I wonder if @bcantrill was aware of this at the time it happened?
An Unbelievable Demo
11–20 of 478 posts
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#12Good story; I do find the “Australians are just the little guys” narrative a bit frustrating and a self-fulfilling prophecy though.
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#13I worked at a company that was interfacing with the AOL Instant Messenger network in the early 2000s. Finally the business people got a deal and AOL made us sign NDAs to get access to the official API docs. We were excited because we were using the docs that one of the open source clients had produced from their reverse engineering efforts. AOL's docs were the same ones from the open source project, with the GPL mess…
Trillian?
[deleted]
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#14Good story; I do find the “Australians are just the little guys” narrative a bit frustrating and a self-fulfilling prophecy though.
Agree it's cringe. The whole "little guy punching above his weight" thing is even worse in NZ.
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#15Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#16Thankfully the "DTrace expert" didn't turn out to be Bryan Cantrill. He's a big fan of Scott McNealy's engineering principles for Sun Microsystems, which includes "Don't Cheat", and the behaviour in this story very much seems not in the spirit of that principle. I wonder if this bit of 'cheating' ended up getting someone at Sun in trouble.
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#17As much as I think RMS himself is an utter embarrassment of a human being, stories like this are why I also believe the GPL is one of the most important contributions to computing, ever.
MIT/BSD-style licenses are practically begging large billion-dollar corporations to rip off your work wholesale and use it to generate profits while contributing only the occasional patch or two. I used to see this phenomenon on HN, where every time some distro had a new release the BSD folks would be in here reminding us that BSD runs Netflix and routers and Playstations and won't we please just donate? As if Sony and Netflix value these projects enough to use them for critical infrastructure but not enough to keep them financially solvent.
(The GPL is of course not a panacea; as TFA demonstrates, Sun would have got away with this, possibly forever, had the author not made his serendipitous discovery)
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#18I was fortunate enough to happen to be live at LISA13 where AFAIK, Brendan gave his first public flamegraphs demo. I'm glad I saw it. I love learning about areas (performance engineering) where I'm weaker. Great demos! I've tried to keep my personal live demos at a high quality too. Can't wait to see what he comes up with next!
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#19As much as I think RMS himself is an utter embarrassment of a human being, stories like this are why I also believe the GPL is one of the most important contributions to computing, ever. MIT/BSD-style licenses are practically begging large billion-dollar corporations to rip off your work wholesale and use it to generate profits while contributing only the occasional patch or two. I used to see this phenomenon on HN,…
I think the GPL and FSF etc lost momentum with their GPLv3 push. I know that was the case for me. I really liked GPL (v2). Then GPLv3 came out and I was like huh? After that I became much more open to the lighter versions of things MIT / BSD.
GPLv3 is not really workable in terms of preserving developer freedom to do what they want with code (as long as they share their code back).
Obviously the powers that be disagreed and the GPL has been "upgraded" to v3, but was never impressed, and now much happier to contribute to MIT / BSD licensed products (which do allow you as the developer to do what you want with the code).
Would be curious if anyone has analyzed this.
Re: An Unbelievable Demo
#20Can someone elaborate on why he takes a weird detour in the middle of the post to discourage forks? Is there some particular issue with supporting bpf tooling forks? As someone who has spent a lot of time in open source, forks are not a problem, they are indicative of a problem. Don’t cry when people fork and go a different direction, try to figure out why and see if you’re willing to change the project to accommodat…
> As someone who has spent a lot of time in open source, forks are not a problem, they are indicative of a problem.
Forks because the main project is not responding to a need are not a problem. Forks just because some project or product believes it gives them more control and they don't interface with the original project usefully are a sort of a problem. Those aren't necessarily started because of a community need, but some business need or perceived business need which may have nothing to do with the reality.
I think that's the situation he's asking to avoid here, as he mentions observability products. He's saying please don't fork just to have it under your own repo and for no other reason, when it can be developed jointly.