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Leading itemsMaking code reviews easier with Review BoardReviewing code is a thankless, but very important, task for any software project. For free software projects, the "many eyes make all bugs shallow" aphorism only works if the eyes actually focus on the code in question. Review Board is a web-based application that helps reviewers examine the code, while making it easier for a developer to track those reviews. Borne out of frustration with the process of code reviews at VMware, Review Board has made a great deal of progress since being released last May. The idea behind it is to centralize all of the pieces that need to come together for a review: code diffs, screenshots of UI functionality, comments by other developers, etc. On many projects, reviews are handled by email, but that can be difficult to use; various pieces of the puzzle are spread around in multiple messages and locations. Often a reviewer needs to see more context than a simple email diff provides or wants to comment on a related section of code that is not contained in the diff; each requires a reviewer to do more work. In a complicated set of changes, ensuring that the developer and any other reviewers can follow what code the comments pertain to can also be difficult. It is these kinds of problems that Review Board is meant to solve. ![[Review
Board diff]](/images/revboard/revboarddiff_sm.png)
Review Board presents a side-by-side diff view, shown at right, with lots of extras, many of which will be familiar to users of other graphical diff tools. Changed lines are highlighted in different colors based on whether they are additions, deletions, or changes. Changes on a particular line are highlighted in a slightly darker color so that they can be distinguished more easily as well. The numbered tabs along the left edge provide a link to a reviewer's comments about that section of the code. This is where Review Board shows that it is much more than just a diff viewer. Using AJAX techniques, Review Board allows a reviewer to interact very naturally with the code. They can highlight a certain section, which will pop up a text widget that records comments associated with that section of code. When other reviewers or the developer read those comments, the code snippet is included, with a link back to the code in the diff view. Each of these comments can then be commented upon which allows for a conversation about the code to develop. ![[Review
Board screenshot diff]](/images/revboard/revboardshot_sm.png)
It is not just code that can be annotated; screenshots of application functionality or bugs can be attached to reviews, as well. Sections of the screenshot can be highlighted and commented upon, as shown at left. This feature is an excellent example of where a web-based tool can shine; doing the same task in text-based email would be painful. Not all projects need it, but those that do will find it quite useful as anyone who has spent time trying to describe a UI problem in email will attest. Inter-diffs is another useful feature that Review Board provides. Often in the code review process, several revisions of the original patch are made. It can be tedious to wade through a large diff, most of which has been uncontroversial (or resolved earlier) to get to the changes in the area of interest. Review Board has the ability to see changes between any two revisions of the patch, which should reduce much of the hassle. ![[Review Board dashboard view]](/images/revboard/revboarddash_sm.png)
Another thing that Review Board does is to assist in managing code reviews. When a developer posts something for review, various reviewers can be notified via email. Review Board keeps track of that information, presenting users with a "dashboard" view of their pending reviews, both those they submitted and those that others have asked them to do. This high-level overview is the first screen the user sees when they log on to the system, shown at right. This makes keeping track of work that needs to be done – or who to prod to get a review moving again – much easier. Currently, Review Board best supports the Subversion and Perforce version control systems (VCS), but support for others, including distributed VCS Mercurial and git, are being actively developed and are usable in their current states. Released under an MIT license, Review Board is written in Python, using the Django web framework. Development is hosted at Google Code; the developers, unsurprisingly, uses the software for internal code reviews. Other systems to assist in the code review process do exist. Codestriker is a Perl based web application that has similar aspirations to Review Board. Also of interest is Python founder Guido van Rossum's first project at Google: a code review system he calls "Mondrian". It is closely tied to Google proprietary code, though, so it seems unlikely to be released as free software – though it might make an appearance as a tool for Google Code projects to use. Code reviews are very powerful, but generally painful to perform; any tool that claims that "Code reviews are fun again! ...almost.", as Review Board does, will be welcomed by many. It will be interesting to see whether a code review tracker becomes a standard part of newer free software projects. Over the last few years, we have seen the rise of distributed VCS, bug trackers, and wikis to assist in distributed development. Will Review Board – or something like it – be the next tool to be added?
