GravityZoo goes Open Source with MediaZoo

[mah...@gmail.com]

MAASTRICHT, The Netherlands, November 10, 2008 - GravityZoo today
announced that MediaZoo, its Cloud based media library & player, is
going Open Source. The source code is released under the GNU General
Public License v3.

MediaZoo is an online media library & player. It streams uploaded
music to any device where a GravityZoo client is installed, and allows
users to invite close friends to their “Music Room”. With the public
release of MediaZoo, GravityZoo hopes to create a platform that allows
users, musicians and developers to start collaborating on creating a
unique, open and free music experience in the Cloud.

An experience enabled by the GravityZoo Cloud OS allowing any
application to become accessible as a service via any device connected
to the internet. An Internet Operating System aimed at creating an
open and free Cloud, a goal GravityZoo believes only to be realized
through the direct involvement of the global FOSS developer community.

To encourage Open Source development GravityZoo has created DevelZoo,
a gateway to GravityZoo tools, roadmaps, tasks, wiki content and
projects. To enable the development of mobile applications, GravityZoo
is finalizing its Symbian S60 client soon to be released.

Related Websites:

MediaZoo: http://www.gravityzoo.com/mediazoo
DevelZoo: http://www.gravityzoo.com/develzoo

About GravityZoo

Founded in 2006, GravityZoo has created the 1st true Cloud Operating
System allowing applications, including legacy, to become accessible
via all devices connected to the internet, be they desktop, mobile or
embedded devices.

The GravityZoo Cloud OS opens a whole new, browser-free world of
Internet automation, communication and Open & Free Cloud Computing.
For more information about GravityZoo, visit http://www.gravityzoo.com.

[Chris Sears]

Where to begin...

First, your GravityZoo product is not an operating system and has almost nothing to do with cloud computing, so you really can't call it the first cloud OS. Please stop doing so.

Second, the whole solution seems very unnecessary. You have a RIA client app framework that will never have the install base of Java, Flash/Flex, or Silverlight, and some backend services that will never gain the critical mass of AWS or Azure/Mesh. The fact that you guys see yourselves as an alternative to Citrix/Terminal Server is just ridiculous.

Third, what makes you think this group has any interest in your product or press release? We're mostly not OSS zealots here, so the fact that you've open sourced a proof of concept media player that uses your obscure framework is really not that newsworthy. If you wanted to talk about how you implemented the backend systems behind the service, how it scales, what challenges you overcame -- that might be interesting. Instead, you chose to spam us with useless marketing hype.

 - Chris

[mah...@gmail.com]

On Nov 12, 10:47 pm, "Chris Sears" <cse...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Where to begin...

Hello Chris,

First of all you are correct in saying that I should not have dropped
the press release as such. My apologizes to the group. My intention
was only to inform the CC community here about GravityZoo and to start
a discussion. Nevertheless I feel compelled to give you a reaction,
since it seems your “enthusiasm” got you carried away, if I may say
so. Having that out of the way, here is my reaction:

> First, your GravityZoo product is not an operating system and has almost

Let’s first establish a kind of definition of what an OS is about:

Wikipedia: “Operating systems offer a number of services to
application programs and users. Applications access these services
through application programming interfaces (APIs) or system calls. By
invoking these interfaces, the application can request a service from
the operating system, pass parameters, and receive the results of the
operation. Users may also interact with the operating system with some
kind a software user interface (UI) like typing commands by using
command line interface (CLI) or using a graphical user interface (GUI,
commonly pronounced “gooey”).”

Now let me run you through a “GravityZoo Cloud OS” process and
establish whether our Framework may be referred to as a Cloud OS. For
the sake of the length of my reply I skip GravityZoo’s OS
characteristics like its own distributed file system, encryption,
network protocol (REP) development platform, memory management,
threading or even the possibility to run on bear-metal. You can read
more here:

http://gravityzoo.com/products/overview.py
http://gravityzoo.com/support/documentation.py

The process case: What happens if an end-user decides to play a song
via the MediaZoo cloud service? That is before the user receives the
stream of the song selected.

In general the user requests to receive a replication of an update of
an Object in an ecosystem totally defined in terms of Objects. Or more
specific:

The end-user, by means of a GravityZoo Client, requests the updating
of a Song_Object through invoking the GravityZoo_API. This request is
first received by the GzF_ Rep_Router to be passed on to the GzF_
Authenticating_Server, to subsequently being assigned to one of the
MediaZoo applications running in a Load balance pool of AppServers.
Once assigned, again by invoking the GzF_API, a request to find the
requested Song_Object is assigned to a GZF_Storage_Handler, a
Song_Object either to be found in the GzF_Caching_Service or in the
Central_Object_Store, a Load balanced pool of Gzf_Storage_Servers.

