60 ms·

An Unbelievable Demo

• tushar-naik 5y ago
  Nice
• amelius 5y ago
  Sounds like a Silicon Valley (the series) plot.
• xxsaculxx 5y ago
  This comment section if full of interesting stories! Gold content here!
• InfiniteRand 5y ago
  This reminds me of how the developer of MINIX, Andrew S. Tanenbaum, found that Intel put his operating system on millions of machines only after reading about it in the media: "I guess that makes MINIX the most widely used computer operating system in the world, even more than Windows, Linux, or MacOS. And I didn't even know until I read a press report about it." https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/ https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/
• brechmos 5y ago
  Finding code in multiple places.... Semi-related... I TA'ed a Comp Sci class a long time ago (back when they had to submit their code as print-outs). I read through the print-outs and noticed that the "look" of one of them seemed oddly familiar (blocks, line lengths, indenting etc). I went back through the others and found another one that was almost exactly the same. Took it to the Prof and we agreed the ones that copied got 0 on the project, and the ones who allowed the copying got 50% of their mark. Honestly, they got off quite easy.
• digitaltrees 5y ago
  What a great story. Thanks for posting. And being a tall poppy.
  • kragen 5y ago
    Sergey Tselovalnikov is not Brendan Gregg.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• willcipriano 5y ago
  I did not see that coming, well worth the read if you just came here for the comments. I won't spoil it for you.
  • dstick 5y ago
    Thanks for this heads-up. Wow. What a plot twist...
  • quasarj 5y ago
    I guessed it right away, but had no one to see my glory
  • aero-glide2 5y ago
    It was quite obvious the way he worded it
  • nwsm 5y ago
    I was expecting something Theranos-esque
• joeldo 5y ago
  Great read, curious to hear what happened after the demo.
• kortilla 5y ago
  Can 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 accommodate them. Dropping chastising “more wood behind fewer arrows” platitudes is pointless when half of the wood wants to break off in a different direction anyway.
  • kbenson 5y ago
    > 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.
    • kortilla 5y ago
      Why? If someone wants more control their interests already aren’t aligned with the community. Developer resources aren’t just some faucet easily redirected. It’s worse to have people trying to jam shit into the main project if they don’t actually care about the main project. That’s how you get contributions that are huge hacks and require more work to review and iterate on than is worth it to the community. If some company forks for an observability product and doesn’t contribute back, they clearly don’t want to. Don’t try to force them. git is an incredible tool for managing forks and this anti-fork mindset is right out of old school open source culture from the early 2000s. Demanding people contribute to your project instead of forking just sounds like demands to pay homage more than anything.
• trollian 5y ago
  I 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 message intact.
  • DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
    Trillian?
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
    What does an NDA-encumbered GPL document mean in practice? You're allowed to spread the document, but not tell anyone where you got it from? I once received a library under a modified Apache 2.0 license, where all the conditions under section 4 (attribution, etc.) were just inverted for a given number of years (effectively an NDA), after which the normal Apache 2.0 would apply. Which worked because it came straight from the original copyright owners, but here I assume AOL weren't.
• allurbase 5y ago
  Great article. Disgusting behavior. Seems like the sort of experience that sticks with you for years.
  • andi999 5y ago
    Was there actually no follow-up? Change of header?
    • brendangregg 5y ago
      I never got a chance to see it again. I ended up spending more energy with another Sun project that wanted to switch the CDDL license to the GPL, only because they wanted to avoid going through the legal approval procedure to ship mixed-licensed products. Maybe I'll share that story one day: it was another eye-opening experience.
      • andi999 5y ago
        Thanks! Also, you never heard back from the Dtrace expert? (silly question, ok)
        • brendangregg 5y ago
          Nope, never heard back again. I'm not too surprised, Sun was a big company.
• BrissyCoder 5y ago
  Were there any legal repercussions? Was the employee fired? Were you as calm about this at the time as you seem now?... I would be furious! EDIT: For some reason I assumed OP was the author. Someone with a twitter account should ping him and get him over here to participate in discussion.
  • brendangregg 5y ago
    I was in shock, and a bit furious at being ripped off, but didn't feel there was a lot I could do about it. I edited this bit out (I was trimming the post): "You might wonder why I didn't talk about this first case publicly at the time. I'd already informed them of the problem privately and how to fix it, so there wasn't more to say. Also, Sun was the number one employer in town, and to be publicly critical could be career ending." I don't know what happened to the US developer. But I didn't think it made sense to burn bridges with Sun about it. I was more worried about giving people a bad experience with DTrace by running older versions of my software.
    • sydthrowaway 5y ago
      Sun was the number one employer in town in Australia? What?!
      • brendangregg 5y ago
        Sorry, should have said "tech" employer, and this is referring to Sun and its ecosystem. A few years earlier I gave a talk to a local University about the job market and asked the comp sci students to have a showing of hands as to whether they thought they'd work on Windows or Solaris when they graduated. Most hands went for Windows. Then I showed the local job statistics: Sun Solaris was number one.
        • yitchelle 5y ago
          I come from Melbourne and know that there are several rather large multimational engineering centers in Melbourne around this time period. Ericsson, NEC and Robert Bosch comes to my mine.. Perhaps largest in Sydney...Great article btw!
• Timothycquinn 5y ago
  I wonder if @bcantrill was aware of this at the time it happened?
  • rurban 5y ago
    The VIP can only be Bryan himself, caught with his pants down. Amusing
    • brendangregg 5y ago
      No, it wasn't, I don't even remember the VIP's name. Met him that once and never heard of him again.
      • rurban 5y ago
        Thanks. Not a VIP then
        • naikrovek 5y ago
          lol that's a very weird take. there were many people inside Sun that were not Bryan Cantrill. In fact, almost all of them were not Bryan Cantrill. But there can only be one VIP and it can only be Bryan?
  • bcantrill 5y ago
    Definitely not -- see my earlier comment[0], but when I met Brendan in person later that year (and he relayed this incident to me), I didn't even recognize the name. Certainly, it wasn't someone who should have been claiming to be a DTrace expert! And honestly, by that time, any actual DTrace expert inside of Sun definitely knew of Brendan -- and likely vice versa. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396911
• lukeh 5y ago
  Good story; I do find the “Australians are just the little guys” narrative a bit frustrating and a self-fulfilling prophecy though.
  • BrissyCoder 5y ago
    Agree it's cringe. The whole "little guy punching above his weight" thing is even worse in NZ.
