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That's not the way that Sun worked at all, actually -- and certainly not with respect to DTrace. To the contrary, Sun often deliberately allowed competing proj

That's not the way that Sun worked at all, actually -- and certainly not with respect to DTrace. To the contrary, Sun often deliberately allowed competing projects, believing that the internal competition would generate a better result. (Or, perhaps more likely, Sun simply did not have the command-and-control to prevent such internal competition.) So contrary to your assertion, there was never an executive fiat around DTrace (indeed, there was never much executive fiat at all at Sun), and DTrace had loads of internal competition -- but DTrace succeeded where the others didn't because it was actually useful for solving the problems that others weren't.

brendangregg 10y ago
There's roughly ten different tracers for Linux. Yes, Sun liked competition, but it did not endure this situation like this -- what project had ten competitors, all staffed and paid for by Sun? If Linux were a company, I cannot believe the situation would have gotten this out of hand.
- bcantrill 10y ago
  There were (at least!) ten different kernel debuggers at peak in the late 1990s -- and many different tracers too. (As the saying goes, you haven't heard of them for a reason.) My point is that Sun didn't get out of the morass of myriad half-assed solutions by executive fiat; it got out of it by a small, focused, self-motivated team that was hell-bent on building something that could work on real problems. The nascent success of DTrace had nothing to do with executive management, corporate heft, or marketing; these things only were brought to bear when DTrace had already succeeded where it mattered most: solving real problems.
  - brendangregg 10y ago
    A nice story, but it's not working out that way for Linux. The Linux kernel engineering talent is there, but split among the different tracers, and, have different priorities to work on. And this has dragged on for years. A rational company could see that it wasn't working (no nascent success), and then combine the right forces to get it done. Linux isn't a company.

brendangregg 10y ago

There's roughly ten different tracers for Linux. Yes, Sun liked competition, but it did not endure this situation like this -- what project had ten competitors, all staffed and paid for by Sun? If Linux were a company, I cannot believe the situation would have gotten this out of hand.

bcantrill 10y ago
There were (at least!) ten different kernel debuggers at peak in the late 1990s -- and many different tracers too. (As the saying goes, you haven't heard of them for a reason.) My point is that Sun didn't get out of the morass of myriad half-assed solutions by executive fiat; it got out of it by a small, focused, self-motivated team that was hell-bent on building something that could work on real problems. The nascent success of DTrace had nothing to do with executive management, corporate heft, or marketing; these things only were brought to bear when DTrace had already succeeded where it mattered most: solving real problems.
- brendangregg 10y ago
  A nice story, but it's not working out that way for Linux. The Linux kernel engineering talent is there, but split among the different tracers, and, have different priorities to work on. And this has dragged on for years. A rational company could see that it wasn't working (no nascent success), and then combine the right forces to get it done. Linux isn't a company.