Atlassian Cloud ToS section 3.3(I) prohibits discussing performance issues • Hacker News Board

Re: Atlassian Cloud ToS section 3.3(I) prohibits discussing performance issues

#41

Post by confluence_perf » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 6:19 PM UTC

burnthrow wrote: post #35

confluence_perf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to hear it's been a frustrating experience. I'm a PM for Confluence Cloud and we're always trying to make it better. Would you be willing to share more specifics, such as: - Pages with content X are the slowest - Trying to do A/B/C is annoyingly slow - etc ? (edit: looks like HN is severely limiting my reply rate so apologies for delays)

Come on, everything is slow and you know it.

We have certainly heard from some customers that agree that 'everything' is slow, but we've also heard from other customers saying they have no problems.

We would love to fix "everything", and we have some longer term projects focused on this -> However, "everything" fixes seem to be a more incremental boost and also take longer time to complete.

If you have any feedback about "specific" items that are the most frustrating, we'd love to hear about those -> targeted fixes for specific can be much faster, much greater gains, and usually offer better user experience gain/engineering time returns.

If not, I can only say that we are definitely working on making 'everything faster'

(edit: trying to reply but looks like HN is limiting my reply rate)

(edit: maybe I can post my replies here and hopefully they'll get read)

------ @rusticpenn - This is definitely possible that 'some users are just used to it'. But we also see a very wide variance in individual customers' performance numbers (ie. some instances have consistently faster performance than other instances), and even within individual instances variance amongst users (some users have consistently faster experience than other users on the same instance) -> we're trying what we can to narrow down the causes in this variance.

Hearing from "users with slow experiences" is simply one of the ways we're trying to track this down, but it helps if users are willing to provide more info.

--------

@ratww - thank you for the suggestion! We have some amount of data that helps us see what might be different between instances, but haven't gone out of our way to 'interview a fast customer', I'll bring this up with the team to see.

The two biggest factors I think we've seen: slow machines can contribute (but not a necessity), and large pages (especially with large tables, or large number of tables) can contribute.

Re: Atlassian Cloud ToS section 3.3(I) prohibits discussing performance issues

#42

Post by vsskanth » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 6:20 PM UTC

papafox wrote: post #13

I don't read section 3.3(i) as preventing criticism of performance, rather it prohibits the release performance benchmarks without further permission from Atlassian. Having been on the receiving end of competitors running 'benchmarks' on a service I worked on, and the trumpeting the very contrived and out of context figures, I can understand why Atlassian is trying to prevent it from happening to them. Pity that it p…

If your competition is misrepresenting your product in benchmarks can't you just sue for defamation ?

There's also the option of counter articles

Re: Atlassian Cloud ToS section 3.3(I) prohibits discussing performance issues

#43

Post by hertzrat » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 6:21 PM UTC

social_quotient wrote: post #15

So the language highlighted here is: (i) publicly disseminate information regarding the performance of the Cloud Products; But can we take a minute to talk about the combination of these two : (h) use the Cloud Products for competitive analysis or to build competitive products; (j) encourage or assist any third party to do any of the foregoing. Does this mean as a jira user I can’t help build a jira competitor for a…

Imagine if products prior to the 90s or outside software had these sorts of “agreements.” Every store in a mall would have them and every piece of fruit in a grocery store would require you to agree to arbitration clauses and privacy policies and non disclosure and non competition. Consumer reports and class action suits would not exist, and nobody would really be allowed to talk about it because of the NDAs. Automated facial and voice recognition in smart home devices could sell data to companies to enforce it. The news would not be able to talk about it. It would be a good setup for a dystopian movie, no?

Re: Atlassian Cloud ToS section 3.3(I) prohibits discussing performance issues

#44

Post by sytse » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 6:23 PM UTC

ineedasername wrote: post #30

josh_atlassian wrote: post #18

Just so everyone is aware, this is Atlassian's stance on that language taken from the internal guidance on the ToS. To be clear I'm not defending this stance as I think it is flawed. But I wanted you guys to know what Atlassians are told about it - ------------------------------------------------------ Section 3.3: Benchmarking Can you explain Atlassian's stance on Benchmarking? Like many other software companies, At…

That explains the stance but is not sufficient to justify it. It gives Atlassian infinite power to stomp on any benchmark that shows poor performance under a claim that it is flawed. It is also irrelevant that it's been in your ToS since 2012: Precedent or longevity do not make consumer-unfriendly restrictions acceptable. This is implicitly recognized by allowing internal assessment: That assessment would be just as…

Those suggestions in your last paragraph look very reasonable to me. At GitLab we explicitly allow performance testing as our ninth and final stewardship promise https://about.gitlab.com/company/stewardship/#promises But I recognize there is a trade-off and companies can reasonably but the balance at different points.

