Stumbled across your site on another search but it touched a nerve. I’ve got a reasonable amount of work unit scheduling and scheduling products experience (have twice assesed new products).
I have previously come to the conclusion that generally the products on offer are too weighty, complex and expensive and that there is a niche to be filled by a simple (very) low cost no frills product, definately no GUI.
I have the skills to develop one but have never started for a variety of reasons but the main 2 are:
I work in a support/development role and tend to like to switch off at the end of a working day and on the occassions I get past this I then assume that the Linux devotees will already have developed one anyway.

Cheers

Mark

http://www.leyton.org/download/qsbs-0.1.tar.gz

Needless to say: it’s VERY alpha, not complete, and very, well, Quick and Simple (as in not much effort). If you find a use for it, great, but use it at your own risk. For now, it’s distributed under the GNU General Public License, and comes with no warranty (See the README and COPYING files).

I’m leaving to go travelling in a month or so, but I may start work on something a bit more fully featured later this year, after I return from South-East asia in June/July.

I have done a lot of work with schedulers over my years and, indeed, have ended up with Autosys everywhere I have worked. Even though it is outrageously expensive, it is also reliable and for this job, we can’t afford to pinch pennies. One of the Windows groups where I currently work had implemented some jobs in an app called 24×7 (http://www.softtreetech.com/24×7). It was simple and cheap but they admitted that it failed/crashed a couple times a week. So we are converting their stuff to Autosys.

A motivation for my writing to you is that I am also a convert to the Mac for a little over the past year. Our office is investigating alternatives to Solaris machines ($9000 for 2U dual CPU Sparc 240). The current favorite in the systems group is RH Linux ($7500 for dual CPU incl. Server software). I am trying to push dual CPU G5 XServes. The only thing holding me back is Autosys availability. Heaven knows what it will take to move the CA mountain, but thought I’d pass on to you that I am going to try.