    • ZephyrBlu 5y ago
      Why do you find it cringe? In NZ I think it's even more true than Australia. It's a tiny, isolated country with a small population that isn't the hub of anything really. Aussie and NZ compared to the US are completely different worlds in my eyes. (I'm a Kiwi btw)
      • BrissyCoder 5y ago
        I think it's a myth that NZ "punches above it's weight" is all. Show me some empirical evidence if you disagree. I'm a Kiwi too - but living in Aus.
        • ZephyrBlu 5y ago
          I think there are lower expectations of Aus/NZ because they're relatively small and out-of-the-way countries (Maybe less so for Aussie), so it's surprising how often they seem to excel in things. The obvious examples that come to mind would be sports. NZ excels in Sailing, Cricket and Rugby against much larger countries. Though it could be that in general, Aus/NZ have the same skill distribution as other countries, but they just stand out more because there are lower expectations or highly skilled people are rarer overall due to lower populations.
          • BrissyCoder 5y ago
            I knew someone was going to mention the sailing... suprised no one brought up Lord of the Rings.
• thundergolfer 5y ago
  Thankfully 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.
  • sam_lowry_ 5y ago
    You do not know.
    • dijit 5y ago
      Given that Brenden and Bryan worked together closely and seemed to be very fond of each other; and the article mentions that "the VIP may not have known" I think it's safe to assume it was not Bryan. As if it had been Bryan, Brenden would have been more sure.
    • apendleton 5y ago
      To the extent that the two of them have disagreed about things, they don't seem to have any issue saying so publicly, referring to the other by name: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16382456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16382456
    • dswalter 5y ago
      It feels like Cantrill being a creator of DTrace earns at least the credibility to be called a 'DTrace expert' without quotation marks.
      • cryptonector 5y ago
        Specifically: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27391764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27391764
    • nosequel 5y ago
      Brendan already replied to another comment saying he doesn't remember the VIP's name.
• na85 5y ago
  As 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)
  • whoknowswhat11 5y ago
    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.
    • edgyquant 5y ago
      I think the FSF appeared at a critical juncture and that the tools they built, that were totally free, helped to fix the direction that software was going. With the rise of Linux as the working GNU kernel an entire generation (or two) became aware and appreciative of open source which then went on to become the backbone of most of the internet and now those companies are some of (if not the) largest contributors to open source. With that said you’re right, with GPLv3 they moved the fight into new domains that aren’t as obvious or really “as big of a deal” to a majority of people. Also with the rise of things like JavaScript GNU, under Stallman, became the old man crying at the children. Stallman hated the rise of “non-trivial” JavaScript and refuses to work with proprietary code so GNU could never have developed e.g. React or Tensorflow. We now have a new generation of open source tooling that was developed more in spite of the FSF than by it. The current environment will in turn spark a new generation of tooling down the line that is even more removed from the likes of Stallman; who once responded to a request I sent to work on a JS library advertised on the GNU website with the fact that I should call it F/LOSS instead of open source (and nothing else.) So while I respect the FSF for the work they did in creating what we have today, the time where they were leading the fight to save software is long passed. They won in some ways and the world is better for it, but they lost in others and I’m not sure the world is that worse because of it. Having trade secrets isn’t completely a bad thing as it allows competition and different implementations, though that part is simply my opinion I suppose.
• purpleidea 5y ago
  I 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!
  • Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
    Flame graphs completely blew my mind, but most people I talk to about them just don't seem to get it. I'm a generalist, but I've been thinking lately if performance engineering is something I should be specialising in. I'd love to hear any advice from those in the field.
    • jakub_g 5y ago
      Specializing in anything is good if you have 5+ years of exp IMO. It's always good to stand out from the crowd of generic developers. The other plus is, if you frame yourself as a specialist in X, it might be easier to explain not knowing Y. You can't simply know everything, especially if you invest heavily in specializing in other things. Personally I've been a web performance (i.e. mostly JavaScript/HTML) guy lately and it's been fun. There's a million of React devs in the world, but only a few dozen web perf guys with web presence (Twitter / blogs), and I almost know all of them by name at this point. Of course it depends what you want to do. Typically it's big corps who look for specialists. Small companies prefer generalists.
      • Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
        Thanks for the advice! My problem with picking a niche is that ones that are easy to learn from a book are too crowded to be considered niches, and the rest can only be learned by doing in real production environments. Now there’s one where I have a foot in, and it’s one that I enjoy.
        • jakub_g 5y ago
• galacticaactual 5y ago
  TIL that people fly around the world demoing DTrace...
  • rodgerd 5y ago
    At the time, Sun were pushing it heavily as one of the two salvations for Solaris, so I'm not surprised. I have to say that my limited experience in dealing with Sun as a customer mirrors Brendan's comments around a remarkable arrogance, and it probably played no small part in their downfall.
    • toyg 5y ago
      > At the time, Sun were pushing it heavily as one of the two salvations for Solaris, so I'm not surprised. Yeah, I remember that. I kept thinking "this tool might be nice for C wizards but it does nothing for my day-to-day experience as smalltime Linux user / admin". The other big thing was ZFS, which was interesting, but they were extremely uncooperative with the license, basically ensuring it would never make it big.
    • mannykannot 5y ago
      This has me imagining a struggling engineer at Sun, trying to live up to the arrogance and falling short, who finds Brendan's work and decides to save his career by passing it off as his own. Then some high-level executive decides to make it one of the straws that will save the company... This is a made-up story, so you are free to make up your own ending as to whether this was the world-travelling VIP, and if so, whether he had some partial or complete flashback on hearing Brendan's name. One thing we can be sure of: whoever 'carelessly' stripped the copyright notice out of Brendan's code had seen his name before (and it was, perhaps, the part of the code he was most familiar with!)
  • tooltower 5y ago
    16 years ago, it must have been pretty refreshing.