Re: Atlassian Cloud ToS section 3.3(I) prohibits discussing performance issues

#45

Post by ratww » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 6:24 PM UTC

confluence_perf wrote: post #28

dalrympm wrote: post #22

I'm curious, I'm a Cloud customer and I can tell you that the service is incredibly slow even for a small scale setup (2 Jira Projects and 3 Confluence Workspaces). There's an insane amount of network requests seemingly for mouse tracking. By telling everyone here, that Atlassian Cloud products are insufferably slow, am I violating the ToS? I was actually thinking about doing a write up on the issues I've had but thi…

Sorry to hear it's been a frustrating experience. I'm a PM for Confluence Cloud and we're always trying to make it better. Would you be willing to share more specifics, such as: - Pages with content X are the slowest - Trying to do A/B/C is annoyingly slow - etc ? (edit: looks like HN is severely limiting my reply rate so apologies for delays) We're trying to focus on frustrating pages/experiences rather than number…

> Trying to do A/B/C is annoyingly slow - etc ? [...] We're trying to focus on frustrating pages/experiences rather than number of network calls

It's not really a problem with a certain page or a certain action: it's a systemic issue, that can only be solved with a systemic change.

This has come up before here in HN [1]. From my point of view, ignoring the issue around number of calls/performance and all feedback regarding it is the root cause for the slowness.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24818907

Re: Atlassian Cloud ToS section 3.3(I) prohibits discussing performance issues

#46

Post by tw25613937 » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 6:24 PM UTC

confluence_perf wrote: post #25

unixhero wrote: post #16

Atlassian Cloud customer here. Large enterprise. The Jira and Confluence cloud products are slow as fuuuuuck.

Sorry to hear it's been a frustrating experience. I'm a PM for Confluence Cloud and we're always trying to make it better. Would you be willing to share more specifics, such as: - Pages with content X are the slowest - Trying to do A/B/C is annoyingly slow - etc ? (edit: looks like HN is severely limiting my reply rate so apologies for delays)

Not trying to be snarky, but... do you use your product?

Re: Atlassian Cloud ToS section 3.3(I) prohibits discussing performance issues

#47

Post by snypher » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 6:29 PM UTC

confluence_perf wrote: post #25

unixhero wrote: post #16

Atlassian Cloud customer here. Large enterprise. The Jira and Confluence cloud products are slow as fuuuuuck.

Sorry to hear it's been a frustrating experience. I'm a PM for Confluence Cloud and we're always trying to make it better. Would you be willing to share more specifics, such as: - Pages with content X are the slowest - Trying to do A/B/C is annoyingly slow - etc ? (edit: looks like HN is severely limiting my reply rate so apologies for delays)

As a product manager, are you allowed to discuss performance and benchmarks without violation of your contract? Or, is it just customers that are prohibited from this?

Re: Atlassian Cloud ToS section 3.3(I) prohibits discussing performance issues

#48

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 6:29 PM UTC

confluence_perf wrote: post #5

This is certainly a strange thing to have in there, as we've had public discussions about performance before and I assume no one's accused those customers of violating the ToS. I'll see if I can find someone inside Atlassian to talk about this part of the ToS (edit: Looks like other users have found similar clauses in other companies, so it seems like it might be standard legalese. Will still see if I can find out mo…

[deleted]

Re: Atlassian Cloud ToS section 3.3(I) prohibits discussing performance issues

#49

Post by Hamuko » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 6:30 PM UTC

jjuhl wrote: post #26

"Atlassian Cloud ToS section 3.3(I) prohibits discussing performance issues" - Their ToS may prohibit it, but that is in no way going to stop me from doing it - I don't give a shit about some document they write. Atlassian products suck hard and their performance characteristics are horrible. I hate being forced to use their crap at work.

The problem with Atlassian's Terms of Service is that most of their end-users are not paying for the software and do not really care if they violate an agreement they were either forced to make or which someone made on their behalf.

Re: Atlassian Cloud ToS section 3.3(I) prohibits discussing performance issues

#50

Post by tw25613937 » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 6:30 PM UTC

josh_atlassian wrote: post #18

Just so everyone is aware, this is Atlassian's stance on that language taken from the internal guidance on the ToS. To be clear I'm not defending this stance as I think it is flawed. But I wanted you guys to know what Atlassians are told about it - ------------------------------------------------------ Section 3.3: Benchmarking Can you explain Atlassian's stance on Benchmarking? Like many other software companies, At…

> protect users from flawed reviews

Perhaps California will address this problem by banning "performance benchmarking platforms" from listing evaluated products without an agreement from the vendor... [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25601814