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'Cultlike' Devotion: Apple Once Refused To Join Open Compute Project, So Their Entire Networking Team Quit (businessinsider.com)
mattydread23 writes: Great story about the Open Compute Project from Business Insider's Julie Bort here, including this fun tidbit: "'OCP has a cultlike following,' one person with knowledge of the situation told Business Insider. 'The whole industry, internet companies, vendors, and enterprises are monitoring OCP.' OCP aims to do for computer hardware what the Linux operating system did for software: make it 'open source' so anyone can take the designs for free and modify them, with contract manufacturers standing by to build them. In its six years, OCP has grown into a global entity, with board members from Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Intel, and Microsoft. In fact, there's a well-known story among OCP insiders that demonstrates this cultlike phenom. It involves Apple's networking team. This team was responsible for building a network at Apple that was so reliable, it never goes down. Not rarely -- never. Building a 100% reliable network to meet Apple's exacting standards was no easy task. So, instead of going it alone under Apple's secrecy, the Apple networking team wanted to participate in the revolution, contributing and receiving help. But when the Apple team asked to join OCP, Apple said 'no.' 'The whole team quit the same week,' this person told us."
the cult-like Apple doesn't like competing cults?
Apple has no respect for FOSS to any meaningful extent and they do love exploiting their cult, it's nice to see apple suffer the wrath of a cult for once.
But it probably was as good a reason as any
This team was responsible for building a network at Apple that was so reliable it would never down. Not rarely — never.
Leave it to business insider to make ludicrous claims about network availability. If Apple's network had 99.99% uptime, and it would cost ten billion dollars to add another 9 to it, I'm pretty sure they'd rather pocket that money than spend it on more redundant switches/routers.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
No you CAN'T. Don't even try.
Why would you want to knowingly buy a Chinese-built switch?
They did not quit because they had some sort of cultlike devotion. They quit because they recognized a business opportunity to "get in on the ground floor" and form a startup. "Instead, they founded a startup called SnapRoute, led by Jason Forrester, the former team leader. While Forrester declined to talk to us for this article, SnapRoute's website hints at the story. " Lord knows I've been tempted to leave my big ol' company to pursue similar ventures... Can never convince enough principles to join me. The lure of that pension plan (yes, still have one...) is too strong.
I was part of Apple's licensing software team twenty years ago---1996.
At the time, the Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP) was the big item, essentially the same as OCP. Standardize the API at a hardware-abstraction layer, and let everyone build compatible machines. The manufacturer would write the HAL (BIOS) and a variety of operating systems can run on the hardware. (At the time, it was MacOS, OS/2, Novell Netware, and a couple others I've forgotten.)
My question at the time was "How does Apple make any money when the platform becomes a commodity, and millions of units come into the market on barges from Chinese manufacturers?" Naturally, Apple would cease to sell computers. This was the OS-licensing situation in spades.
Steve Jobs cancelled Apple's participation in CHRP as well as all OS licensing, knowing that Apple makes most of its money selling the computer. IBM got out of the PC business when Dell and Gateway built PC-compatibles cheaper. Now they're starving as Acer and everyone else builds the platform.
Why would this be any different today than it was two decades ago?
100% uptime means the network wasn't down in time period you're talking about. My network has 100% uptime this week.
Maybe last year I had crappy up time, but this year my network doesn't go down (hasn't gone down).
I enjoy the first few weeks of football season because my team is always undefeated, at least until the end of the first game.
Actually 100% uptime even over a long period isn't THAT difficult - heteregenous reduncancy pretty much does the trick. That's heterogenous, not homogenous. In other words, you have redundancy for everything, but not by having two of the exact same things. You have a pair of connections (or sets of connections) to the outside world - a metro ethernet connection from one provider, and a direct MPLS connection from another. A Cisco router in the metroE and a Juniper on the MPLS.
It's extremely unlikely that both providers will go down at the same time. It's extremely unlikely that both the Cisco (or pair of Ciscos) and the pair of Junipers will crap out simultaneously.
It's extremely unlikely that both providers will go down at the same time. It's extremely unlikely that both the Cisco (or pair of Ciscos) and the pair of Junipers will crap out simultaneously.
...says the guy who has obviously never run a Juniper. :-)
John
If I were an apple hardware engineer I'd quit too. Clearly a company that's selling 3-4 year old technology as a new "top spec" computer doesn't value their hardware wing.
Don't get me started on the fact that their only laptop with a network adapter is 4+ years old...
My network has 100% uptime
so does mi
It's nice to talk about 100% uptime, but you can't protect your network from everything. As an example, what do you do if/when there's another Carrington Event and much of the power grid goes out? Yes, some of the backbone will still be working and you have backup power, but how much and how long will it last? Even if your data centers are hardened enough to keep the flare from frying your servers and routers, all you can do is hope that the electric grid comes back before your generators run out of fuel because if they do, you're going down no matter how good your plan is. And, as you can only stockpile a finite quantity of fuel, you can't guarantee staying up until the power's back. Yes, that's not the only disaster that could bring Apple and Google down, but most of the others are man made, and I wanted to show that even a natural disaster (or Act of God if you prefer) can overwhelm the best laid plans of mice or men.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
OCP should just stick to robots that shoot people. It's what they do best.
I have friends that work for Apple, Google, Oracle, whatever. And I have friends that have quit en-masse from those companies. They almost always quit because they went from a cool startup to a tiny cog in a gigantic machine. These gigantic internet companies consume smaller companies and spit out all the parts they don't like. In many cases, that's most parts.
