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Atlassian's new terms forbid benchmarking
- adtac 8y agoThis is also very similar to the clause that allowed Larry Ellison to allegedly try to have a professor fired for benchmarking Oracle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886333 I was just going through theirs (and other) terms and conditions to understand what kind of legalese goes into these and I was appalled at this. While these terms aren't effective until after 01-Nov-2018, I tried searching online to see if there was any discussion about how stupid this is, and this unanswered forum post came up. I have no idea how this is still considered acceptable.
- rhinoceraptor 8y agoPlenty of proprietary software has these restrictions, Datomic, MS SQL Server, etc. I suppose you could make a case that most published benchmarks will be flawed or inaccurate, but it's still wrong to do.
- snuxoll 8y agoIt’s not, the Consumer Review Fairness Act prohibits this practice.
- DoofusOfDeath 8y agoThat's the first I've heard of the CRFA - thanks for mentioning it. I was curious whether or not the CRFA could be overridden by contract terms, but the FTC claims quite the contrary: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/consumer-review-fairness-act-what-businesses-need-know https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/con...
- briandear 8y agoA contract provision that is unlawful can’t be enforced.
- ubernostrum 8y agoI was curious whether or not the CRFA could be overridden by contract terms The whole point of it is to override and render invalid/unenforceable terms which try to forbid posting honest reviews of companies.
- jkaplowitz 8y agoI just looked at the text of the law. As the name suggests, it only applies when an individual is a party to the contract. If a company is the licensee, it wouldn't apply.
- towndrunk 8y agoIt’s obvious they know they have performance problems. They think they can keep it secret by pulling this kind of crap.
- charliefan1234 8y agoIt’s no secret. We’re trying our best to drag our 15+ year old codebases into the modern age. We’re hiring if you want to help! https://www.atlassian.com/company/careers https://www.atlassian.com/company/careers
- umanwizard 8y agoThen what’s the deal with these terms? I would have serious reservations about working for a company that bans publishing benchmarks of its software.
- GordonS 8y ago> It’s no secret ...until November, when these outrage terms come into force? It also seems somewhat delusional (or perhaps "misguided", if I was feeling charitable) to try to hire in a thread bashing Atlassian for these downright scummy terms, and indeed for having tools that are simply awful to work with.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kbos87 8y agoI feel like there is a subtle pattern of attitudes and behavior that I pick up on from Atlassian. It’s almost as though they don’t get that they need to keep working to innovate and please their customers to stay relevant. Look at what happened to Hipchat, and what I’d argue will eventually happen to JIRA.
- anothergoogler 8y agoThat's not the best comparison, HipChat is an ant compared to JIRA, and Atlassian gave up on HipChat only a few years after acquiring it.
- albertgoeswoof 8y agoSlack pretty much killed hipchat and drove directly into enterprises - which should have been atlassian sales. Once you have your tentacles in enterprise (and slack are almost there), it’s very easy to sell huge contracts of pretty average software. JIRA is great, but it’s not that complex, and it would not take much to start chipping it away
- briandear 8y agoIf Slack had an on-prem product, HipChat would be toast.
- monkpit 8y agoHipchat is already toast, it was being replaced with Stride, and Stride got the axe. Atlassian has now partnered with Slack for chat.
- borkyborkbork 8y agoAnd now they don't have an on-prem solution. Very upsetting.
- jarfil 8y ago
- shiftoutbox 8y agoFuck this dumb company and it’s crappy software !
- Roritharr 8y agoJira + Confluence Clouds Performance Problems are the Number One reason for our company to actively seek for ways to get the Atlassian needle out of our arms. It's really tough once you've invested the time to get Jira just the way you org works, but the Issues are just piling up and the complaints grow louder each month.
- anothergoogler 8y agoWhat sorts of issues? For me, performance is the issue, I've never found JIRA buggy or inadequate, and I'm generally able to find a given ticket and interact with it in the expected way.
- dingdongding 8y agoHow about JQL? Their query editor is so buggy.
- jimktrains2 8y ago> I've never found JIRA buggy I'm not sure how you can have used the UI and hold this option. I feel like I've been greeted by the same basic bugs time and time again, like clicking on an issue ans it not opening until the second click, or opening the previously viewed issue.
- jjoonathan 8y agoIt loses drags too. Just awful.
- bberenberg 8y agoJira performance takes a fair amount of experience to nail down. If anyone needs help, that's what my companys (https://atlasauthority.com https://atlasauthority.com) core focus is. Spent 4 years at Atlassian in support, and now we work with a number of the largest deployments in the world to help make things fast(er). It won't ever get to the sub second standard we like to see from modern SaaS apps, but it also doesn't need to be 12s page load times like we often see in client environments.