Once the Storage_Handler has located the requested Song_object, an
available Gzf_REP_Router assigns a then available AppServer running
the same instance of the MediaZoo application. The MediaZoo
application assigned, again by invoking the Gzf_API processes or more
specifically by invoking a Gzf_Streaming_Object, starts to generate a
stream as requested.

Remains explaining how the GravityZoo Framework makes certain that the
stream is delivered correctly i.e. to the UUID/Uniquely identified
Device/end-user who originally requested the update of the Song_Object
(as in: I want to listen to this song).

For this the GravityZoo Framework again uses to what I earlier
referred to as the REP_Router. It is that same Rep_Router (load
balanced pool of) that handles the replication of thousands to
millions of almost simultaneously incoming/outgoing requests for
Objects_Updates to all the UUIDs out there. Again a GravityZoo related
service delivered.

To conclude, taking the above definition in mind and offsetting it
against the above described GravityZoo Services as invoked by using
the Gzf_API, has indeed resulted in passing parameters and receiving
results of the operations. The GravityZoo Framework has done even
more than just that, it has managed the simultaneous delivery of
services that are geared towards handling requests (Input) and
distribute results (Output) from within a Internet scaled, load
balanced group of Authenticating_Servers, App_Servers,
Storage_Handlers, Storag_Servers, and REP_Routers to uniquely
identified devices (PC, Mobile, Embedded, TV etc.).

If that doesn’t justify the qualification of what indeed started out
as being a mere Framework to actually being a true Cloud OS ….

>has almost nothing to do with cloud computing

For definition purposes lets again use Wikipedia:

“According to a 2008 paper published by IEEE Internet Computing "Cloud
Computing is a paradigm in which information is permanently stored in
servers on the Internet and cached temporarily on clients that include
desktops, entertainment centers, table computers, notebooks, wall
computers, handhelds, sensors, monitors, etc."

The other day I was at a Cloud Computing event discussing CC. It felt
like I was living in a parallel Universe. All that was discussed was
the Infrastructure/hardware layer as a service. I felt like CC was
being hijacked by a group of datacenter techie’s. Later that night I
talked to few experts who gave me a short lecture on what they
believed what Cloud Computing is about. They summarized it as being
about Platform – aaS and Software-aaS and Infrastructure-aaS.

I couldn’t agree more and walked away with the confirmation that the
GravityZoo Cloud OS is indeed all about Cloud Computing, since it not
only provides the (FOSS) developer community with a Platform-aaS the
end result of which turns their (at present only Python) applications
into a networked, Software-aaS and this running on a Infrastructure-
aaS.

I hope Chris, that this reaction gives you a better understanding of
what this four year long scientific research and development project
has been aiming to realize.

> Second, the whole solution seems very unnecessary. You have a RIA client app
> framework that will never have the install base of Java, Flash/Flex, or
> Silverlight, and some backend services that will never gain the critical
> mass of AWS or Azure/Mesh.

That is up to the market to decide.

By shedding some light on what we are about, I hope that this reaction
has also triggered some interest in what our team of software
engineers with different backgrounds still believes to be the first
true Cloud OS.

I look forward to further constructive discussions with respect to the
content.

Best Regards,
Mahdi Abdulrazak
GravityZoo

[Moore, Eric]

"The other day I was at a Cloud Computing event discussing CC. It felt like I was living in a parallel Universe. All that was discussed was the Infrastructure/hardware layer as a service. I felt like CC was being hijacked by a group of datacenter techie's."

I think the majority of the people here are interested in cloud computing from the datacenter side of things. Playing media is a use case I don't think many people are going to get interested in for a couple reasons:

1) media is best accessed locally, since modern media distribution systems require licensing, transfer occurs at time of purchase, implying that there is a local copy
2) storing your own media offsite wastes bandwidth when compared to the cost of hard drives today
3) streaming other peoples media is already a well defined use case that providers like youtube have found ways to manage.

