project is addressed to developers or highly technical enthusiasts and, therefore, its focus is on bleeding-edge technology, not on stability. We have received very positive feedback so far from the community, and we are working hard on implementing the improvements suggested by some users. We are very enthusiastic about this project and we would like to encourage everyone to try it and participate in future releases, either by suggesting improvements, developing them yourselves, or fixing bugs you may find.

We believe that Fura will enable the creation of a solid core of next generation Grid technology that can be used widely and freely by a large community of users and developers. We also believe that lowering the adoption barriers and providing a true affordable model for everybody will unlock the potential of our grid middleware and will ease market adoption, freedom and agility.

We follow a dual licensing business model, as we think that it represents the best model for a new world of professional Open Source. With Fura Enterprise Edition, we provide professional annual subscription support services to our customers under either a GPL 2 license (Fura Open Enterprise Edition) or with with a flexible commercial license (Fura Commercial Enterprise Edition). Please, see the FAQ of the Fura Project for details.

(By the way, Fura means "ferret" in Catalan, the language spoken in GridSystems' HQ)

We have been asked why we are making our software Open Source. First of all, we fundamentally believe in the philosophy and economics of professional Open Source models. Second, and more important, we have discussed with our own communities the implications of this change, with very positive feedback. Finally, we unabashedly admit that we have an ambitious goal in mind. During the last years, we have pioneered the introduction of Grid computing technology in the marketplace. At the same time, the concept of grid has gone through several phases in the IT hype cycle. Most of the hardware vendors, as well as infrastructure software providers, have developed their own grid initiative with some successful initial traction. Some software companies have also been very successful in specific vertical industries, and we have witnessed the emergence of commercial first steps from academic projects. We believe that:

• Many academic projects are developing excellent ideas, and there is a great research under way to make next-generation grids a reality. Unfortunately, most academic projects lack some of the fundamental features demanded by industrial enterprise grids: robustness, full integration with the existing technology of the data center, easy installation, configuration and management, support and solutions, etc. At the same time, these projects are fully open source, and they have developed large communities of academic users and developers, with hundreds of research projects based on their technology. There is a tremendous untapped potential within these projects.
  
  
• Many commercial offerings have the advantages of their market focus: supported technology and strong marketing teams with solid references in their experiences with customers. But, in some cases, the technological foundations are not especially sound, with legacy technology being wrapped in modern clothes, or with products lacking the most fundamental layers of application virtualization and resource optimization. We think that the legacy of the high performance computing batch schedulers is still too dominant in this space and there is a fundamental need to improve the technology behind the curtains.

We would like to make fura the technology platform that integrates the best of both worlds: the openness and community of academic projects, with the robustness and support of a commercial entity behind the product, as with Fura Enterprise Edition, combining the best of the research ideas with the real needs of customers, and making grid and service oriented middleware technology realize its full potential.