Reports from the Heart of the Machine
Machine Heart Editorial Department
Open source is a good thing, but when mixed with something else "utilitarian", it may change its flavor.
When it comes to domestic self-developed databases, Alibaba's cloud database OceanBase is certainly not bypassable.
OceanBase is a 100% self-developed, financial-grade distributed relational database developed by Alibaba and Ant Financial.
In October 2019, OceanBase swept the TPC-C chart, breaking the world record held by Oracle for 9 years, becoming the first Chinese database product to reach the top of the list; in May 2020, OceanBase once again broke the world record it held, with a performance score of more than 707 million for the first time, a significant increase of nearly 11 times compared with 2019.
Such a domestic database that has attracted much attention in the industry currently has a star volume of 3.7k in GitHub.
Project Address: https://github.com/oceanbase/oceanbase
OceanBase's achievements will undoubtedly have a significant positive impact on the rise of domestic self-developed databases. However, an incident that happened in recent days surprised insiders.
It is said that on the afternoon of October 23, OceanBase participated in a "Cloud Native Open Day" event, and the students in charge of the community launched an interactive activity on the spot that GitHub liked Star as a gift. As you can see from the image below, like an OceanBase project on GitHub, from 1 like to 20 likes, the liker will get the corresponding gift.
Image source: Zhihu asked questions.
OceanBase's practice of Razan in the community has been widely complained about by netizens. After the incident continued to ferment, Yang Chuanhui, CTO of OceanBase, apologized in a zhihu post, and Jia Yangqing, vice president of Alibaba, also made his attitude clear.
CTO Yang Chuanhui apologized and Jia Yangqing replied
The amount of open source star brushing has always been a much-maligned behavior.
As soon as the incident came out, Yang Chuanhui, CTO of OceanBase, quickly issued an apology, admitting that this interactive practice of giving gifts to get likes was wrong. He said the OceanBase team fully agrees that the likes of developers and users are loyal to the technology itself, and accept criticism from everyone.
Yang Chuanhui said that OceanBase conducted an internal self-examination overnight. This is the first time that the open source community team has done a "like Star gift" interactive activity, and OceanBase guarantees that this has not happened before and will never be allowed to happen again. In the future, OceanBase will deeply reflect on the management of the team, cultivate the team's correct awareness of open source, firmly believe in the geek and open source spirit, take every developer's questions and suggestions seriously, jointly promote the development of the OceanBase open source community, and contribute to China's open source ecosystem.
Behind the spitting incident, it reflects the problem of judging indicators of open source technology products. The amount of star on GitHub has long been considered the benchmark for technology projects: the higher the star volume, the higher the gold content of the project.
But open source products led by technology companies tend to become a more complex problem. In this regard, Alibaba Vice President Jia Yangqingzhi apologized for the matter and expressed his views on the issue of open source projects:
While using indicators as a criterion, they have also become one of the driving forces for promoting open source. But it is clearly not advisable to use a marketing-like amount of brush star to enhance the value and competitiveness of the project. Jia Yangqing said that open source itself needs enthusiasm: "Cangxiao is realistic and knows etiquette, and thinks warmly about open source." As a technology leader, he said that while adhering to open source governance for a long time, he also hopes to design a better open source judgment system.
In today's increasingly concerned about open source, this matter has also aroused heated discussion in knowledge.
For example, Dr. Li Mu, a senior chief scientist at Amazon, commented that there is a big problem with using Github Star metrics as KPIs, "One reason is that companies don't necessarily think clearly where the commercial value of open source is for the company, so they don't know what to optimize." Second, students will stare too much at these indicators in order to promote and raise salaries, which is easily detrimental to the development of open source projects."
The essence of the open source spirit is to jointly promote the development of the field. No metric may be a perfect measure of the full value of a technology project, but adhering to and maintaining the spirit of open source is key to effectively leveraging metrics and requires the encouragement of every developer in the community.
Reference link: https://www.zhihu.com/question/494108102/answer/2184934080