This is not an Apple problem, it's an industry and maybe even a societal problem. I don't even think it's possible to get a good job, get an A+ rating for every performance review ever, and expect to stay at that job for 5+ years. After 10 years, you are too expensive to keep around.
It's a race to the bottom. Throw enough cheap shit at the wall and you'll eventually meet your short term profit goals but, damn, that's a lot of shit to clean off the walls. In fact, you may not be able to clean it all off.
Greetings, Humans. The machine churns. I'd like to introduce you to the grinding wheel...
I remember when entire teams would quit because the bosses canceled the weekly Quake deathmatch due to productivity concerns. Back then it was easy to get a new job the same week, because technical people were in high demand.
Wait, this isn't a story about the 1990s?
They did the autolayoff thing to themselves? Post-Recession? What were they thinking??
They want everyone to take a byte but you're not allowed to leaf.
If Goldman Sachs is involved I am very suspicious. They are never to be trusted.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
However, it will allow you to hit your data caps in about 10 seconds. isn't that fun?
anyways, if apple wanted a network that never goes down, were they prepared to build their own cables and wireless backups to every place they want to connect to?
or willing it to be total shite as far as performance goes?
All hail Bob! All hail Bob! https://youtu.be/Qt9MP70ODNw http://www.subgenius.com/
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
My network has 100% uptime
so does mi
Ahh, Slashdot humor. It never fails to serve.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
You are obviously not a Browns fan.
Bet I could just walk onto campus and their wireless portion would cease working.
Hello 2.4 GHz HPF EMF device. Easily built for less than $10 if you know how to make the tank circuits yourself.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The time of my life I was largely pro Apple, I was warned away from joining Apple, because I thought objectively about Apple. It was explained to me that was the kiss of death.
100% uptime can be easy to deliver, but is effectively impossible to guarantee contractually.
Thou shalt not have any cults next to me!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I mostly see cult like devotion from Apple aficionados, who's typical answer to question "Why did you choose iPhone" typical boils down to "because Apple".
There was nothing "cult-like".
The networking team at Apple understood there could be a huge business opportunity to build a business over stock OCP, so they thought Apple should pay their bills while they are learning OCP and iterate various ideas. Understanding that Apple won't pay for their OCP education, the team chose to keep going on their predetermined course.
Since Apple anyway joined OCP later on, it's possible they used this situation to weed out the opportunists who tried to ride Apple for their own further goals.
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
Wish I could read the article but since Business Insider decided to prevent users of ad blockers from viewing their pages I guess I can't. Even whitelisting doesn't seem to work. So I guess BI can suck it, I will find my news elsewhere...
Reminds me of the Delta airlines story of a few months ago. They had similar systems, yet the whole thing went down shutting Delta down for a couple days. I believe the investigation found similar results with Management making decisions that ultimately compromised the system, where a backup generator catching fire essentially took it all down...
I expect it was less a "Cult" and more about being set up for failure.
Being asked to do something unrealistic, then on analysis coming up with the best option, then being told by Management to do something else, the team probably looked at the situation, realized they were being set up for eventual failure and rather than following through to the enviable conclusion decided to cut their losses and start looking for more rewarding work elsewhere.
In the end it was likely known that Management would throw them under the bus eventually and rather than being briefly associated with a failed project and tarnished reputations a better option was to simply move on.
For Linux and other successful open source projects, there are two critical factors, openness and consensus. People discuss and generally move in a unified direction, even if not everyone is in perfect agreement.
OCP is plagued by every member thinking they know so much better than everyone else, they don't drive toward consensus. When Microsoft joined, they borught a completely different set of designs, not even fitting the same *rack* as facebook's design. OCP vendors upon hearing the news would briefly hope that meant they could get mileage out of all the work they did to support Facebook by selling that stuff to MS, before having those hopes dashed in learning they couldn't reuse a single damn thing.
The closest thing to a 'standard' is the OCP mezz card. They have the same connector and pinout. However, there are four incompatible layouts depending on the whim of the company deciding what *they* thought would be important. This could have been a golden opportunity, since the PCIe standard has not bothered with an improved, datacenter appropriate design in ages.
It leaves a particularly bad taste in the mouth of vendors, as these clients abuse their suppliers worse than WalMart abuses their vendors. They live it up as vendor after vendor opts to lose money under the mistaken impression they are buying loyalty, when these companies don't give a rats ass.
I really don't get this story, honestly.
Is Apple being a "Cult" for wishing to protect possibly marketable trade secrets that were created by its employees on the company's dime?
Is OCP (didn't they buy-up Detroit?) being a "Cult" for engendering a sense of "loyalty" to an ideological position on technology?
Are the ex-Apple Developers being a "Cult" for expressing solidarity, even if it costs them their jobs?
None of those seem to fit the definition of "Cult-like" behavior.
The company wants a network that never goes down---a very challenging project.
Then it prohibits the engineers from implementing the solution they chose.
So management is demanding a high-grade service and refusing the method chosen by their experts? I assume the engineering team would also be blamed when the service failed to perform as expected.
I would quit too. You don't get to ignore a consensus of experts and then hold them accountable for result. If they're skilled enough that you ought to be listening to them, they can find something better when you treat them like wage slaves.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
>> building a network at Apple that was so reliable, it never goes down. Not rarely -- never.
Thats logically impossible. No matter how many layers of failover and backup systems you have, each unavoidably has some probability of themselves failing. Even if VERY small, its still not never.
If that didn't matter, we Linux enthusiasts would be merrily running FVWM and Blackbox.
BlackBox can actually look pretty neat, if themed correctly.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
OCP aims to do for computer hardware what the Linux operating system
turn it in to a mess of competing standards that have no consistency?
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.