- stevew20 8y agoI agree with the dead thread guy! Fuck this dumb company and it’s crappy software!
- dang 8y agoCould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
- jjoonathan 8y agoHere's a benchmark for you, Atlassian: your software is slow as molasses and getting worse with each redesign.
- imglorp 8y agoIt seems like they're balancing features with speed. In order to get a bunch of extra features, every page load needs to be 200mb of extra crap that 99% of users won't use 99% of their page views. Oh and hamburger menus are hiding the key features you DO use every page view.
- ethbro 8y agoI always thought of Atlassian projects as inheriting all the problems of Java, exposed in UX form.
- ex_atlassian 8y agoIts always the people/expertise, rarely the tool or language.
- ethbro 8y agoFair. But for purposes of language = ecosystem, I'd definitely say organizations trend to mimic language structure, and vice versa. At least to a first order, palm-reading, internet comment approximation. ;) Modern Java, IBM C# .NET, Microsoft React, Facebook Rust, Mozilla
- anothergoogler 8y agoI'm not sure what's more concerning, that you're calling React a programming language or that you're unaware that Facebook is written in PHP.
- ethbro 8y ago
- willsr 8y agoAfter 4 years of dicking around with Jira/Confluence, we finally got rid of them last month. Haven't looked back since.
- BeeOnRope 8y agoWhat did you replace it with?
- Prefinem 8y agoNot parent, but we replaced Atlassian with Github and Pivotal
- jacques_chester 8y agoTracker is one of our best ambassadors, I think. I miss it sorely when working with Github Issues.
- Prefinem 8y agoTracker?
- ccoggins 8y agoPivotal's project management software https://www.pivotaltracker.com/ https://www.pivotaltracker.com/
- Prefinem 8y agoOh wow. So yeah, I guess we call it pivotal so much at work that I didn’t even realize it was actually called Pivotal Tracker. It’s a great product. The speed and ease of use is amazing.
- jacques_chester 8y ago
- orf 8y agoCan we please talk about how terrible BitBucket is? No syntax highlighting on diffs, horrible defaults (closing development branch when you merge into master???), not being able to make a PR after you make one commit to a branch without refreshing and loosing your message, inconsistent code formatting that is just horribly broken in general, weekly downtime that's not reflected on their status page, having to manually press a button to see updated diffs after updating a branch, no support for signed commits, API support lacking in the weirdest places, random failings in commit webhooks, etc etc. God I hate it.
- jchw 8y agoI've also tried the 10 user licenses for both Jira and Bitbucket servers. I absolutely loathe Jira. I respect its vast featureset, but user experience as a programmer has felt absolutely abysmal. The React redesign only confused me more. To find the Kanban boards, you had to hit the search button! I hope Jira has improved since last time I used it, but I have to say I'd probably prefer just about anything else at this point. As for Bitbucket.... It works, but I can't think of a whole lot it does that GitLab doesn't do better.
- mattnewport 8y agoJira is still horrible, I've only been using it a few months so I don't know if it's improved since last time you used it but if it has then it hasn't appreciably moved the dial from abysmal. I die a little inside every time I have to interact with it.
- gchucky 8y agoYeah, Jira is horrible. Between the workflows, search filters (create one, apply it to a board, but then you can't edit it?) and everything else, it's really clunky to use. I've done test runs with other tracking software, and I can't really find anything better. Every tool sucks in its own way. Do you have a recommendation on something that you've found that's better than Jira?
- mattnewport 8y ago
- sundvor 8y agoTwo companies, everything else being same; One with JIRA, the other GitHub Issues wrapped with Waffle, the choice would be a very simple one. Oh and https://twitter.com/HackerNewsOnion/status/981609242221318145?s=19 https://twitter.com/HackerNewsOnion/status/98160924222131814...
- seanwilson 8y agoAre there any examples of companies taking action when these kinds of restrictions are ignored? I would have thought terms like these would prompt people to release benchmarks for the sole purpose of generating bad PR if the company actually took action.
- sytse 8y agoNot allowing people to talk about how you application performs is not compatible with GitLabs value of transparency. I've added a commitment to always allowing people to do this to our stewardship promises https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commit/da81150e8e834bf59ad3f2f24bde6417ef32aa31 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commit/da81150e...
- adtac 8y agoThanks a lot for adding that! This is a bit offtopic: (OP here) the reason why I was even reading Atlassian's terms is to understand what kind of language is used in enterprise self-hosted software because I need one for my own product. I really like GitLab's open core model (as long as the core is still perfectly usable), and I was wondering if I could ask you some questions about it as I'm looking to adopt something very similar? Could I contact you over email about this?
