I've been taking a back seat on computing for a while, enjoying just letting the devices run with minimal management. Figured I would pop back in on this one, though. I hope everyone is doing well.
My first reaction was annoyance that IBM would drop WCG while it continues to make billions in net income per year (i.e., free and clear profit after all expenses and taxes). My guess is that they realized that they could 1. Save/redeploy the staff costs, 2. Save the IBM Cloud use costs, and 3. Most significantly, redeploy the IBM Cloud assets WCG was using to other uses. As IBM Cloud was, I believe, their most profitable sector, they probably want to make the best financial use of it they can. I'm also really disappointed that IBM didn't find new roles for the entire WCG team.
My second reaction was that this could be a great shift to allow more projects onto the grid. I think we've all experienced the frustration of the long on-boarding times with WCG in the past, partly from needing to code new science applications (which clearly won't be solved by the move) but also from the IBM security and legal teams. While I appreciate the thorough security reviews that IBM did, it would be nice if we could get more, small projects on WCG that rotate through instead of it needing to be a huge, multi-year project to make it worthwhile to add. I'd like to see a nice group of long-running projects that always have work to keep the grid busy (Mapping Cancer Markers, Open Pandemics, etc.) while we then have targeted projects that last a couple of months doing critical work that would have been too small for WCG in the past.
And finally, I do have concerns on the technical side. WCG was one of the few (maybe the only) BOINC project that seemed to always be up and running. Downtime was minimal and mostly due to security patching. Whenever there was an issue, the tech team was on it. I hope WCG doesn't turn into other BOINC projects with unexpected downtime of days or weeks and little to no communication from project admins or techs.