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DeWitt Clause, or can you benchmark %database% and get away with it

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Re: DeWitt Clause, or can you benchmark %database% and get away with it

#21
post #11

All the BSL/SSPL ones shouldn't be in an "open source" section. Just change the heading to "source available" or put them with the "vendors".

Author of the blog post in question here. Let me clarify: they shouldn't be there because they're not OSI-approved, right? Just wanna get your point here. (While I understand that BSL/SSPL lack certain liberties, I deemed it okay to mark them as "open source" for the purposes of this post.)

Not just lack of OSI approval, they're attempting to redefine the long accepted meaning of open source to include their new licenses. They want the goodwill of being "open source" without the obligations. The only sorts of licenses that have consistently been considered open source are either copyleft licenses like the GPL and do whatever the hell you want licenses like MIT and Apache. Do whatever you want... unless you're a big corporation... or unless you're part of a group the authors deem evil/immoral/unethical... etc. is a massive departure from the spirit of the term open source.

Re: DeWitt Clause, or can you benchmark %database% and get away with it

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author of the blog post in question here. Let me clarify: they shouldn't be there because they're not OSI-approved, right? Just wanna get your point here. (While I understand that BSL/SSPL lack certain liberties, I deemed it okay to mark them as "open source" for the purposes of this post.)

Not just lack of OSI approval, they're attempting to redefine the long accepted meaning of open source to include their new licenses. They want the goodwill of being "open source" without the obligations. The only sorts of licenses that have consistently been considered open source are either copyleft licenses like the GPL and do whatever the hell you want licenses like MIT and Apache. Do whatever you want... unless…

Makes sense! Will edit when I'm next to my laptop, I promise.

Re: DeWitt Clause, or can you benchmark %database% and get away with it

#24
post #7

If you want to benchmark for internal reasons you don't publish the results and nobody knows. If you want to make a service to the community, run your benchmarks, download Tor and publish the results anonymously. I don't see what the big deal is? Is this only limited to marketing claims where you post it on your company's website?

[deleted]

Re: DeWitt Clause, or can you benchmark %database% and get away with it

#25
post #8

It would be quite refreshing if we could have a story in which Oracle are the good guys for once. I'm sure they are at least purchasing some modern-day 'indulgences' by - for instance - donating food to starving north korean elites?

They try to be the good guy. Their free tier is quite extensive (24GB of RAM, 4 ARM vCPUs and ±2 AMD cores, a several hundred GB of storage), good enough to run quite a decent personal cluster on, probably to lure in businesses for their AWS-style cloud services which are as ridiculously expensive as their competition.

However, just like AWS, Azure, and GCloud, their admin UI is complicated, slow, frustrating and full of invented acronyms and quirks.

Re: DeWitt Clause, or can you benchmark %database% and get away with it

#26
post #8

It would be quite refreshing if we could have a story in which Oracle are the good guys for once. I'm sure they are at least purchasing some modern-day 'indulgences' by - for instance - donating food to starving north korean elites?

I wasn't sure if you were joking, so I googled "oracle north korea". This is the first result:

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2020/10/07/North-Kor...

Re: DeWitt Clause, or can you benchmark %database% and get away with it

#28
post #7

If you want to benchmark for internal reasons you don't publish the results and nobody knows. If you want to make a service to the community, run your benchmarks, download Tor and publish the results anonymously. I don't see what the big deal is? Is this only limited to marketing claims where you post it on your company's website?

How likely is it that one takes an anonymous benchmark published by a noname researcher seriously?

100%

Have you met programmers?

Re: DeWitt Clause, or can you benchmark %database% and get away with it

#29
post #7

If you want to benchmark for internal reasons you don't publish the results and nobody knows. If you want to make a service to the community, run your benchmarks, download Tor and publish the results anonymously. I don't see what the big deal is? Is this only limited to marketing claims where you post it on your company's website?

How likely is it that one takes an anonymous benchmark published by a noname researcher seriously?

Extremely.

Why would you assume people generally do background/credential checks on researchers?

Sure its nice to have it on phoronix or something, but its by no means a deal-breaker if it isn't.

Re: DeWitt Clause, or can you benchmark %database% and get away with it

#30
post #12

Interesting. As a SaaS vendor, we do not allow performance testing of the production system. Because, you know, just casually saturating production resources can become very iffy for strange and unexpected reasons. And you will always be able to saturate a system, or a subsystem of the subsystem of the system. However, we have provided bigger customers, or customer willing to pay for it, with performance testing envi…

Looking at the language, almost all of them allow you to run benchmarks since it's phrased as "you may not publish benchmark results"; it doesn't forbid to actually run them. Never mind that MS-SQL, Oracle, etc. are not SaaS vendors of course.

To be honest, if a cloud vendor has technical problems with someone running a few benchmarks then that would make me very wary of said cloud vendor. What's the difference between a "benchmark" and "using all resources I paid for" anyway?

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