[HN Gopher] An Unbelievable Demo (2021)
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An Unbelievable Demo (2021)
Author : kunley
Score : 198 points
Date : 2024-03-03 10:07 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.brendangregg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.brendangregg.com)
| firebaze wrote:
| (2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27390512 (465
| comments)
| ryandrake wrote:
| Wow, the previous thread had a _lot_ of similar war stories of
| big companies trying to pass off other people 's work as their
| own. I didn't realize the practice was so widespread! I'm
| probably spoiled working for HugeCompany but we have thorough
| legal reviews of all external dependencies we pull in that goes
| down to the source code to find and stop improper uses of
| "other people's work". Crazy to hear how much casual credit-
| taking happens in this industry.
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> The belief at Sun that only Sun could make good use of its own
| technologies, and anything created outside of Sun was trash._
|
| Exactly my impression during the OpenSolaris time.
|
| Every time criticism of Sun's open source strategy was raised,
| people seemed in disbelief that Sun! could be doing anything bad.
| They were sacred.
| f1shy wrote:
| My experience with Sun products was before and after Oracle
| acquisition extremely bad. Particularly the last times when
| they started supporting intel and went open source.
| poisonborz wrote:
| I don't get it how he didn't followed up on this. I guess
| copyleft licenses (and adding licenses at all) wasn't that
| widespread back then, but this would have been easy (and fair)
| money, either licensing, hiring, consulting or behind the
| curtains arrangement.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Story is from 2005. Brendan started working at Sun in 2006.
| ghaff wrote:
| Ah. I thought Brendan was Sun so I was a bit surprised by the
| post. That explains it.
| alberth wrote:
| I guess the post title should instead be:
|
| _"how I got a job at Sun"_
| mysterydip wrote:
| Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be an isolated incident in the
| corporate world. There's been a few caught that made the news,
| but probably more that haven't.
| pbronez wrote:
| This is indicative of a more general phenomenon: the world is big
| enough that attention is stretched thin. If you invest a few
| weeks of thoughtful work into a specific corner, just because YOU
| care, you can quickly surpass broader experts.
|
| This doesn't devalue broad expertise in general. Focused amateurs
| benefit significantly from access to experts, and you need some
| level of training/experience before you can pull this off. The
| point is that attention and persistence are valuable.
|
| Consider someone with human body. There's a lot going on. You can
| go to a doctor. You can go to specialists. It takes weeks and
| months to get seen and you get minutes of their time. If you have
| a complex condition, it's very hard to find and capture the
| attention of an expert who can address the breadth of the
| problem.
|
| You have to get informed. Not the "do your own research" trope
| that leads to anti-vax and flat-earth nonsense. You have to
| document your symptoms. Figure out how to tell your story
| concisely. Learn what the relevant specialties are and the
| language they use. Dig into primary sources for early studies and
| experimental interventions. Nobody else will do this work for
| you. For much of it, nobody else can - because only you have
| direct experience of the problem.
|
| The software ecosystem is the same. It's huge, interconnected,
| with silo'd experts and communities of practice. A competent,
| motivated person can chart unique, rewarding paths. Keep pushing!
| geor9e wrote:
| A less clickbaity title: How I Found Out Sun Microsystems Was
| Selling My Open Source Tools Without My Permission
| Terretta wrote:
| That's clickbait since you are supposed to want to click to
| find out how.
|
| "Sun sales VP demoed me my own OSS DTrace Toolkit with
| attribution stripped."
| msdrigg wrote:
| Hmm still clickbaity because you don't know how it happens.
| Better title:
|
| "This is the story of the most unbelievable demo I've been
| given in world of open source. You can't make this stuff up.
|
| It was 2005, and I felt like I was in the eye of a hurricane.
| I was an independent performance consultant and Sun
| Microsystems had just released DTrace, a tool that could
| instrument all software. This gave performance analysts like
| myself X-ray vision. While I was busy writing and publishing
| advanced performance tools using DTrace (my open source
| DTraceToolkit and other DTrace tools, aka scripts), I noticed
| something odd: I was producing more DTrace tools than were
| coming out of Sun itself. Perhaps there was some internal
| project that was consuming all their DTrace expertise?
|
| DTraceToolkit v0.96 tools (2006) As I wasn't a Sun
| Microsystems employee I wasn't privy to Sun's internal
| projects. However, I was doing training and consulting for
| Sun, helping their customers with system administration and
| performance. Sun sometimes invited me to their own customer
| meetings and other events I might be interested in, as a
| local expert. I was living in Sydney, Australia.
|
| This time I was told that there was a Very Important Person
| visiting from the US whom I'd want to meet. I didn't
| recognize the name, but was told that he was a DTrace expert
| and developer at Sun, and was on a world tour demonstrating
| Sun's new DTrace-based product. Ah-hah - this must be the
| internal project!
|
| But this would be no ordinary project. I'd seen some amazing
| technologies from Sun, but I'd never seen a developer on a
| world tour. This was going to be big, and would likely blow
| away my earlier DTrace work.
|
| The VIP was returning to Sydney for a few days before going
| to the next Australian city, so we agreed to meet at the Sun
| Sydney office.
|
| ...
| rdlw wrote:
| That's kind of long-winded. Maybe the title should just sum
| up what happens in the article, in a way that sort of gets
| your interest and makes you want to read the story.
|
| How about "An Unbelievable Demo"
| kazinator wrote:
| I would swear that many years ago, there had been an indicent
| whereby some individual or group took the GNU CLISP sources (a
| Common Lisp implementation written mostly in C), converted it to
| C++ and passed it off as their own work.
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