Date: Mon, 05 Dec 2005 10:18:35 -0700
From: Richard Megginson <rmeggins@xxxxxxxxxx>
Mike Jackson wrote:
Howard Chu wrote:
Sorry to poke at a moldy old thread, but I think some misconceptions
need to be cleared up.
Hi Howard,
That certainly was a moldy old thread. I'm surprised it took this
long to catch your attention :-)
I guess my attention has been elsewhere ;)
I'm not here to attack FDS. I have nothing but respect for the team
working on it today. But the fact that OpenLDAP developed under
different conditions, with a different philosophy, is just that -
philosophical difference.
This is one problem which I have with using OL in commercial systems:
developers pushing their philosophy. The preaching of philosophies is
a fundamental difference between open-source and commercial
projects/products, and fortunately not all open-source projects do it.
With a commercial product, the customer is always right and new
features (like MMR) will appear and be enabled by default with
sufficient customer demand.
I don't believe the customer is always right. A good marketing
organization will give the customer what they ask for. A great one will
give the customer what he/she really needs/wants, which is not always
what the customer asks for. We were fortunate at Netscape and Red Hat
to have a couple of great PMs, and a few good ones.
Indeed. In my experience on many projects, the "customer" is almost
always wrong. Fortunately for them they were usually shielded from me by
several layers of sales/marketing, and those layers got to deal with
twisting the language so that it appeared the customer was getting
exactly what they asked for, when we were just delivering what they needed.
I don't want to pollute this list with too much off-topic discussion,
but this is a key difference - OpenLDAP did not begin as a commercial
directory product, and that was not its original purpose. It was never
Kurt's goal to create a directory server that could compete with other
commercial directory servers, he just wanted something that would work
for NetBoolean's mail routing product. Symas wasn't looking to become a
commercial directory server company either, we were just looking for
something that would work for our Connexitor EMS product. I.e., OL
started as the bare necessities that a couple developers needed for
something else entirely, and the only focus of the project has been
satisfying its developers. Many people are put off by the "if you want
it, add it yourself" attitude. I personally found this attitude
attracted me to the project, because I enjoy creating code that does
what I want.
With an open-source project, the developers sometimes call the
"customers" crazy, stupid, uninformed, etc, and tell them to be quiet
or go away if they don't like it.
That happens with proprietary software just as much or more, it's just
not as public :-) c.f. Microsoft, Oracle
LOL. Indeed, when was the last time you ever heard "you're right, we'll
fix that right away" from Microsoft...
That being said, I have been bothered by the tone of discussion on the
openldap lists at times, and I don't want to have that sort of
negativity on the fedora ds lists. Perhaps it is just a difference of
philosophy.
Newbies tend to have a rough time with OL and with the OL lists. And
teaching newbies about LDAP basics hasn't really been one of the
priorities for OL. But in general the only time I've seen real problems
has been due to folks who come onto the lists without a clue and who
steadfastly ignore all the clues given to them. Ignorance isn't a sin,
but aggressive ignorance is.
Since this project's software has commercial roots, and still has
commercial funding, thankfully you don't see much pushing of
philosophy here.
You see a different philosophy. Besides, OpenLDAP does have a
commercial entity behind it (Symas), and they do have customers, and
they do want to provide features and services for them.
Yes, and this marks a distinct change for OpenLDAP. "It works" used to
be good enough, but isn't any more. A lot of initial development was
driven purely by internal needs. The emphasis has slowly changed to
making the code enterprise-grade, and that change has been largely due
to Symas. The old codebase sucked, royally. We at Symas started
profiling the code (and developing new code profiling tools to assist),
re-factoring, ... and as a result the OL 2.1 code was 200 times faster
than 2.0. With the old philosophy probably nobody would have bothered to
investigate. But I'm a perfectionist; "it works" isn't nearly good
enough for me...
The biggest problem I have with OL is that the -users mailing list is
censored, which is sometimes used to ensure that philosophy can be
pushed without being questioned. I have had numerous postings to
openldap-users blocked, which either questioned (even indirectly) the
philosophy of OL or mentioned the name of another directory server.
I'm happy that we have freedom of speech on this list and can have
this discussion; it would be prohibited on openldap-users. I really
despise being censored, and I'm sure that many other people feel the
same way.
There are other lists that can be used to talk about other directory
servers and how they compare to OpenLDAP e.g. the umich list, and to
some extend the ldap-interop list. I don't fault Kurt for keeping the
discussions germane - perhaps we will have to do the same with the
Fedora DS lists if we become victims of our own popularity, which is a
good problem to have :-)
I think part of the problem was that the OL list was the only place to
find free help on the entire technology, and it irked me to see my time
being wasted giving free support to people using commercial products. 1)
they paid money to a vendor already, the vendor should be supporting
them. 2) if they have money to burn, they ought to be paying me instead.
;) The fact that these other lists are active has pretty much solved
that problem.
Considering those two problems, I would have a difficult time saying
that I have nothing but respect for the *entire* OL team. However, I
do have a lot of respect for you because you listen to opposing views
with an open mind and are willing to debate them in a friendly manner.
Thanks. A good debate is always nice; anyone who doesn't like
intellectual challenge shouldn't be here in the first place...
BR,
Mike
--
-- Howard Chu
Chief Architect, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com
Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc
OpenLDAP Core Team http://www.openldap.org/project/
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