Bull manure. You freeware fanatics have definitely overdosed on you elixir
Okay, what should Beowulf's creators have done? Where could they have gotten a closed operating system for free to freely hack into being able to run a supercomputer?
Maybe they could have begged Microsoft to give them all the soucce code for the then newly-released NT 3.1 with freedom to modify it at will, with a promise from Microsoft to extend that free license to other institutions that wanted to do a Beowulf. Now that's getting pretty rediculous.