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Goodbye Joyent

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Re: Goodbye Joyent

#71

Post by techslave »

vanderZwan wrote: post #54

> I read a lot of code too, which wasn’t always easy, but sometimes I was lucky enough to find myself treated to one of Robert’s epic block comments[0]. He wasn't exaggerating, that is an epic, beautiful, I would even say humbling block comment to read. It's completely outside of my regular knowledge domain but that is not at all required to appreciate it. [0] https://github.com/joyent/illumos-joyent/blob/dff0473c792…

it’s a horrible comment. OTOH it’s world class documentation. obviously i’m not comparing myself, but i often find myself the only one at my $JOB that documents things at similar level. 99% of the time because i’m touching code i don’t understand and need to understand it first. writing the doco is the way i do it.

software would be soooo much better if we lived in a world where a) engineering practice demanded devs document this well, and b) the majority of devs had the skill to write so well. market pressure however demands faster delivery times, and who cares about the tech debt.

Re: Goodbye Joyent

#72

Post by vertex-four »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #64
trasz wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would GPL prevent anyone from being sued in a way that a permissive license wouldn't?

My thinking is that the one-way opening of source code due to the GPL ensures that a company cannot reverse its overall stance on taking an OS open (like Oracle-Sun did with Solaris); and forces it to think in an open-first way (for lack of a better term). If Solaris source had always been available under the GPL, it would have removed the incentive for Oracle-Sun to sue other people for announcing support for OpenSo…

A company that owns its code can release version 1 under the GPL and version 2 under some proprietary license just fine. We actually see this in the recent “commons clause” debacle, where previously free software became proprietary.

Re: Goodbye Joyent

#73

Post by dasil003 »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #5

It’s kind of risky to have programmers who feel so passionately opinionated about the software that should power a business. It’s doubly tricky, because most companies pay lip service to passion. But like a chef that cares a bit too much about which cookware you use, it sometimes hinders the goal of serving 100 customers at noon. I respect that they’ve created their entire networking stack from the ground up. Few can…

As one of the first customers of Joyent (aka TextDrive) in 2004 who funded the company via a prepaid "lifetime" hosting account, I think you hit the nail on the head. The CTO was in love with Solaris, constantly waxing poetic in the forums about the next great technical idea he was implementing while the shared hosting we had prepaid for suffered constant downtime and technical problems. While I think they eventually sort of got their shit together (just based on outward appearances, they had long since burnt their bridge with me personally), it's really no surprise that they lacked the customer-centricity to succeed in the cloud wars.

Re: Goodbye Joyent

#74

Post by patkai »

user5994461 wrote: post #48
patkai wrote: post #26

It is the sign of terrible incompetence to downsize people like him. If you ever get hold of people with this much competence then find a clever project for them, or create a new subsidiary.

The company is doing poorly and it's a miracle it's not closed yet. Better not judge a dying company for laying off (all) its staff.

No way I am judging the company, meaning Joyent. But Samsung Electronics owns them, so what I expect is they realise they sit on a goldmine of talent, and if Joyent products are not doing well then they reinvest that talent in something else.

Re: Goodbye Joyent

#75

Post by bgrainger »

tgtweak wrote: post #3

What a joy to work with Bryan et al. Probably the best paid education you could imagine. Is Samsung doing nothing with joyent? Seems they could and should be competing heavily in the server space if not the public cloud itself more meaningfully than they seem to be today.

Joyent Public Cloud was shut down (three years after the Samsung acquisition): https://docs.joyent.com/joyent-public-cloud-eol

Re: Goodbye Joyent

#76

Post by mathattack »

techslave wrote: post #60
mathattack wrote: post #42

Interesting that he throws MongoDB under the bus. I’ve heard a lot of negativity about them lately.

lately? MDB has always been awful. Then again i did work at the largest MDB deployment (per MDB themselves) so saw all the problems.

Technical problems or commercial?

Re: Goodbye Joyent

#77

Post by ktm5j »

theredbox wrote: post #69
ktm5j wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you don't want open source to be more inclusive? Seems like a silly reason for your decision.. I don't understand your motivation here.

You should realize not all of us are americans and we dont care about your identity bullshit.

okay thanks.. still seems like a stupid decision

Re: Goodbye Joyent

#78

Post by bahamat »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #64
trasz wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would GPL prevent anyone from being sued in a way that a permissive license wouldn't?

My thinking is that the one-way opening of source code due to the GPL ensures that a company cannot reverse its overall stance on taking an OS open (like Oracle-Sun did with Solaris); and forces it to think in an open-first way (for lack of a better term). If Solaris source had always been available under the GPL, it would have removed the incentive for Oracle-Sun to sue other people for announcing support for OpenSo…

There’s nothing in GPL that prevents or prohibits closing later versions. This is also true for the CDDL. The reason Oracle was able to close Solaris after it had been open is that Sun had required a contributor license agreement that assigned the copyright for your code to Sun before they would accept your changes. This would work even for the GPL.

The CLA is actually what initially prompted the illumos fork even before Oracle closed the gate.

Joyent initially had a CLA on Node.js for business reasons that (as far as I know) everyone in engineering disagreed with. When we were finally able to make Triton (née SmartDataCenter) open source we also eliminated the CLA for node.

We now have contributions from many people under the MPLv2 in Triton, and we are no longer the exclusive copyright holder which means that it is pretty much impossible\* for Samsung to close it again.

* We would have to either rip out all those commits or get every contributor to either relicense or assign copyright to Joyent.

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