Re: [Ksummit-2008-discuss] DTrace

[James Bottomley <James dot Bottomley at HansenPartnership dot com>]

Don't drop the ks discuss list, since very few people who're
participating will be subscribed to that.

On Sun, 2008-07-06 at 19:31 -0400, Frank Ch. Eigler wrote:
> Hi, James -
> 
> 
> > [...]  The problem is that SystemTap hasn't really benefited from
> > community based innovation largely because it doesn't have much of a
> > community.  The bigger picture problem Red Hat didn't see when they
> > accepted the cash was that this project wouldn't generate a
> > community just from the usual publish the code and they will come
> > philosophy.  [...]
> 
> Red Hat didn't help build systemtap on "contract" if that's what you
> think.  It has not been the sole player either.  Many of the same
> customers who really want to use the tool have been partners,
> contributing considerable ongoing engineering talent to help it along.

My observation has been that companies who recognise the need for this
functionality for their customers (IBM, Intel for example) have
contributed engineering resources.  Customers who want it (at least
those I've talked to) seem only to have contributed cash.

> > [...]  The rising challenge it to find a way of bringing open source
> > methods to bear on this class of problem.  What SystemTap seems to
> > have demonstrated nicely is that simply paying a third party to
> > solve your problem doesn't really work largely because the tight
> > feedback loop between the producer and the consumer that drives open
> > source innovation is broken. [...]
> 
> This analysis really doesn't seem to fit well to our actual situation.
> We've been soliciting/collecting community contributions from the
> beginning.  We've been active on LKML since 2005.  Any accusation that
> we're not displaying "open source innovation" needs better evidence
> than that some LKML seniors have not been very supportive / satisfied
> users.

I actually covered this in a piece you failed to quote:

        The bigger picture problem Red Hat didn't see when they accepted
        the cash was that this project wouldn't generate a community
        just from the usual publish the code and they will come
        philosophy.
        
Your quote above pretty much bears this out ... especially as you seem
to be blaming others for the actual lack of community formation.

If it helps, I also didn't blame you or Red Hat for this.  Open Source
communities (at least from the distro point of view) have been largely
self assembling to date, driven by overriding pressures like need and
interest.

SystemTap is different: its notional community seems to come as some
assembly required, so what I was trying to analyse was why that was (and
possibly think about how it could be assembled).  One of the ironies of
this situation is that the distros are quite a bit further behind the
curve on this one than a lot of other companies who've all had
experience of launching an open source project (or simply publishing the
code) and seeing it die and then trying to work out how to do better.

James