• zfxfr 5y ago
  I read a large bit of the article before I finally realized it was not about some demo (understand demoscene) I did not know :)
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• throwawaye3735 5y ago
  Ok, maybe i'm too old or experienced with these type of things to really enjoy this article. The author might honestly be sincere as he wrote this but I felt it was a bit overblown and coming from negative feelings of being brushed off and rightfully so being upset that his code was stolen. It could just be there are some cultural misunderstandings as well. He mentioned this "VIP" is a "Developer and dtrace expert". But reading that and the other details, I think this is probably not the reality and maybe was communicated incorrectly to him. I really doubt this guy was a "VIP" as he says. My guess is this "VIP" was actually a pretty normal member on the dtrace project, could be a little senior and got the opportunity to go around and talk about it. I am sure they had a team somewhere who put together most of the software, maybe he was involved a little bit, but probably he was just as confused as everyone else about using that open source software - he probably knew enough to teach it, and how it worked, but so many people work on these type of projects, unless they sent the lead engineer he probably didn't know it deeply except enough to evangelize and teach how it works. He mentions about being slighted by this guy a lot, saying things like "He wasn't impressed", "gave me a look like he didn't really believe me" etc. This might be true, but i suspect it's coming from his negative interpretation of the situation. This guy just traveled all the way around the world, was super exhausted, was possibly honestly confused what's going on - i certainly have been in that situation before. The author also mentions he felt it odd that he (the author) was producing more dtrace tools than Sun was. This almost sounds a bit like indirect boasting. Large companies are slow. A dedicated passionate developer who is working alone or with a small team will always run laps around huge companies. This isn't odd at all. Companies often get distracted, can't focus on what's important, or decide not to do what is important for a product due to other business reasons. In fact, as he found out, some engineer somewhere just ripped his stuff cause it was faster and easier for them to do it. Sun's team was not professional at all, even possibly breaking the law, which I think is the point of the article but the descriptions of the Dtrace guy who's job was to show Dtrace around the world lessened my enjoyment of the article.
  • anyfoo 5y ago
    Brendan Gregg has a lot of clout. Besides that, he did eventually work at Sun proper, and later Joyent. I have no reason not to believe his account.
• crackercrews 5y ago
  So is this "developer-splaining"?
• cperciva 5y ago
  Reminds me of when Apple started providing "smaller size updates" to OS X. I was curious about the details since my doctorate had touched on the topic, so I worked my contacts (I had a few in Apple engineering from the FreeBSD / OS X relationship) and after a few months I got back as answer: "We're using a tool called bsdiff, are you familiar with it?" I was indeed, since I was the author of said tool. (Just to be clear, there was no license violation involved in this case; just a lack of awareness of the provenance of the open source software they were using.)
  • eska 5y ago
    I sent an email to a corporate Steam email address, asking whether I’d be allowed to post a screenshot from half-life in a computer graphics shading thesis. Ended up with a response from Gabe Newell, CEO, shortly after, and another engineer who invented skeletal animation, all excited to talk about it with some random kid
  • rubicon33 5y ago
    I don't understand what bsdiff does, or is. I am a software developer and I frankly have no clue what I would ever use bsdiff for! I've read what it does (libraries for building and applying patches to binary files) and still don't really have a sense for what the purpose of this tool is. What are some real life use cases for it? When does a developer need such a tool?
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • faeyanpiraat 5y ago
      If you have a game, where you have large packs of files (like a 2GB sized textures.pak), and in a patch you want to add 2 small things, you can just ship the differencd between the old anc new pack file, and skip transferring the rest.
      • OldTimeCoffee 5y ago
        They do this, but not as a binary diff. The new files are just shipped as an override of the old files that are loaded after the old files. It's substainally faster than applying a binary diff and file sizes really aren't a concern for the most part. The game industry really hasn't used binary diffs and patching since the 90s when they used RTPatch.
• vzaliva 5y ago
  Nice story and judging by it congrats on overcoming your "low-key" austrailian manner handicap ;)
• irrational 5y ago
  > a heavy American accent Any non-Americans want to chime in on what is a heavy American accent? I’m imagining heavy southern accent, but maybe this is something that can only be heard by non-Americans?
  • laurieg 5y ago
    Rhoticity (the r sound in words like butter). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English
  • pindab0ter 5y ago
    Imagine a British accent. Now imagine that that is what’s normal; everyone in your country speaks it. Suddenly American sounds very different. Specifically in my limited experience stuff like pronouncing t’s like d’s and soft back-in-the-throat r’s. “Budder” vs. “buttah”, for example. American vowels tend to sound larger as well in my experience.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • youeseh 5y ago
    Most accents that aren't your neutral evening news accent sound "heavy".
  • TeMPOraL 5y ago
    It's like your mouth was full of water - in contrast to British Received Pronunciation, which is like a mouth full of down feather. Also compare to "Hollywood Soviet English", which is like a dry mouth, but the tongue is filled with helium so it floats up, and then 'r' sounds like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Alveolar_trill.ogg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Alveolar....
    • creddit 5y ago
      I have absolutely zero ability to take your descriptions and convert them into an understanding of what you're trying to convey. Like what could this possibly mean??? > ...which is like a mouth full of down feather.
• pulse7 5y ago
  How is information in this blog related to Wikipedia article on DTrace [1] where one can read "DTrace is ... originally created by Sun Microsystems" and "Original author(s): Bryan Cantrill, Adam Leventhal, Mike Shapiro (Sun Microsystems)"? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTrace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTrace
  • robbomacrae 5y ago
    Quite simply, it is not. The author is not claiming to have written DTrace, but rather, tools that made use of DTrace. From the introduction: "Sun Microsystems had just released DTrace" and "I was busy writing and publishing advanced performance tools using DTrace".
  • FPGAhacker 5y ago
    Look at footnote 28. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTrace#cite_note-28 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTrace#cite_note-28
  • stingraycharles 5y ago
    Sun developed DTrace the kernel building blocks, Brendan Gregg became an expert on it and made scripts that actually did useful stuff with them. The VIP was selling a GUI around Brendan Gregg’s scripts.
  • Kiro 5y ago
    What do you mean? Brendan didn't create DTrace, he created DTraceToolkit and this VIP took his work and presented it as his own new DTrace-based product.
  • cryptonector 5y ago
    Bryan, Adam, and Mike created DTrace. Brendan was the most amazing and prolific user of DTrace, from very early on. Brendan did not create DTrace, but in a sense he "made DTrace" what it is. And not just DTrace, but eBPF.
• widforss 5y ago
  I almost had an heart attack last week when I noticed that a library I've used for work in the last year wasn't open source, but rather source available. Thankfully, my employer had some licenses for the library without my knowledge, but it ain't fun to break licenses at work, especially when you don't notice until months later.
