BURP vs ORE?

The reason why the two services are being run separately is just that - in order to have two different environments available to users. Originally the Burp.renderfarming.net service was running on a different licensing scheme to Creative Commons (which prevented its use for commercial purposes completely). The ORE (Open Rendering Environment) project that ran (officially) from June 2008 to December 2009 produced Renderfarm.fi, an alternative BURP service to the original Burp.renderfarming.net service. For that period of time, the project received funding from Tekes, the Finnish the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation.

Renderfarm.fi adopted a Creative Commons licensing scheme from the beginning and in many ways proved that people don't necessarily shun such a service merely on the basis of it being able to produce commercial results or not. We also very much adopted a sense of making the technology as available as possible to anybody - contrary to Burp.renderfarming.net, which oriented more on mastering the technical aspect of the service. This actually is quite accurately the decisive difference between the two services. Renderfarm.fi aims at accessibility, while Burp.renderfarming.net on the development of the technology.

The fact that there are two services does not in any way mean that we're not doing collaboration with Burp.renderfarming.net. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Janus Kristensen, the head developer of BURP and owner of Burp.renderfarming.net has been key in the founding and development of the Renderfarm.fi website. We are very much still developing the technology together with the aims of benefitting both services.

PS. This week we finished writing the first scientific article about BURP to ACM Grid 2010 (http://www.grid2010.org/). Hopefully the article will get accepted, after which (if the IEEE rules agree) I will be able to post it on Renderfarm.fi for everybody to read. The paper is titled BURP: Distributed Rendering using Volunteer Computing and covers the most pressing topics of running a service like Renderfarm.fi or Burp.renderfarming.net.

It seems really that Janus has done all the hard work of developing the service, and you guys have then packaged it up to make it look a bit nicer, and "sell" it.
I don't really understand why you couldn't have taken the funding and used it to improving the accessibility of the already existing service, rather than creating what seems like a needless competitor

I appreciate your concern on this subject matter, especially as I've come to consider Janus as a personal friend during the 2,5 years we've been working together on ORE. BURP itself is GPL (GNU General Public License) licensed software, a fact that has enabled us to study and finally contribute to Janus's incredibly cool project. You're welcome to join us anytime. You can find the ORE team on the IRC Freenode channel #blender.fi (Janus visits us sometimes too).