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This talk and my experiences at Microsoft are why I tend to try to steer our projects at Mozilla Research to partner with external offerings rather than doing t

This talk and my experiences at Microsoft are why I tend to try to steer our projects at Mozilla Research to partner with external offerings rather than doing too much building of our own. It's hard to imagine a world where we build and continue to improve a source control / issue tracking system better than GitHub; a continuous integration solution better than Travis CI; a build system; etc. Even if we can imagine building a better product today, the ongoing maintenance and extension of those services quickly become full-time multi-person investments with many hundreds of dedicated machines, neither of which even our core infra teams have, much less the little tiny research org.

indygreg2 12y ago
Except it isn't internal only. Many of Facebook's tools are open sourced. And not in the "throw it over the wall" sense. Their open sourced projects tend to gain traction and get a significant amount of community contributors. By turning a number of their core tools into successful open source projects, they are leveraging the community effect to lesson the ongoing maintenance burden for these projects. Yes, they are paying a high initial cost to develop these offerings. But since they tend to produce high quality products that attract nearly-free-to-Facebook labor via open source, the investment tends to pays off in the long run. It's a savvy business move. And one that can arguably only be pulled off by a talented engineer organization.
- larsberg 12y ago
  > Yes, they are paying a high initial cost to develop these offerings. I certainly agree that for organizations who can afford these high initial costs internally this is a great development model. My challenge (as a manager at Mozilla) is that, given we don't have such resources available, how do we build partnerships with groups or other projects that do in order to ensure such offerings are built? Of course, another interesting approach would be to say that GitHub, Travis, Heroku, etc. show that DevOps-as-company is a viable business model and really what we should be doing is spinning up companies that raise funding and build products around each of the areas that are still lacking products that serve enterprises (read: customers with money) today.
bzbarsky 12y ago
It's not hard to imagine a world in which someone builds or continues to improve an issue tracking system better than GitHub, because GitHub seems to be actively uninterested in improving its issue tracking system in various dimensions that matter to a lot of issue tracking system users (ability to attach testcases, dependency tracking, and release management are the big ones for me personally). It's not just that GitHub is lacking in those areas; they've repeatedly rejected suggestions for improving them.
- icefox 12y ago
  If it makes you feel any better out there is a really good issue tracking system that has a bolted on git repository system that actively is rejecting improvements for their repo stuff. If GitHub didn't have issues people would still be there. If GitHub didn't have Git people would leave. Issues are a accessory to the main event like AppleTv is to the iphone/macbook
- larsberg 12y ago
  > they've repeatedly rejected suggestions for improving them. I certainly agree that it's easy to imagine better issue management or patch review than GitHub has today - like many other projects we use other systems. When I've talked with GitHub engineers, all of our issues are well understood and they have plans to address them. My skepticism is around the strategy of building and supporting our own things vs. partnering with places like GitHub that make a living building and supporting such software. In the Mozilla-specific case, they have proven open to working with us in the past, by pony-trading enhancements to Firefox for enhancements to GitHub, and the inability to deliver has been more on our side :-/
  - bzbarsky 12y ago
    Interesting. I haven't seen any requests for enhancements to Firefox (or more precisely Gecko) from GitHub, and I watch all incoming Gecko bug reports... Were they asking for these enhancements from Firefox itself, not Gecko, or through some sort of opaque channels or something? Past that, partnering with people makes sense to me if they're flexible enough to add things when we need them. My point is simply that historically GitHub has not been adding the things we need.
ldng 12y ago
I'd rather have you steering it to opensource based systems/services, you know in the spirit of open web.

indygreg2 12y ago

Except it isn't internal only. Many of Facebook's tools are open sourced. And not in the "throw it over the wall" sense. Their open sourced projects tend to gain traction and get a significant amount of community contributors. By turning a number of their core tools into successful open source projects, they are leveraging the community effect to lesson the ongoing maintenance burden for these projects. Yes, they are paying a high initial cost to develop these offerings. But since they tend to produce high quality products that attract nearly-free-to-Facebook labor via open source, the investment tends to pays off in the long run. It's a savvy business move. And one that can arguably only be pulled off by a talented engineer organization.

larsberg 12y ago
> Yes, they are paying a high initial cost to develop these offerings. I certainly agree that for organizations who can afford these high initial costs internally this is a great development model. My challenge (as a manager at Mozilla) is that, given we don't have such resources available, how do we build partnerships with groups or other projects that do in order to ensure such offerings are built? Of course, another interesting approach would be to say that GitHub, Travis, Heroku, etc. show that DevOps-as-company is a viable business model and really what we should be doing is spinning up companies that raise funding and build products around each of the areas that are still lacking products that serve enterprises (read: customers with money) today.

bzbarsky 12y ago

It's not hard to imagine a world in which someone builds or continues to improve an issue tracking system better than GitHub, because GitHub seems to be actively uninterested in improving its issue tracking system in various dimensions that matter to a lot of issue tracking system users (ability to attach testcases, dependency tracking, and release management are the big ones for me personally). It's not just that GitHub is lacking in those areas; they've repeatedly rejected suggestions for improving them.

icefox 12y ago
If it makes you feel any better out there is a really good issue tracking system that has a bolted on git repository system that actively is rejecting improvements for their repo stuff. If GitHub didn't have issues people would still be there. If GitHub didn't have Git people would leave. Issues are a accessory to the main event like AppleTv is to the iphone/macbook
larsberg 12y ago
> they've repeatedly rejected suggestions for improving them. I certainly agree that it's easy to imagine better issue management or patch review than GitHub has today - like many other projects we use other systems. When I've talked with GitHub engineers, all of our issues are well understood and they have plans to address them. My skepticism is around the strategy of building and supporting our own things vs. partnering with places like GitHub that make a living building and supporting such software. In the Mozilla-specific case, they have proven open to working with us in the past, by pony-trading enhancements to Firefox for enhancements to GitHub, and the inability to deliver has been more on our side :-/
- bzbarsky 12y ago
  Interesting. I haven't seen any requests for enhancements to Firefox (or more precisely Gecko) from GitHub, and I watch all incoming Gecko bug reports... Were they asking for these enhancements from Firefox itself, not Gecko, or through some sort of opaque channels or something? Past that, partnering with people makes sense to me if they're flexible enough to add things when we need them. My point is simply that historically GitHub has not been adding the things we need.

ldng 12y ago

I'd rather have you steering it to opensource based systems/services, you know in the spirit of open web.