• neilv 5y ago
  There's a long industry history of stealing code, but I'm surprised to hear this story of Sun allegedly doing it. My impression is that reason for the stealing usually makes sense. For example, a key library that's hard to write that's just copied into the source tree, ignoring licensing. Or an appliance developer didn't want to deal with licensing for Linux or BusyBox. Or an individual developer in over their head quietly copies code. The time I heard an explainable incident happened with my code, was in mid/late-'90s. An acquaintance, who'd offered to be one of the testers for an unreleased Java desktop application I wrote, then reportedly ran it through a decompiler, and passed it off as his own code, in a demo to investors. He later acknowledged doing this, and said he'd send me a Sun (ha) workstation as compensation. I declined. Then there are incidents for which the reason isn't obvious, like the one from the article. I speculate that sometimes the explanation might simply be that the perpetrator wasn't quite right in the head at the time, like in some famous cases of journalism fabrication. An inexplicable one involving my code was when an open source developer took a substantial and novel package that I wrote, stripped out my name and license notices, including out of the main file, and posted the package with themself identified as the author. There were also a couple other incidents with that person that seemed like that hadn't yet learned how to play well with others, in engineering or open source. I asked a mutual acquaintance, in confidence, what was going on with that person. The acquaintance checked, and was also baffled. In that case, I suppose that maybe the perpetrator was going through a difficult time, and not thinking clearly. Or maybe it was a combination of unlikely accidents that looked worse than the intent was (which happens). In the article's story of the Sun incident, I'm a little surprised that (speculating) an engineer could do this despite all the other people in engineering who might be in a position to notice something funny going on. And Sun had been the dot in some dotcoms by 2005, so presumably they had some strong engineering processes around what goes into product. Maybe the demo was something put together by a systems engineer, working as part of a small marketing/sales team, rather than under an engineering organization, so a lot fewer engineers were aware of it?
  • toyg 5y ago
    You are very compassionate towards people just literally stealing code. My experience is that a lot of folks just don't care about licenses: they steal and rebrand by any mean necessary, I guess to accumulate reputation. I wrote a few silly scripts in my lifetime, all small-time stuff (so trivial it never got me hired as a Dev anywhere). No matter whether I marked things as GPL or BSS, I often found them copied on GitHub with my copyright notices stripped. In the case of the BSD license, that's literally the only thing you can't do! In some cases it was utterly blatant: cloning from my own GitHub repo and then replacing authorship notices in the very first commit. I mean, come on guys, at least try to be smart; you can add your name just fine... When I politely asked to, y'know, respect license terms and reinstate the notices, some people just took down their repo rather than doing that. I bet they then re-uploaded it somewhere else.
• Twirrim 5y ago
  Years ago, I interviewed a candidate for a role on my team. As usual, one of the ways I break the ice with candidates is to get them to talk "war stories". The team he'd worked on had produced a tool that was only ever intended to be used by the team to solve a particular problem they had. It contained proprietary code. Unknown to the team, word had spread about the tool, and others had started to use it, including solutions architects. Who started shipping it to customers to use, who absolutely loved it. That'd be fine except one of the core libraries it used was GPLv3 licensed, and there was non-open source proprietary code used in the tool. The nightmare scenario he found himself in was having to rapidly re-architect the tool around a non-GPLv3 licensed library, without breaking any functionality, all the while having to have regular sync up meetings with a furious CEO and Legal department (who, to be clear, were mad about the situation, not this particular developer or his team, who weren't to blame)
  • Aachen 5y ago
    > having to rapidly re-architect the tool around a non-GPLv3 licensed library ... or just go with it and have it be open source? The old version is already open and free for anyone to request the code of. No rush at that point, you can withhold updates for a little while while you rearchitect this or take the situation as it is and have the next few bugfix releases also fall under GPL until you get around to replacing the core component (iff one insists that the future additions must absolutely be proprietary). Quickly removing the code doesn't change the previously released versions' license.
    • Aeolun 5y ago
      It does hopefully prevent any of your customers from ever asking for it.
    • alkonaut 5y ago
      > Quickly removing the code doesn't change the previously released versions' license. But would $BIG_CORP publish source on request for a proprietary product just because they built one version with a GPL library by mistake and later fixed it? Has this been successful, ever?
• zwischenzug 5y ago
  I once had an interview where someone quoted one of my blog posts at me. 'Oh, I wrote that', I said. It felt good.
  • throwaway2037 5y ago
    Can you share your blog URL?
    • zwischenzug 5y ago
      https://zwischenzugs.com https://zwischenzugs.com
      • jjkaczor 5y ago
        Thanks... first article I see about "IT Transformation" is soooooooo painfully accurate!
  • MandieD 5y ago
    And I thought it was fun when a colleague who publicly belittled me on a somewhat regular basis for scripting (“we're not programmers!”) triumphantly showed a blog post he’d found to solve a problem he was having. A blog post on my blog. In fairness to him, it was still on a domain that didn’t identify me at all, though the “About” page had my name on it. He then proceeded to launch up the chain of command to get me in trouble for publishing company secrets on said blog. I promised to only write it outside of work hours and not to directly copy any code (scripts, one-liners) I wrote at work, and that was the end of that. There were other less-antagonistic instances of others in this large company finding solutions on my blog, which says something about the value to the company of posting generic stuff like this on publicly-searchable platforms instead of an internal-only SharePoint or Confluence instance, and definitely instead of the PDFs our senior management insisted on for all documentation.
• bilalhusain 5y ago
  > I've learned ... instead to simply say "I have a lot of experience with that technology" and leave it at that. Shows Brendan's maturity. I am not sure what should be the appropriate reaction or corrective measure in these situations. We should talk more about handling these unfair situations. Someone else can become more successful building on top of one's open source project. On a resume, a top contributor and a minor contributor to open source project might have same weightage depending on how you present it - making the situation unfair for a person dedicatedly working on a single project (quality) vs minor contributor to multiple projects (quantity). But deleting name and credits is wrong. An acknowledgement from the benefitting person (if not the recognition/reward) has far more positive impact on career than justifying to other's that your work was stolen. It was a bit strange to read some of the initial negative comments. I see Brendan being a sport. I would argue that reading the story as a report against unknown persons at Sun makes more sense. I don't see much sense in blaming victim. And, in my opinion, the VIP had a good run but he isn't the bad guy here.
  • Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    > I am not sure what should be the appropriate reaction or corrective measure in these situations. We should talk more about handling these unfair situations. Start recording; have them, a big multinational with a massive legal department, admit to violating and stripping a license from source code. Then sue them. They should know better, and they're making billions off of other people's work. That in itself is fair enough, if the license permits it, but removing the license is crossing the line.
    • jclulow 5y ago
      Be extremely careful recording conversations without consent in the US.
      • apendleton 5y ago
        Most jurisdictions in the US are one-party-consent. I think the tech crowd tends to have a skewed perception of recording consent rules because California happens to be one of the relatively few two-party-consent states, but it's the exception rather than the rule.
