[HN Gopher] DeWitt Clause, or can you benchmark %database% and g...
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DeWitt Clause, or can you benchmark %database% and get away with it
Author : arjunnarayan
Score : 54 points
Date : 2022-06-02 18:56 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (cube.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (cube.dev)
| kstrauser wrote:
| Honestly, the presence of that clause screams to me "this app
| sucks and we'll sue you if you tell anyone how badly". That may
| not be the case whatsoever, but my first assumption is that
| they're trying to hide terrible performance.
| [deleted]
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| One of my personal bugbears is the DeWitt Clause for Datomic,
| especially because knowing the performance profile of Datomic is
| very important for understanding whether your app will be a good
| fit for it given some of its peculiarities.
| [deleted]
| Nextgrid wrote:
| If you want to benchmark for internal reasons you don't publish
| the results and nobody knows. If you want to make a service to
| the community, run your benchmarks, download Tor and publish the
| results anonymously. I don't see what the big deal is?
|
| Is this only limited to marketing claims where you post it on
| your company's website?
| igorlukanin wrote:
| How likely is it that one takes an anonymous benchmark
| published by a noname researcher seriously?
| throwamon wrote:
| Aren't benchmarks supposed to be more or less reproducible?
| So just publish the results _and_ the data?
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| 100%
|
| Have you met programmers?
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| Extremely.
|
| Why would you assume people generally do
| background/credential checks on researchers?
|
| Sure its nice to have it on phoronix or something, but its by
| no means a deal-breaker if it isn't.
| [deleted]
| noasaservice wrote:
| Its mainly related to MSSQL and Horracle. Horracle will just
| use their legal team (which is bigger than their engineers and
| developers) to bludgeon you over benchmarks.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| "This just in Oracle legal team takes down entire Tor
| Network"
|
| Jokes aside, I'm surprised they're so touchy about these
| things. They can make plenty of money without it, they can
| also save plenty of money with less lawyers.
| chmod775 wrote:
| It would be quite refreshing if we could have a story in which
| Oracle are the good guys for once.
|
| I'm sure they are at least purchasing some modern-day
| 'indulgences' by - for instance - donating food to starving north
| korean elites?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| They try to be the good guy. Their free tier is quite extensive
| (24GB of RAM, 4 ARM vCPUs and +-2 AMD cores, a several hundred
| GB of storage), good enough to run quite a decent personal
| cluster on, probably to lure in businesses for their AWS-style
| cloud services which are as ridiculously expensive as their
| competition.
|
| However, just like AWS, Azure, and GCloud, their admin UI is
| complicated, slow, frustrating and full of invented acronyms
| and quirks.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| I've read various stories over the years about Oracle
| extremely aggressively pushing high bills because they think
| you're using the "free" version of MySQL or VirtualBox in a
| way that you're supposed to pay for it. I'd be very wary
| running anything "free" from Oracle (as in: I wouldn't).
| [deleted]
| throwamon wrote:
| I wasn't sure if you were joking, so I googled "oracle north
| korea". This is the first result:
|
| https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2020/10/07/North-Kor...
| Beltalowda wrote:
| It's a strange feeling to find myself agreeing with the North
| Korean government.
| josephcsible wrote:
| If Oracle ever wants to be the good guys just once, I have an
| idea for them that's right in their wheelhouse. Step 1: buy
| grsecurity's kernel hardening patches. Step 2: put said patches
| in the publicly released UEK source. Step 3: wait for
| grsecurity to refuse to give them future patches. Step 4: sue
| grsecurity for imposing further restrictions on the exercise of
| rights granted by the GPL.
| andrenotgiant wrote:
| Has either the Dewitt clause or the Dewitt Embrace ever resulted
| in some kind of legal action?
|
| It seems like more of a threat stance to various partners and
| ecosystem players than anything else.
| bluestreak wrote:
| It does result in cease and desist threats quite often. We have
| been on the receiving end of one.
| igorlukanin wrote:
| Oh! Would love to learn more :--)
|
| As I'm the author of the blog post in question, I can think
| of including your account there, if you'd like to.
| igorlukanin wrote:
| I think someone from Oracle would be more informed on that
| matter. JK. On a more serious note, who would dare to displease
| a multibillion corp with hundreds of lawyers (without being
| backed by a similar co & lawyers)?
| _jal wrote:
| These things become substantially easier when approached
| correctly.
|
| In this case, never run Oracle software. Not only will it
| vastly improve your mood during budget season; your
| developers will be less likely to stab you in your sleep and
| you will never worry about their primary line of business:
| lawsuits.
|
| _And_ you don 't care how they benchmark.
| rckoepke wrote:
| Could you pirate the database, then hide behind the fifth
| amendment to not reveal that you're a pirate while
| simultaneously asserting that you never agreed to any EULA?
| I'm not sure what the legal rights are here.
|
| I'm certain someone in say, China or Russia, could pirate the
| database and run benchmarks on it with no repercussions.