- sytse 8y agoFor sure. Maybe you want to talk to Jamie, she knows most about this. Her email is jhurewitz at our domain. Please have a https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ea/#pick-your-brain-meetings https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ea/#pick-your-brain-meetin... (public video) so others can benefit as well. Please reference the url of this response in your email to her.
- tajen 8y ago
- mesozoic 8y agoNot suprising considering how terrible their products are. You don't need to benchmark them to know they're slow.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y agoI have a simple heuristic: if the company bans benchmarking, then the product is slow (and they know it).
- beerlord 8y agoI'd also add that Atlassian are a well-known user of immigrant labour under an Australian visa scheme similar to the H1-B. They are hugely pro-immigration publicly also. (Despite this, their founder just bought a huge mansion in a very expensive part of Sydney completely protected from population growth due to restrictive bylaws). I'd propose that they are hiring cheap workers just to keep the ship afloat, rather than to radically improve it.
- charliefan1234 8y agoI’d propose that you’re wrong - with relocation and visa costs it’s significantly more expensive to bring in someone from overseas. Not to mention it’s frequently 3-4 months after interviewing before they can start, as opposed to 3-4 weeks for a local hire. We hire as many local people as we can, the interview process isn’t any different. The other aspect of the founders believing in the importance of being able to hire talent from overseas is actually at the higher levels - the local talent pool of managers with 10+ years experience running large SaaS orgs is pretty small, given the industry here is fledgling. We’ve developed our own leaders internally, but there’s no substitute for bringing in an external hire to develop the next generation of leaders.
- mholt 8y agoThe HN title is misleading: the terms do not forbid benchmarking, just public dissemination of the benchmarks. This is a standard software EULA clause. One reason we decided to keep this clause in the Caddy EULA (which I should clarify here only applies to official binaries, not the open source, Apache-built binaries you can make yourself) is because we found out that very few people are expert enough to benchmark correctly. I've read a dozen Caddy benchmarks, for example, that turned out to be based on false assumptions or had hidden factors or were simply not reproducible (and not just by me). Benchmarking requires expertise that, it turns out, very few people have. I don't think I even have enough skills to do it correctly and meaningfully. Also, web servers are complex enough (in terms of both configuration and all the layers involved with networking stacks) that one correct benchmark is not generally useful to the next person. Spreading wrong performance information can hurt a business. It's not that there's anything to hide or any desire to take away your freedom -- and I would normally be one to assume the worst from any large company -- it's just business: they don't want the risk of bad PR based on a possibly false premise, especially when that information tends to only create negative hype rather than actually being useful. Anyway, this link doesn't seem like news. Just usual HN hype.
- icelancer 8y ago>> The HN title is misleading: the terms do not forbid benchmarking, just public dissemination of the benchmarks. If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? The title is not misleading. Performing 69,000 benchmarks but being unable to publish them is de facto banning benchmarks, period. Hiding behind the idea that benchmarking is hard therefore it should be banned because it might be fake news is ludicrous. It is also not standard software EULA licensing, unless you think Oracle's practices are somehow industry standard and good for everyone.
- mesozoic 8y agoThis way they can make you spend a ton of time bringing up a trial version on your internal systems to do the benchmarking. Effectively forcing lock in and sunk costs fallacy thinking then put you into tons of meetings that are really just attempts to upsell.
- GuyPostington 8y agoI've submitted many benchmarks over the years for new jira and confluence UI "upgrades". I've received responses to the tune of, "our developers don't see that behavior issue on Windows" even though the test systems I used were Linux based and clearly stated as such. Speaking frankly, the new jira ui is fucking shit and makes my job slower due to the fact that pertinent information is obscured and only clearly displayed when I click "use old interface". This means that I must first wait for the whole page to render, click a link, and wait for the entire page to redirect to the old UI and render again. Multiply this for every single ticket I have to open and you can see the minutes tick off the clock.
- towndrunk 8y ago> Speaking frankly, the new jira ui is fucking shit and makes my job slower Yep. Bitbucket as well. In some of the repo config screens you get a save button in others you don't. No consistency at all.
- cimmanom 8y agoWhere is the “old interface” link?
- GuyPostington 8y agoFor me, it's in the top right corner of every issue.
- cimmanom 8y agoHuh, I haven’t seen a link like that in months. Unless... is it inside that “...” menu?
- jarym 8y agoWow, I last used Jira a long time back when it was pretty much new and loved it and I loved the values Atlassian had. It was far better than anything I'd come across before, Kinda shocked to see all the negative posts on here. How can a product fall so much?
- scaryclam 8y agoTo be honest, most companies using Jira never actually configure it to match their requirements. That's not really their fault, Jira is a beast and quite a lot of time needs to be put into getting it just right. Jira's always been hard to get going with, and it's still way better than pretty much everything else (once configured), but they are really bad at actually making it easy to use.