• satysin 5y ago
  I have a similar experience to this myself. A long time ago (early 2000s) I wrote a handful of tools to ease physical to virtual (P2V) migration for Windows Server. I was a systems administrator in the UK working for a large American firm. I wrote the tools in my own time and unlike in other countries my employer had no ownership of them, just to clear that up at the start. I did use these tools at work but never developed them on company time or resources. They were released as open source. Fast forward 6 months and we had a meeting with a virtualisation consultancy trying to sell us some tools to assist in a wider P2V programme. We had a sales guy and a tech guy visit to show us their stuff. After half an hour of them talking up all they can offer the tech guy fired up a tool and I instantly recognised it was my tool but with some rebranding. My manager looked at me slightly confused as he recognised it too. I let them continue for a few minutes to properly confirm my suspicions then mentioned that this tool was in fact a tool we already use. They were very confused until I loaded up my version on a remote system to show them. Needless to say the rest of the presentation was extremely awkward. I believe these two gentlemen thought they were in fact their own tools developed in house. It turned out several of "their" tools were in fact rebranded versions of mine. I would love to say there was some kind of exciting conclusion but in reality all that happened was they were clearly spooked by this as their/my tools were removed and never included again in their P2V toolkit. I suspect the moment they left the meeting with us they called to report what happened and rather than risk me following up (not sure how I could do that to be perfectly honest, it was FOSS after all just not used the proper way) they decided it would be safer to just pull these non-critical tools. They were just "nice to haves" anyway. My boss excitedly share the experience with the team and we had a good laugh about it and how the sales guy went from Mr Confident to stammering and stressed in a matter of seconds. We never did buy their toolkit.
  • thinkindie 5y ago
    did you follow up with that company to make sure they granted you recognition and money for your tools?
    • fifilura 5y ago
      Recognition - yes, but money - why? It was open source. This meeting does not sound at all awkward to me if I was the sales person. To me this sounds like how lots of companies work with open source to make a business. They take some open source tools (maybe they built it themselves, maybe not), package then and maybe sell some cloud service around it or simply just support. If I was the sales person I would be delighted to meet the person who wrote a part of the package. The only reason to be embarrassed is if it did not contain the correct attribution and recognition. Edit: the fact that it happened 2000 could have made it embarrassing though. Many things have changed since then...
• Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  Something I should be aware of; in Go programming, they sometimes encourage you to just copy some code instead of add another dependency. However, if you copy code from a codebase with a certain license, you should, if everything is above board, include the license as well then for that bit of code. I mean in practice it's tiny utilities that I'm too lazy to reimplement in the exact same way, but still, it's something to keep in mind.
• fenomas 5y ago
  Great article. Gives me flashbacks to the time someone sent me a link to a newly-released version of Minecraft, and it turned out to be using my own voxel engine. :D (No credit of course, and the marketing copy around it made it sound like it was all their own code. Welcome to open source I guess!)
  • rubatuga 5y ago
    Do tell more.
  • Agentlien 5y ago
    I would love more details! Could you please link the voxel engine? Which version of Minecraft was this?
    • fenomas 5y ago
      Annoyingly there's not much to tell. It was a minimal web version, released as a one-off marketing thing and then never updated, and Mojang didn't reply when I tried to get in touch (via contacts at microsoft). So I never really found out anything about it. The game is still live though: https://classic.minecraft.net https://classic.minecraft.net - Originally it supported multiplayer, but that stopped working the day after the game launched. The voxel engine is here: https://github.com/andyhall/noa/tree/develop https://github.com/andyhall/noa/tree/develop
      • webXL 5y ago
        > Minecraft Classic - official game from Mojang (I'm as surprised as you are) lol. Microsoft should just release all the source for this since Minecraft isn't exactly state of the art these days. The brand is nearly all of the value.
• mothsonasloth 5y ago
  Is the "D" prefix in things like DTrace a Sun standard/convention? What does it mean, for example in the JVM arguments start with "D" as well. Any history to this?
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • j-pb 5y ago
    TL;DR: DTrace uses a minimalistic C dialect called D to write it's probes, hence the name. In order to trace arbitrary code, it has to inject these into the code site that you want inspected. If you could just inject arbitrary C, you'd get the issue of potentially adding probes which change the behaviour of your code under test to a degree where new bugs/behaviours are introduced or old bugs/behaviours are masked. DTrace solves this by using a C subset which helps you avoid such unwitting changes, by not including loops or other operations which could change the memory or timing behaviour of the existing system.
    • layoutIfNeeded 5y ago
      >DTrace uses a minimalistic C dialect called D Which is completely unrelated to the other language called D, also known as DLang. (which was released 4 years earlier than DTrace by the way)
      • eppsilon 5y ago
        Should've called it C--.
        • tapotatonumber9 5y ago
          Or, if less is more, perhaps “C-+”?
        • gowld 5y ago
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C--
• baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  My reaction to this presentation would have been... let's just say, less gracious than the author's.
• 29athrowaway 5y ago
  Once, someone tried to refute my argument using a post by a ghost user from github. That ghost user was an older account of mine. Their interpretation of the post was wrong though. I reacted to the situation by laughing slightly but didn't even bother explaining why. Because of the poor tone, I decided to let that person enjoy being wrong.
• mpermar 5y ago
  Awesome story. I'm not sure if this is just my personal feeling but I would say that stealing intellectual property was sort of common at that time. Open source was not widely known, knowledge was scarce, communities were just ramping up and really anyone with lack of principles could pretty much steal anything and get away with it. It happened to me a few times with online content I wrote. Essentially tutorials, articles, etc. around Open Source. Once my own company sent me a newsletter which contained one of my articles signed by another employee from a different place. It felt pretty weird.
  • peterkelly 5y ago
    The article says the story was from 2005. Open source was very much widely known at that time. Linux was 13 years old by then, and Sun themselves open sourced both DTrace and Solaris that same year.
    • mpermar 5y ago
      Widely known... by a few techies. Well, certainly many more than in 1995, right? But can't compare those times to these days.
      • BlueTemplar 5y ago
        More than a few "techies", around here at that point software licenses were already part of the mandatory undergraduate "computer literacy" course...
      • anthk 5y ago
        You must be young. Everyone on IT/CS related knew about Linux/BSD and the GPL2/BSD licenses.
• EvanAnderson 5y ago
  I worked with a tech from a software vendor who had a link to one of my Server Fault answers in their setup docs. We got to that bit of the setup and I mentioned that I wrote the answer his doc was referencing. I quite enjoyed it.
• krzrak 5y ago
  It would be fun to make the American guy sweating profusely by saying something like "I'm going to sue the shit out of you" ;)
• thomashabets2 5y ago
  Heh. I've a few times asked questions, only to be pointed to my own blog for answers. To be fair, yes those articles were on the same topic, but I'm actually trying to take the next step here. :-)
  • vidarh 5y ago
    I've found my own blog posts in the search results while searching for something more than once. The best part is when my own blog posts actually have the answer I was looking for - at which point I start feeling old and forgetful.