| Surprising that this isn't a business model for an overseas
| technology analyst firm.
| xen0 wrote:
| > Surprising that this isn't a business model for an
| overseas technology analyst firm.
|
| How much are you willing to pay for a legally dubious
| benchmark?
| GorillaWarfare wrote:
| Could this article comparing DeWitt Clauses be considered
| benchmarking?
| [deleted]
| igorlukanin wrote:
| Or benchmarketing?
| jenny91 wrote:
| All the BSL/SSPL ones shouldn't be in an "open source" section.
| Just change the heading to "source available" or put them with
| the "vendors".
| igorlukanin wrote:
| Author of the blog post in question here. Let me clarify: they
| shouldn't be there because they're not OSI-approved, right?
| Just wanna get your point here.
|
| (While I understand that BSL/SSPL lack certain liberties, I
| deemed it okay to mark them as "open source" for the purposes
| of this post.)
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Not just lack of OSI approval, they're attempting to redefine
| the long accepted meaning of open source to include their new
| licenses. They want the goodwill of being "open source"
| without the obligations. The only sorts of licenses that have
| consistently been considered open source are either copyleft
| licenses like the GPL and do whatever the hell you want
| licenses like MIT and Apache. Do whatever you want... unless
| you're a big corporation... or unless you're part of a group
| the authors deem evil/immoral/unethical... etc. is a massive
| departure from the spirit of the term open source.
| igorlukanin wrote:
| Makes sense! Will edit when I'm next to my laptop, I
| promise.
| l33t2328 wrote:
| > unless you're part of a group the authors deem
| evil/immoral/unethical.
|
| What parts of the license mention that?
| barkingcat wrote:
| It is most likely in the "Additional Use Grant" which is
| tricky - because this additional use grant is distinct to
| each product licensed under the BSL. This additional use
| grant is also not that easy to find, since some licenses
| display it prominently, and others hide it under some
| additional legal fineprint[1,2].
|
| From mariadb site: https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-
| adopting/#limits
|
| "Q: What are the usage limitations under BSL?
|
| A: The usage is limited to non-production use, or
| production use within the limits of the "Additional Use
| Grant" defined by the vendor using BSL and specific to
| each BSL product."
|
| [1] obvious Additional Use Grant for Couchbase, included
| clearly in https://blog.couchbase.com/couchbase-adopts-
| bsl-license/
|
| [2] it is extremely difficult to find the Additional Use
| Grant for Mariadb products themselves. For MaxScale,
| which is their proxy product, it is buried in a file
| within the source code (which on the surface level might
| be a good place for it, but it's not very easy to find
| and I had to go through lots of legal print to get to it)
| : https://github.com/mariadb-
| corporation/MaxScale/blob/2.5/LIC... or
| https://github.com/mariadb-
| corporation/MaxScale/blob/6.3/LIC... depending on which
| version you are trying to use, etc.
| [deleted]
| tetha wrote:
| Interesting. As a SaaS vendor, we do not allow performance
| testing of the production system. Because, you know, just
| casually saturating production resources can become very iffy for
| strange and unexpected reasons. And you will always be able to
| saturate a system, or a subsystem of the subsystem of the system.
|
| However, we have provided bigger customers, or customer willing
| to pay for it, with performance testing environments. We have,
| however, usually survived into the curiosity phase - "just how
| much to I have to throw at this thing to break it?".
| Beltalowda wrote:
| Looking at the language, almost all of them allow you to _run_
| benchmarks since it 's phrased as "you may not publish
| benchmark results"; it doesn't forbid to actually _run_ them.
| Never mind that MS-SQL, Oracle, etc. are not SaaS vendors of
| course.
|
| To be honest, if a cloud vendor has technical problems with
| someone running a few benchmarks then that would make me very
| wary of said cloud vendor. What's the difference between a
| "benchmark" and "using all resources I paid for" anyway?
| danielheath wrote:
| For a smaller/younger SAAS: If a customer environment is
| suddenly running at 100% of some resource when it wasn't
| before, that's an important thing to alert on / investigate.
|
| For established players it's lost in the noise, but if it
| were me I'd appreciate a heads up for big changes.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| Sure, a heads-up is certainly nice, but I don't think that
| running a (reasonable) set of benchmarks is all that out of
| the ordinary, or any different from just taxing the service
| at 100% with some periodic batch job or the like. _Paying_
| for it is even stranger IMO.
|
| And for what it's worth, I did actually work for a few
| small SaaS businesses, but a few _reasonable_ benchmarks
| wouldn 't have been a problem.
|
| Of course, if your benchmarks are going to take 50 hours
| it's a different story.
|
| Also: I suspect a lot of these database SaaS services are a
| lot smaller than you'd might think. I know at least one of
| them is anyway because I worked there.
| josephcsible wrote:
| There's a really big difference between "don't performance test
| on our hardware that you're sharing with other tenants" and
| "don't performance test on our software no matter whose
| hardware it's running on".
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