PBS Licensing and Support: Open-source and Commercial
- Anne Urban
The PBS Pro software is dual licensed – it is available as a commercial software product, and it is also available under the terms of the AGPL 3.0 Open Source license.
Generally, enterprises doing production work (e.g. manufacturing, automotive, aerospace, oil & gas, weather prediction, and other Fortune 5000 businesses) prefer PBS Pro with commercial licensing, with commercial support, with indemnification, and with the additional QA and resilience that comes with hardened, enterprise-quality packages. With the commercially licensed PBS Pro, Altair offers “commercial support” – which is industry-standard software support and maintenance, for a fee.
Generally, public-sector organizations that are not as focused on production work (e.g. academia and research facilities) opt for PBS Pro with the Open Source license. These organizations generally do not have stringent SLAs that require 24/7 uptime, and many of these organizations can leverage inexpensive staff (e.g. graduate students) to help install, configure, and support open-source tools. In this case the PBS Pro Open Source Project provides a community forum where one can ask (and answer) questions. “Community support” is supplied via this forum at community.pbspro.org. The forum is monitored by volunteer members of the community, who are generally very knowledgeable and responsive, but there is no guarantee that questions will be answered or that bugs will be addressed. There is no fee for taking advantage of the community forum.
In summary, “commercial support” is industry-standard software support and maintenance provided by Altair with a defined service-level agreement for a fee (same as is available for most commercial software packages). “Community support” is a forum for Q&A where volunteers from the PBS Pro Open Source community ask and answer each other’s questions on a good-faith basis with no guarantees and no fees.