[throwawaye3735]

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.

[bcantrill]

I have said this elsewhere on this thread, but just to reemphasize: the person that Brendan met had absolutely nothing to do with DTrace -- to the point that when he told this story to me, I didn't even recognize the name. (And can't now remember it.) The DTrace team was very small (there were three of us), and the community of early DTrace users inside of Sun -- the earliest folks who could rightfully call themselves DTrace experts -- can be seen in the acknowledgements section of our 2004 USENIX paper.[0]

[0] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...

[anyfoo]

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.

[throwawaye3735]

I am not saying it's factually incorrect. My point is that it includes a lot of Gregg's personal feelings (and maybe was informed incorrectly about the situation) and I'm just not sold that the guy who was assigned to show off Dtrace was the bad guy here

[brendangregg]

In the article I included my guess about real cause for this: Sun's assumption that any good work had to be from a Sun employee. I'd guess the sequence of events was:

  - DTrace is the new hotness, we need it in our UI.
  - Everyone's using Brendan's tools, let's add them (so far, so good).
  - Oh, why do they say copyright Brendan? He made a mistake: Sun employees should be putting copyright Sun on them. (THIS is the mistake, as I wasn't a Sun employee).
  - I'll just delete his name and stick copyright Sun on them all.
  - Developer gets picked to go do a world tour (and may genuinely not know what happened).

As for how I was treated: I guessed why in the article as well, the low-key introduction as is the norm in Australia.

[mnw21cam]

As for how you were treated - I don't think the low-key introduction can be fully blamed. The VIP should have known that smart people exist in various places around the world, and sooner or later one does bump into them. When you meet someone knowing absolutely nothing about them (and an introduction doesn't count), and then they start talking intelligently about a topic, then you have one data point (that they have talked intelligently), and you should draw an appropriate conclusion from that. It sounds like the VIP had serious preconception issues.

[throwawaye3735]

I worked for a government research lab and it was the same, only work coming from inside the lab was respected and contractor work was looked down upon.

That's really interesting, since you were so close to Sun they actually thought you were a Sun employee!

[lukeh]

The example in the article is an exception but, companies (including Sun) are generally very careful about using open source, and using it without attribution would be the exception not the rule.

Large companies are slow, indeed. In the late 90s I wrote a few operating system plugins (nss_ldap, pam_ldap, GSS SASL plugin for the Netscape directory server) which were eventually obsoleted by native Solaris equivalents. The Sun versions were on the whole better engineered, if less flexible, because their OS team had a depth of experience that I didn't have at the time.