Zen and the Art of Apache Maintenance 137
SilentBob4 writes "Apache recently held a week-end "infrathon" to sweep the dust out of the corners, squash a few old bugs, drink a wee bit of ale (maybe a wee bit more than a wee bit) and get their hands dirty with the Zen of maintaining their infrastructure. MadPenguin.org crashed the party in search of the secrets of getting into the "zone" while peeking into the grittiest of the nitty gritty with one of the darling projects of open source, Apache." From the article: "The guys that I interviewed were among some of the brightest minds in open source; Brian Behlendorf; Upayavira; Greg Stein; and Roy Fielding, all of whom are well known and regarded (or deserve to be). These guys have the skills to be Microsoft millionaires, but instead flew thousands of miles to sit slouching on couches and squatting on cushions hacking infrastructure maintenance for free, primarily just to hang out with each other, even though they could have done the same thing on line."
Only the really important stuff, please... (Score:5, Funny)
Really fascinating stuff, but I couldn't help mysef:
From the interview with Brian Behlendorf:
MP: What's the most important thing about this event?
BB: I'm not sure this is an event worthy of Slashdot [laughing]
Heh, you must be new here.
Re:Only the really important stuff, please... (Score:1)
I had a little deja vu while reading the headline. (Score:3, Funny)
Mandatory Monty Python reference (Score:1)
Poke him with the soft cusion!
Thankyou! (Score:4, Funny)
Not worthy of /. (Score:5, Funny)
Don't you worry yourself about what's worthy of
Re:Not worthy of /. (Score:2)
I give it a day, two tops before the first dupe.
Re:in case it gets slashdotted... (Score:1)
Re:in case it gets slashdotted... (Score:1)
"Subversion trees" Ha! Buncha commies - I KNEW it! (Score:5, Funny)
Like a Phone tree, right, only they're subversives!
(yes, sub-version, I know)
Uh (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Uh (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't get it either, dude. Is he complaining about A) Bill being tied up with the press, B) giving away his money, or C) giving to charity, or D) all of the above?
If it's A, it's probably intended to mean Bill should spend more time with his developers. Possibly a valid point, but presented in a horribly malignant way.
If it's B or C, he should seek professional counselling. Soon.
If it's D, there's no hope for him. He'll never be happy and should consider moving to a small shack somewhere in the wilderness - preferably without easy access to the Internet, firearms and/or explosives.
Re:Uh (Score:2)
Re:Give a man a fish... (Score:1, Informative)
You really have no clue; first, Bill Gates donated over 25 billion dollars, not "a few hundred million". Second, the amount deductible from taxes is only 30% of the individual's income or 20% in the case of securities [aegis.com] (as were most [historylink.org] of Gates's donations). And even
Re:Uh (Score:2, Insightful)
The world needs both free software *and* generous charitable donations. Don't discount one because you prefer the other.
And don't play the "Oh, well, it doesn't count because it's not a significant portion of his worth". A hungry person doesn't give a damn how much someone had to sacrifice to give him that bowl of soup.
Re:Uh (Score:1)
Re:Uh (Score:2)
Re:Uh (Score:2)
They Care. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They Care. (Score:5, Interesting)
True, but I don't think it's just a Microsoft thing.
Any large software company will have red-tape out the wazoo. If you had a bright idea and wrote some spiffy new bug-fix, it would go into a repository, need to get sold in house and then reviewed & tested before going gold in a patch god-knows-how-many months later...
As much as anything I think the processes are to help management cover their asses - If it goes through a 17 step analysis and is still wrong, they've done due diligence...
Re:They Care. (Score:2, Insightful)
I'll agree with that...unfortunately for Microsoft, they're the largest example ever of a red-tape-laden software giant, and most comments that *should* be generalizations end up becoming anti-Microsoft slams.
It makes me wonder, though, if large software corps don't have something to learn from this "event" as the article keeps calling it. Would it ultimately be productive/counterproductive to, say, stop work on all new projects (or new fe
Re:They Care. (Score:1)
Re:They Care. (Score:1)
Re:They Care. (Score:1, Flamebait)
Your comment is very interesting because I'm guessing by the wording of your comment that you obviously prefer the Apache/OSS way. But when I read your comment, I think I'd rather trust my systems to be running on Microsoft. Why? Because I'd rather do business with a g
Re:They Care. (Score:1)
Re:They Care. (Score:2)
You don't have enough money to truly bargain with Microsoft.
Re:They Care. (Score:2)
Personally, I don't. But the company I work for does. We pay big bucks to get premium support from Microsoft. If we have some issue with their software, and I take it to them, they'll give me a fix. It's happened before.
Re:They Care. (Score:2)
Say you find a showstopper in Apache httpd: You can wait and hope, hire your own coder, or contract someone else's coding shop. Any of those are viable, depending on the nature of the problem.
Now say you find an identical
Re:They Care. (Score:2)
Man, you have no idea do you. I would advise you to check out my other responses. Let me ask, have you actually ever worked with Microsoft? Have you ever had to make decisions regarding how much support you purchase for them? Do you have any idea how much their support costs? If not, then perhaps you shouldn't get involved in conversations that you have no knowledge about.