    • rendall 5y ago
      This has happened to me. And I wrote the post in the first place because I kept having to rediscover how to do the thing
• DonHopkins 5y ago
  >The belief at Sun that only Sun could make good use of its own technologies, and anything created outside of Sun was trash. As a former Sun employee, I can tell you that's true: people at Sun wouldn't even look at competing technologies because they were sure there was nothing useful to be learned from them. That's why Bill Gates and Anders Hejlsberg were able to screw Sun so badly by examining and copying the good things about Java, and making something much better: C# and CLR. While Sun totally failed to learn from any of the good things that Microsoft or Apple or anyone else did. >We are better off with all the wood behind one arrow. Nice reference to the old Sun slogan and 1999 April Fools Day prank, in which Sun employees put an enormous arrow through Scott McNealy's office. https://findery.com/johnfox/notes/all-the-wood-behind-one-arrow https://findery.com/johnfox/notes/all-the-wood-behind-one-ar... All your wood notwithstanding, it also helps to chose an arrow that isn't flawed and doesn't totally miss the target. For what it's worth, Scott McNealy also put all his wood behind another arrow named Donald Trump. Scott McNealy has long been one of Trump's few friends in Silicon Valley https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Scott-McNealy-has-long-been-one-of-Trump-s-few-14447197.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Scott-McNealy-h... Trump held fundraiser at former Sun CEO Scott McNealy’s Silicon Valley house on Tuesday https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/17/trump-silicon-valley-fundraiser-at-scott-mcnealys-home.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/17/trump-silicon-valley-fundrai... Scott McNealy gets touchy feely with Trump: Sun cofounder hosts hush-hush reelection fundraiser for President https://www.theregister.com/2019/09/17/mcnealy_trump_fundraiser/ https://www.theregister.com/2019/09/17/mcnealy_trump_fundrai...
• knolan 5y ago
  My stories are very minor. I did my PhD in a reasonably well regarded mechanical engineering lab. My area is experimental fluid mechanics. I ended up writing a lot of Matlab code while there and even worked with a spin out company from the lab in the biotech sector for a while. I'd get a lot of other students coming to me for coding help. Most just wanted me to do their job for them and I was too naive to say no. One wanted to count cells in a microfluidic device using image processing. I sat down with them for a couple of hours and walked them through a few methods they could look into to get started collecting all the examples in a script. Basic stuff so they wouldn't feel overwhelmed. A few months later I see he published my simple introduction as a paper with zero modifications. He had the good grace to at least thank me in the acknowledgments. Several years later while working a $BIG_TECH lab we interviewed a candidate from my old lab. They presented their work and had performed some data analysis of thermal camera images. Turns out they were using a script I'd written there and it was still actively used to work with the thermal camera. Nobody ever modified or improved the code — many engineering students are terrified of code. I was annoyed because there was no interest in further development the code, I don't think they even read it or understood it. While at the spinout company I developed a software tool for the PCR optofluidics platform that was being developed. It was considerably faster and more robust than the hacked together script they were using before and had a user friendly UI that I build with feedback from the biologists on the team. A few years later the founder and one of their new students published a paper documenting their amazing tool without any reference or acknowledgment whatsoever. That one pissed me off. There is a lot of ignorance around code authorship and respect for the developer in physical sciences research. Like I said, many are terrified by code but don't value the time and expertise it requires; once they have it they no longer think about its maintenance or acknowledging the author.
  • knolan 5y ago
    Just remembered another recent one. A couple of years after I had left, my former employer closed the regional site. I saw the writing on the wall I guess. A few colleagues from there have set up a new consultancy company, they’re going to build demos as a service apparently. Several of the showcases on their website are my work.
  • stdbrouw 5y ago
• jasonkester 5y ago
  It makes me sad that the way a developer is expected to react when they discover that the Valuable Thing that they gave away for free is being sold by a Big Company for Big Money is to try to ensure that the Valuable Things they give away in the future remain free. I'd much prefer to see the people who build Valuable Things show more interest in capturing some of that value. There's this overwhelming narrative revolving around Open Source that makes it seem shameful to profit from your work. It's maddening to watch. There's no reason we as developers need to be the low man on the totem pole getting tread on by business people. We just set ourselves up that way and socially punish anybody who doesn't.
  • rwmj 5y ago
    If that's what you took from the article, then you got completely the wrong end of the stick. The problem was the removal of the author's attribution and illegal relicensing. He says himself he was glad when Apple later included his tools in macOS with correct attribution and licensing.
    • jasonkester 5y ago
      Exactly. That was the problem that he saw. The problem he should have noticed was that the Sun was selling the code he wrote for hundreds of thousands of dollars and not passing any of that on to him. Step one shouldn't have been to worry about putting his header comment back in place and getting them the latest version of his code to sell to their customers. It should have been negotiating a redistribution license for his code if they wanted to continue selling it.
      • rwmj 5y ago
        No, the problem was the licensing change and removal of attribution. I would strongly suggest reading what Brendan says in the article. On this topic, I work for Red Hat where we made $3.4 billion in revenues in the last published year (before being acquired), making exclusively open source software which you can download yourself for no cost.
      • 5y ago
• kuroguro 5y ago
  A colleague of mine was attending a local tech conference just before Covid hit. I believe it was aimed at newcomers and various companies tried to show off exciting tech that interns/new coders could potentially work on. She couldn't believe what she saw. A major govt. backed logging company (which does do a lot of dev work themselves) were showing off one of our projects as theirs! We were using depth cameras to estimate the volume of wood loaded on a truck as it drives trough a gate. They even used screenshots that I had made! Now, they were involved in the project. But they were basically clients of our client. They provided us with a place to test the system as their trucks ran trough. They didn't own the software let alone did any work on it. Why they would present it as something interns could potentially work on is beyond me. People are weird.
  • toxicFork 5y ago
    I would imagine they would say to an intern once they joined, "yeah you won't work on THAT project, but here's some other thing for you to do". It's like the estate agency putting a listing of a nice place on a website and then when it comes to viewing the place they say "well that one was just taken but let me show you something similar".
  • jgilias 5y ago
    Maybe they wanted to show something that the interns could try and replicate. I mean, if everything your in house dev team is working on are CRUD applications built on 90s tech, that's not very exciting.
  • imhoguy 5y ago
    Maybe they hunted for some passionate overzealous intern to rewrite it from scratch for them. Kind of "make me a clone of facebook for $10" gigs :)
  • gowld 5y ago
    Does logging software have extensive logging?