So yes, you're thing seems cool, I think you got the response you did because you kinda just threw something out there about playing media and cloud computing and it does not really click as a useful demonstration of what could be a neat framework, take this as constructive criticism and maybe find a new way of demonstrating your frameworks utility? I don't think anyone could post "cloud computing media player OMFG" and get a good response in here honestly, not to mention the claims of first CC OS, by your definition wouldn't ESX with DRS enabled be a cloud computing OS since you can move processes (in the form of entire OS occurences) between nodes?

"According to a 2008 paper published by IEEE Internet Computing "Cloud Computing is a paradigm in which information is permanently stored in servers on the Internet and cached temporarily on clients that include desktops, entertainment centers, table computers, notebooks, wall computers, handhelds, sensors, monitors, etc."

That describes the WWW as of a decade ago, except for the expanded list of types of clients, unless I am missing something. HTML pages are stored permanently on servers on the internet and cached temporarily on clients.

If that doesn't justify the qualification of what indeed started out as being a mere Framework to actually being a true Cloud OS ....

>has almost nothing to do with cloud computing

For definition purposes lets again use Wikipedia:

"According to a 2008 paper published by IEEE Internet Computing "Cloud Computing is a paradigm in which information is permanently stored in servers on the Internet and cached temporarily on clients that include desktops, entertainment centers, table computers, notebooks, wall computers, handhelds, sensors, monitors, etc."

The other day I was at a Cloud Computing event discussing CC. It felt like I was living in a parallel Universe. All that was discussed was the Infrastructure/hardware layer as a service. I felt like CC was being hijacked by a group of datacenter techie's. Later that night I talked to few experts who gave me a short lecture on what they believed what Cloud Computing is about. They summarized it as being about Platform - aaS and Software-aaS and Infrastructure-aaS.

[mah...@gmail.com]

On Nov 13, 10:50 pm, "Moore, Eric" <eric.mo...@hp.com> wrote:
> I think the majority of the people here are interested in cloud computing from the datacenter side of things.

Eric, thank you for the constructive contribution to the discussion .

Yes, of course they are. But at the end these DC’s are there to
deliver services. That’s what I am stressing. And perhaps a future
cloud doe’s not even need DC’s; think of a sustainable distributed
cloud using millions of end-user devices as its infrastructure and
maybe with some central stacks in DC’s.

> So yes, you're thing seems cool, I think you got the response you did because you kinda just threw something out there about playing media and cloud computing and it does not really click as a useful demonstration of what could be a neat framework, take this as constructive criticism and maybe find a new way of demonstrating your frameworks utility?

As you stated MediaZoo is just an example use case of GravityZoo Could
OS. The points you raised about MediaZoo are very interesting and
arguable, but I rest that for now.

Our clients use GravityZoo for different purposes; from central
distribution and management of content to hundreds of screens
(narrowcasting) dispersed all over the country to location based
services and application (SaaS) delivery. An interesting service we
are going to release in to public soon is a seamless online storage
and back-up solution that can integrate with the local OS and
applications.

> by your definition wouldn't ESX with DRS enabled be a cloud computing OS since you can move processes (in the form of entire OS occurences) between nodes?

Let me state that today’s virtualisation is just the beginning of a
new era. At this stage of evolution it focuses on the OS layer and not
the application/service layer or in other words being able to create
an integrated and uniform platform. It brings a bit of scaling in
DC’s. Applications running on these virtual environments are delivered
the same way as on non virtual environments. The complexity,
limitation and cost factor of development, integration, deployment,
administration and delivery (to any device) of this service on today’s
virtual environments are still there to be solved.

> That describes the WWW as of a decade ago, except for the expanded list of types of clients, unless I am missing something. HTML pages are stored permanently on servers on the internet and cached temporarily on clients.

That’s exactly the point, “HTML Pages”. I totally agree with the IEEE
paper. They describe a Cloud being able to store any kind of data/
application on the Internet, rich in functionality and experience,
just like your locally installed applications. A Cloud in IEEE’s
definition is one that can deliver services to any device with a chip.
It’s about the network becoming an “intelligent” computer.

Best,
Mahdi

[Moore, Eric]

Constructive discussion rocks, and improves understanding, leading to better solutions for everyone. :)

I wish you the best with your product offering, I think you may want to look at content management systems, what their use cases are, and how your product per your definition below could fit.

-Eric

-----Original Message-----
From: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com [mailto:cloud-c...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of mah...@gmail.com
Sent: Friday, November 14, 2008 2:56 PM
To: Cloud Computing
Subject: [ Cloud Computing ] Re: GravityZoo goes Open Source with MediaZoo