Re:They Care. (Score:2)
If you want something better, RedHat has _lots_ of people working in the specific projects that might need support, and when you pay for support, they fix bugs for you.
Of course, if RedHat does go out of bussines, there's always Novell/SuSE, or even */Debian.
You seem to believe that Microsoft will never cease to support you, but that's just a belief, in bussiness, that sort of thing does happen.
The sensible option in _any_ c
Re:They Care. (Score:2)
I'm sorry, this is going to sound very condescending, but when someone says something like this, I really get the idea that they must not deal with this sort of thing in real life, and instead they gain most of their "knowledge" about real world I.T. (especially Microsoft) from Slashdot alone.
News flash for you: If you pay for support from Microsoft, they not only listen to y
RE: I imagine... (Score:4, Interesting)
I mean, apache's clearly costing a lot less to make into a good product than IIS. And compare the relative profitability... hehe
Re:FireFox crash... (Score:2)
What? (Score:2)
This reminds me of the PostgreSQL crew... (Score:5, Interesting)
WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
What is this elitist, racist bullshit? I can't even read the rest of the article now. Yes, let's flame someone for donating to poor people. He should put all of his money in a vault and go swimming Uncle Scrooge style and laugh at "them poor brown people" in his spare time. What. The. Fuck.
Re:WTF (Score:1)
Re:WTF (Score:1)
Try and be a little 2 sided about it - obviously its O.K. to give what you can to others less fortunate - just don't expect automatic sympathy on everything from then on.
Trust me, Bill is still well in control of his actions, now it seems he has your support.
Re:WTF (Score:2)
If only I had $28 billion left after I give to charity... And if my children had $3 billion after I died...
Re:WTF (Score:1, Troll)
First off, numbnuts, Bill Gates singlehandedly made computers ubiquitous. He'll b
Re:WTF (Score:4, Insightful)
Not that I don't like a good rant, but let's run some numbers.
Assuming you eat 3 times a day at McDonalds, you end up giving 75 c a day, or less than $275 a year. Assuming you reached 49 years (as old as Bill Gates) despite your terrible dietary habits, and you started working at 20, you ended up donating less than $8000. Even if you're at poverty level [census.gov], that is you make $9827/year, your total income over this period would be close to 285000 dollars; so you're giving about 2% of your total income. Bill Gates donated close to $27 billion, and has a net worth of about 47 billion [forbes.com], so that's about 36% of his net worth. Looks like Gates got you beat here too.
Missing the point (Score:1)
Bill Gates, no matter how much money he gives away, even if he donated 99.9% of his net worth to charity, would still not ever worry about whether he's going to be able to buy food that day.
I'm sure Bill doesn't even think about the buying of food... he just eats--anything and anywhere he wants.
A person hovering near the poverty line
Re:Missing the point (Score:1, Offtopic)
The OP said "If you put a quarter in the cup [...] you're donating a larger fraction of your income to charity than Bill Gates". The assertion seemed to me to be orders of magnitude out of whack, so I decided to do a quick and dirty verification. That was the entire point of my post.
It's not difficult to do a back of the envelope
Re:WTF (Score:1)
CURIOUS... (Score:2)
Re:WTF (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:WTF (Score:1)
Yeah... cause your quarter is much more useful to starving people than his worthless millions.
Only here can people manage to denegrate something so cool.
Skills (Score:5, Insightful)
These guys have the skills to be Microsoft millionaires
Skills isn't the hard part. It's the timing.
Re:Skills (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Skills (Score:3, Interesting)
Those folks didn't get rich because they're brilliant programmers, they got rich because Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are
Doesn't this sound weird? (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe Chairman Bill doesn't "get" it because he's too busy answering press calls about his generosity in donating his billions to them poor brown people over there.
Umm... Shouldn't the source be MadRacistPenguin?
Just a note (Score:5, Insightful)
There you go, simultaneously racist, stupid, and ignorant.
I think Bill's promise to give away 90+% of his net worth is more noble than anything any slashdotter will ever accomplish.
The OSS "community" has a bad reputation precisely because of ignorant stupid bullshit statements like that one.
what reputation do you speak of? (Score:2)
The one that they gained through fewer defects/line of code?
The one they gained for advancing the cause of human freedom? (Encryption, keeping the web out of monopoly hands) 1984 is no nightmare for the proprietary software outfits - BB is a nice cohesive market. Contrast with Carly's ambition: building DRM into every product HP makes...
The OSS community has a great rep for anybody that has heard of it.
Re:what reputation do you speak of? (Score:2)
pgp is a bfd.
an open web is a bfd.
users controlling the hardware they own is a bfd.
You do appear too ignorant/stupid to recognize what they've done for you. They ARE better than you. Sorry.
Re:Just a note (Score:3, Insightful)
What are *you* contributing that's so useful, besides your knee-jerk reactions and inability to read not-so-subtle sarcastic statements?