• greyhair 5y ago
  I had a similar, smaller scale of that happen, in a sort of reverse direction a few years ago. My director dropped a resume on my desk for someone coming from a company I had worked at ten years prior, thinking I might have met them (it was a small organization). I didn't recognize the name, but skimmed through the resume quickly, and their primary claim on their work history was something I invented just six months before leaving the organization. I couldn't believe it. What were the odds of that resume ending on my desk? Basically zero, but what a huge mistake. And they didn't claim they had maintained and extended it, they claimed they had invented it! He didn't get called in for an interview.
  • dhosek 5y ago
    I thought this was going in the direction that I experienced. I had a recruiter try to recruit me for the position that I was already in (we were expanding the team, not replacing me).
  • steelframe 5y ago
    Having conducted technical interviews at FAANG companies for over 10 years, I've gotten to the point where I never believe anything anyone claims on their resumes unless I can independently verify them. I also make it a point to ask probing questions about where they got the idea of "inventing" what they did and what alternatives to "making a brand new thing" they considered at the time. However one of my favorite questions to ask is, "What don't you like about what you invented?" A true creator of something is always acutely aware of its flaws. They're unsettled about its shortcomings and wants to do better. In describing the flaws they demonstrate deep insight into the problem space, and they explain expertly how things don't go perfectly in certain corner cases or how the code could have been better organized. The poser will almost always struggle to come up with criticisms of what they "invented" and try to pass it off as a spectacular feat of engineering brilliance.
    • TimPC 5y ago
      Your favourite question has some cultural gaps as in many countries in interview settings people downplay weaknesses and flaws. It’s why a lot of weakness questions are often ineffective. Unless you are acutely aware of when a person is doing this BECAUSE it’s an interview you’re going to get some answers that might lead you to reject good candidates.
• drstewart 5y ago
  Could you fit in your nationality a few more times in the article? I can't tell what country you're from. P.S: if you constantly boast about how humble your country is, you're probably not that humble.
• squarefoot 5y ago
  Almost been there. I was once hired and given some sources to work on by a company, and those were the same exact sources I wrote at another company years before, although my name and all recognizable comments were stripped, save for a few almost invisible traces I left like my initials paired with reserved words to make them appear like directives, pragmas, etc. The guy who had given me the "new" sources was without any doubt responsible, since he was PM at the old company having access to everything, but almost certainly he had no right to use them over the old company. It took like 10 seconds to me to recognize them as filenames, function names, network usage, variables and structures all were the same, so it went like. "Hah, no problems, I recall this very well, in fact there should be my name somewhere... oh rats, it got deleted somehow, no probs however, consider it done":=).
  • Tepix 5y ago
    I for one wouldn't be so forgiving. Stripping the author's name from source code is an absolute no-go.
    • axiosgunnar 5y ago
      It's a textbook copyright violation and could earn the author at least four to five figures when he settles.
      • dhosek 5y ago
        Only if the copyright was registered before the infraction can you file for punitive damages. Otherwise you’re only eligible for actual damages.
        • axiosgunnar 5y ago
          Interesting, thanks
        • fastball 5y ago
          Isn't anything you write automatically copyright?
• nautilus12 5y ago
  Are we being fools? Do you only get ahead in the world if instead of spending our precious time building things we use it cannabalizing other peoples work?
  • rendall 5y ago
    No. While I don't believe in karma, I do believe there are consequences to misbehavior, even if one is not caught: The temerity and lack of ethics to appropriate a project that someone else has written and claim it as one's own leaks into other areas of one's life. That kind of behavior is not isolated to just open-source software. Perhaps the world-weary thief of the OP took his experience as a lesson and changed his ways, but he likely continued bumbling around, behaving dishonestly, losing the respect of his peers along the way. Perhaps even that of family and friends. Perhaps he miscounts the points in a boardgame, or cheats on his spouse, but it won't be limited to this. Contrast that to the life and career arc of the OP himself. So, no, the fools are those who steal, caught or not.
• dctoedt 5y ago
  An analogous experience: I once chaired an American Bar Association committee that developed and published "fair and balanced" model software license provisions, extensively annotated. Twice in the following year, in working on client deals, lawyers for The Other Side proposed draft license agreements that were indisputably copied wholesale from the model provisions — but with certain fair-play features omitted.
• Tepix 5y ago
  What rights does a developer have in these cases? Can you get some compensation/damages for the license/copyright violation even if you were giving away the software originally? Can you get more money if they violate the OSS license if you offer the software under a commercial license as well?
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• elric 5y ago
  It's a small world. Many, many years ago, I wrote a little help desk application for a one man ISP. The only requirement? "I have to be able to respond to support requests using WAP". This was, of course, before smart phones were a thing. Typing long replies on a phone with only a numpad was not pleasant. So I built something with a lot of prehashed replies and parts of replies, which could be accessed by entering a couple of digits (with some very rudimentary context awareness). Fast forward 10 years or so, I'm consulting at a company. When I see one of their support engineers using a tool that looked vaguely familiar. Turns out the company had acquired the one-man ISP and had continued developing the little helpdesk application I'd made for WAP all those years ago.
• micimize 5y ago
  Wait but what happened? Did he do something about it after, like contact Sun saying "Stop! You have violated the law!" or whatever? If not, why on earth not? What's the point of publishing with a copyleft license if you aren't going to do anything when someone literally walks into your office and says "we at Big Corp are selling your work without any attribution?"
• mark_l_watson 5y ago
  I had a vaguely similar experience. I was working on virtual reality race car simulators that used sophisticated custom designed and built motion platforms. I had several responsibilities, the first was the software that controlled the motion platform. When it was done, and I proceeded to the sound effects system, my boss turned over my motion platform code to his good friend who he had brought on to the project with no interviews. A month later in a status meeting, the new guy said that he had to replace about 20% of my code to fix defects. I was curious, looked, and saw that there were zero code changes, but the comment blocks were changed replacing my name with his. Kind of sad for him. He literally had done no work.
  • Aperocky 5y ago
    What made him think that it would fly, especially with you present in the same meeting?
    • mark_l_watson 5y ago
      I really don’t know. I did not embarrass him in the meeting but we had a smaller group talk later
• hnmullany 5y ago
  To be honest, Sun's whole culture treated software as an afterthought - which is part of the reason they ended up where they did
  • abruzzi 5y ago
    they also (in my limited experience) treated sales as an afterthought. Its the only time I've contacted a company to inquire about a product, and had them actively dissuade me from buying the product (IAM).