- coldcode 8y agoThe (extremely large) company I work for has a product management team that customizes Jira to match what it wants which does not work at all for anyone else. Upper management of course doesn't understand anything about software development and just wants to see meaningless burndown charts. I am sure its possible to set up Jira is a useful fashion but damned if I have ever seen it done.
- Tongueincheek 8y agoIs Atlassian still a thing? Why?
- slow_donkey 8y agoStatuspage.com seems to be doing well
- x0x0 8y agoNo serious alternative to jira (if you have one, I would love to know about it). Hard to find a decent alternative to confluence for an internal wiki, particularly one with a good ACL system. We need certain customer details locked to just the people servicing those accounts.
- ssijak 8y agoYoutrack
- x0x0 8y agothank you
- M_Bakhtiari 8y agoJira's primary user demographic is by its very nature capable of building a replacement for it. Build a bare bones system just like Git itself that keeps track of the data and ACLs, and let the silicon valley startup guys make fancy web interfaces and cloud packaging to make it palatable to middle management. Like Git the core can be moved around and interacted with in the terminal so you're not dependent on any one vendor, and if you don't like any of their GUIs you can just work on the console.
- j45 8y agoI have used JIRA for 5 years and came to it begrudgingly when the project was complex enough. It handled the complexity, details and customizations of the project well enough though. It's funny reporting benchmarking is being banned. The guise of web apps being too complex to be reasonably communicated is laughable. There is a 15 year old bug open to reduce the flood of emails Jira can create from updates. JRASERVER-1369 [1] could be it's own community. With minimal java/jvm tuning experience, it seems likely the oncloud product is aggressively cached and resource throttled. Once a page or filter has loaded, it generally loads quicker. The speed of an on premise install of JIRA compared to the cloud can be staggeringly faster. One solution might be for some clever person to first crawl an entire Jira or Confluence site, and then continually ping all the pages to keep the system performing better. [1] https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-1369 https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-1369
- beepbeepbeep1 8y ago[redacted by author request]
- jelling 8y agoFinally some sort of explanation. Thee feature set is great for complex use cases but the cloud version is unusably slow. Worse the support team seems trained for pretend like it's not a problem. The last web app I remember being as slow as Jira is Friendster.
- ex_atlassian 8y agoThe hyper distributed micro services are definitely one of the big reasons for unnecessary complexity and latency problems. It was surprising for me to see that the JVM based services were load tested for 4-10 minutes to call the test successful.
- beepbeepbeep1 8y agoYeah it's odd as some very clever talented people have passed through there doors, some very mixed feelings towards them. The JVM is just getting warmed up load testing for that short a period.
- therealdrag0 8y agoDo you know of any sources that show it takes that long to warm up JVM?
- bitcharmer 8y agoIt has nothing to do with time and everything to do with the number of times hot paths get executed. On a server JVM instance a method will have to be executed (by default) 10 thousand times before it is compiled. There is also a question of how stable the compilation profile is and how likely deoptimizations are but that's a different story.
- snaky 8y ago
- sh87 8y ago> Cloud terms Para 3.3 > Except as otherwise expressly permitted in these Terms, you will not [...] (c) use the Cloud Products for the benefit of any third party; What does that even mean ? "benefit" is such loose language. Can I not use JIRA to build anything that 'benefit's my customers? Can someone with experience working on such terms throw some light on this ?
- jimjimjim 8y agoWrath of Khan Mode JIRAAAAA!
- enkarta 8y agoSlow/frustrating UIs can be one of the biggest barriers to productivity. At Monolist (https://monolist.co https://monolist.co), we’re building a streamlined task experience that integrates deeply with Jira (and Confluence) Cloud specifically so you don’t have to deal with these painful UIs.
- thomasfedb 8y agoWhat's a decent alternative to Jira for support/workflow (non-software)?
- ofrzeta 8y agoRecently there was some discussion about how restriction like these are void in the EU, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18064772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18064772 I always wondered how or if it is possible to place arbitrary restriction on software use. Also I wonder if a clause like this would be binding for tech journalists who run a benchmark because essentially they don't really agree to the license when they are testing software.
- acd 8y agoI question companies prohibiting basic human rights. Free speech is a basic human right. Link to UN human rights https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ Right number 19. Article 19. "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." So its a basic human right to be able to express how fast or slow Atlassians products are. Further First Amendment to United states constitution Amendment I "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment
- unlikelyzero 8y agoThis is hilarious. At one point I was writing test automation against their JIRA Cloud offering, because they didn't provide an analog to their authentication API in the JIRA on-prem version. To get the tests to pass, I had to create a jiraRetryFixture and when that didn't work I wrote a preflight check which would just skip those tests if it wasn't available.