Re:Just a note (Score:2)
Re:Just a note (Score:2)
Re:Just a note (Score:1)
On a sidenote: Do you realize that if he did this now, he'd still be near the top of the Forbes 500 wealthiest individuals? I actually did the calculation about a year ago. Haven't done it recently, but I imagine he'd still be somewhere near 30th on the list. And this is *after* Microsoft's stock went down due to the dotcom crash and antitrust hearings.
Re:Just a note (Score:2)
I would have to look into it more, but generally this is just to keep the government from getting it. Good Old Uncle Sam would take a HUGE chunk of his estate if he doesn't leave it to charity. I'm sure his wife and children already have money/stock in their own names and won't be hurting for cash. What else is he going to do with it, may as well give it away. Doesn't really make
Re:Just a note (Score:2)
He has lots of options. Giving a ton of cash to AIDS research and education is great of him.
Re:Just a note (Score:2)
Ummm... hard to build space ships after you are dead, and again, not giving nukes to terrorists is hardly benevolant. All that proves is he isn't a total monster, or at least doesn't want his children blown up.
Re:Just a note (Score:1)
Considering he's a multi-billionaire, and how few multi-billionaires actually do what he's doing, I'd say proving he's not a total monster is fairly impressive.
Re:Just a note (Score:2)
Actually, leaving a significant portion of your estate to charity is a common estate planning technique. There are many significantly wealthy people that do it all the time. He's just making a big deal out of it.
Re:Just a note (Score:2)
Except that money doesn't magically appear. His money came from somewhere and all those somewheres would have spent their money elsewhere making people less poor if it hadn't gone to Microsoft.
Thing is, as we've seen over the last 50 years, when you have trade barriers and subsidies in place all the aid in the world doesn't do shit.
Re:Just a note (Score:1)
Re:Just a note (Score:2)
Give any slashdotter that kind of cash and find out. I, for one, would be very happy with even $1 million. But I guess nobility is more expensive these days, with inflation and all.
I don't disagree that Bill Gates is noble or a good person or whatever, when compared with MOST capitalists. But Microsoft got its money by rather less than noble means. So, for example, if a drug deal
Re:Just a note (Score:2)
Wouldn't that entirely depend on what kind of a drug dealer they were? Not all drug dealers are bad, believe it or not! Don't know if pimp would have been a more appropriate analogy, but then again maybe there are good pimps out there too?!?
Hmmm... terrorist anthrax manufacturing puppy killer giving away 90% of their profits?
Re:Just a note (Score:2)
Re:Just a note (Score:2)
Re:Just a note (Score:2)
I'm sure they are probably only doing it to put their kids through school / pay for their sick mother's medical bills.
A bad reputation? But could Bill do this? (Score:2)
Presuming it's not just a promise and he actually does it (I'm not familiar with this, I don't study Gates that closely), it still leaves him with hundreds of millions (or billions? - not sure of his current net worth, but it's enough to know it's way up there) of dollars, and still head of the worlds largest and most (financially and number-of-units sold) successful software company.
Re:Just a note (Score:1)
Charity is a private issue., when you get milage from it, it ceases to be creditable.
If you had 40Bn in the bank, you are not going to suffer even if you gave 99% of it away, so don't pretend he is doing the world a favour.
And as for the racist accusation, it was meant to describe the manner in which the "donations" are made, and to whom, and how they actually appear to the rest of us.
"lets pick a disadvantaged group and throw some money at them, that'll mak
Re:Just a note (Score:2)
Please explain again how giving away billions of dollars to charity is not doing the world a favor.
Can I just say (Score:5, Informative)
So can we please have fewer of these "Zen and the art of blahblahblah" books?
Re:Can I just say (Score:5, Funny)
That book needs to come with a health warning: "If you haven't studied ancient greek philosophy for 15 years, stop reading at page 192. Book may become airborne, or sit next to toilet gathering dust for decades. Aim away from face."
Re:Can I just say (Score:2)
Re:Can I just say (Score:1)
Re:Can I just say (Score:2)
Sadly, at the same time as I am delighted at finding you, I am
Re:Can I just say (Score:1)
Gujju
Re:Can I just say (Score:1)
Zen and the Art of Media-Sexy-Religion (Score:1)
Now! I have been practising zen many years (zazen meditation) and I know something about zen's history and I can think myself as an Zen Buddhist on even numbered days. I find this Zen and stuff quite funny (Zen is japanese for Chan which is chinece for Jahna which is sanskrit/pali term meaning meditative concentration). How ma
Collabration is the key word (Score:2)
Not the actual Apache *software*... (Score:1)
Re:Not the actual Apache *software*... (Score:1)
Re:Apache server apparently now on Linux (Score:2)
This machine is indeed a heavy duty HP/red-hat linux server used for ensuring good support on that platform.
Dw.
minotaur is still freebsd (Score:2)
FreeBSD minotaur.apache.org 4.11-STABLE FreeBSD 4.11-STABLE #8: Mon Mar 21 14:40:31 PST 2005 root@minotaur.apache.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/tur
>
Its interesting how many tier-1 web sites are FreeBSD based. I thought imdb.com was freebsd, but netcraft says Linux again...