  • cryptonector 5y ago
    That's not true. I was there, and I was there at the time. Sun had a lot of problems, but software was not an afterthought, at least not within the Solaris org.
• nailer 5y ago
  > It was something I and my consulting colleagues had run into before: The belief at Sun that only Sun could make good use of its own technologies, and anything created outside of Sun was trash. Yep. See Sun's response to the Linux SPARC maintainers technical critique of Solaris for SPARC. Meanwhile at Red Hat we started hiring all the ex-Sun people that had been pushing for x86 internally at Sun and gotten frustrated with the flip flops (RHEL 3 on Xeon already demolished Solaris/SPARC) .
  • cryptonector 5y ago
    A lot of us at Sun in the Solaris org had no love for SPARC. Sun made a very typical and terrible mistake: it sat on its laurels. Sun created some awesome things then tried to lock-in and milk customers. Sun (and later Oracle) did this with SPARC and J2ME, among others. All the products they did this with are as good as dead today in terms of market share -- surprise! Vendor lock-in is not great for the customer, but when you try to milk the customers, you end up risking taking them to the FYO point [0], and that is catastrophic for the vendor, and the vendor never sees it coming and can't help themselves. Sitting on your laurels is not good. Don't do it. Innovate. Then innovate some more. Then never stop innovating. [0] Let me google that for ya: https://www.google.com/search?q=fyo+point
• JohnBooty 5y ago
  As an American, I found this and the other cultural anecdotes very interesting. We definitely do a lot of obnoxious things, or at least things that can seem obnoxious to other cultures. No arguments there. We should be better. =) To an Australian, introductions in the US can sound boastful, but they can also be useful as a quick way to share one's specialties. But this one puzzles me a bit. Typically, we talk up the people we're introducing - I'm not sure I've ever heard anybody talk themselves up during an introduction! "Sally, this is Bob. Bob's been doing some really cool stuff with XYZ lately. Sally, I know you have too!" (At which point Sally and Bob often politely insist that no, they're nothing special at XYZ) I've always thought of this as gracious and not boastful. I definitely agree it would be obnoxious to talk one's self up!
• busyant 5y ago
  Just to throw in an analogous story. I was hosting a research talk given by quasi-famous professor at a biotech startup that I worked at. Quasi-famous prof was describing a gene (gene "xyz") being used as a tool in his lab, "but the specifics of what gene xyz is and what it does are not important. It's just a gene we use in these assays...." Me: Do you know who has 2 thumbs and discovered xyz? This guy.
• perlpimp 5y ago
  Once I worked at company X, while there I have seen a said Library for universally accessing things in OS. It was written by our senior architect. Year later I worked at another company, there was this high strung developer boasting about his own library. He even put it up on a webpage - was before GitHub. It was same library at company listed above, so I ratted to the developer who wrote that library. I usually feel queasy about ratting, for some reason I did not feel a slight bit of dissonance.
  • hutzlibu 5y ago
    ". I usually feel queasy about ratting, for some reason I did not feel a slight bit of dissonance." I feel it would have been ratting to the original creator to do nothing.
• axiom92 5y ago
  Hah. Reminds me of this incident: https://newatlas.com/ai-art-auction-obvious-belamy/56984/ https://newatlas.com/ai-art-auction-obvious-belamy/56984/ Someone downloaded the code for GANs (generative adversarial networks) from Github, generated (sampled) a painting using it, slapped the GAN objective function as a signature, and sold the painting for over $400k!
• chromatin 5y ago
  Great story. One of my open source bioinformatics tools was ripped off, with name AND GPL license stripped off, by a person working at the EMBL/EBI (European Molecular Biology Laboratory European Bioinformatics Institute; a prestigious scientific institution) Management, when alerted, made it right, but I think the point of my story is that this is perhaps more common than anyone realizes.
• jlkuester7 5y ago
  Recently I was struggling to understand MotionLayout in Android and how to make it do what I wanted for my app. I had searched all over the internet reading blogs and forum posts trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. I ended up watching one particularly helpful presentation video (I think it was from a DroidCon) given by this guy named Jason Pearson. It helped a lot, (watched various parts of the presentation multiple times) but eventually I still got myself stuck again. I ended up dropping a question out on StackOverflow in desperation just to see if anyone might be able to point me in the right direction. Well, fast forward a bit and someone responds to my question with a really great answer that helps me understand what I was missing. Happened to look at the user who wrote the answer and saw his name was Jason Pearson... Then I had to double-check and sure enough, it was the same guy! So, shout out to Mr. Pearson for a great presentation and a really helpful SO answer!
• vipulved 5y ago
  A very similar thing happened to me when I was pitching Gmail on anti-spam and realized they were running a forked version of Vipul’s Razor and claiming it was their own. They never contributed anything back... it’s unfortunately not uncommon.
• ksec 5y ago
  The only great thing I get from the story, at least a multi Billion dollar company thought your tools were so amazing it deserve paying their own VIP going on World Tour. And no wonder why Sun failed to compete. A Cultural and management failure.
• ryandrake 5y ago
  I'd love to hear stories from the other side. Behind each of these "someone else taking credit" war stories is the engineer or product owner at the other company who decided this was an ethical course of action. How did you justify this to yourself and to your boss, and what was the plan if/when you got caught? Doesn't your company have an internal process for vetting the licenses of software you use? It seems like these cases are failures at multiple levels in the company. It would make an interesting post-mortem. Use a throwaway account if you like!
• wst_ 5y ago
  Could anyone, please, share some light on the "low-key" introduction issue mentioned in the article? I work quite a few years in IT and never, during any interview or meeting, I've been introduced as anything more than just an engineer. This must be cultural gap, no doubt, but I'd feel weird if someone would detailed my career in front of other participants. Of course I have nothing against filling some details in by myself but only if applicable in given situation. Truth to be told I've never worked in Australia or US, but I did some job in two EU countries and in Japan and, as said, never encountered detailed introduction. Is this still a thing?
• grahamburger 5y ago
  I recently had an experience kind of like this. I run a website about a kind of niche topic. I got a call from someone at a FAANG one day working in a similar space who wanted to chat about it. I get these calls pretty regularly and agreed, always happy to chat about it. While she was showing me some of what they were working on it started to look very familiar, and I realized that a lot of the ideas had been copied from my site. In some cases they had literally copy/pasted my content. I mentioned this to her and she got uncomfortable and admitted to something like "yeah we took a lot of inspiration from your work." Frankly I don't care that much, I put the info out there to be used and use it they did! But attribution (or an acquisition offer) would have been nice.