SAMP?A few articles making predictions for 2008 had put an initial public offering by MySQL on their list. The company had clearly been heading in that direction for a while; sales were growing, venture capital was coming in, etc. In the end, though, the MySQL IPO seems destined not to happen - Sun Microsystems got there first. The deal is structured as a full acquisition - Sun will pay about $800 million for all outstanding shares of MySQL stock. In addition, about $200 million in options will be covered, so, overall, this is a billion-dollar deal. Not bad for a company which is based on free software.Sun is making the right noises about how this deal will work. There is no talk of taking MySQL proprietary or changing its license. MySQL will continue to be supported on all platforms, and not just Solaris. A series of grants will be made to help university researchers advance the state of the art in database management systems. There is a lot of talk about continuing to support "the community," though details are (perhaps necessarily) scarce. CEO Jonathan Schwartz says that Sun will be working to improve "the rest of the LAMP" stack, though he says nothing about the "L" (for Linux) part. Chances are that this deal will be a good thing for MySQL users. Sun is clearly making MySQL an important part of its overall strategy (in these days, one does not toss $1 billion toward unimportant objectives) and can be expected to continue - or accelerate - development of the system. Sun's free software orientation is strong enough that the chances of parts or all of MySQL going proprietary seem small. Indeed, nothing in Sun's releases says anything about MySQL's commercial licensing business; the emphasis appears to be strongly on support and services. So MySQL might just become even more open than it is now. Sun appears to be positioning itself to compete strongly with Oracle. Both companies are working hard to be able to offer the entire software stack to their customers. So Oracle's push into the Linux distribution business and Sun's database venture are both aimed at having the same story for their sales staff to tell: we, in some way, own and control all of the software you are looking to run. No problems with incompatibilities, finger-pointing, etc. As an added bonus, Sun will happily sell you the hardware you need too. Do expect an increase in efforts aimed at moving MySQL users away from the (Oracle-owned) InnoDB engine, though. For Sun to sell that story, though, it will to have continue to push Solaris hard as an alternative to Linux. Either that, or the company will eventually find itself shopping for a Linux distributor of its own. Either way, it seems likely that competitive pressures for operating systems (and higher layers) sales and support are set to increase, especially in the high-performance web server area. Red Hat, whose PostgreSQL-based database offering appears to have fallen below the radar, may find itself scrambling for a response. Sun makes a big point of being able to sell the entire package, and there is some truth to that. Processors, storage, systems software, database software, programming languages, office suites, and more can all be had from one company. What remains to be seen is whether this is really what customers want. There is a lot of value in being able to integrate components from multiple sources and not being dependent on a single vendor. Your editor, who managed a transition from being an all-DEC shop to an all-Sun shop some twenty years ago, is not convinced that those days are worth going back to.
Ten-year timeline, part 2: the bubble daysLast week, we began a multi-part series looking at the soon-to-be ten years of LWN. At the end of that episode, we were coming to the realization that the training business was, perhaps, not going to perform quite as well as our spreadsheets had suggested it might. It turns out that spreadsheets created with free software can be just as deceptive as those done with proprietary programs - who would have ever guessed? So we decided to look into whether it might be possible to make some sort of deal with some other company - preferably one with some money - to keep the show going.Just how one might go about looking for such a deal is not immediately obvious - especially if you're a bunch of technical people who have no clue about how corporate acquisitions are done. Somehow, hanging an "Acquire Us!" sign on the front page did not quite seem like the right way to go. After some thought, we decided that the best approach might be to just quietly slip the word to a few people that we might be open to offers, then sit back and see what happened. As it turned out, that was all we needed to do. Much of the following story has never been told - but all of the non-disclosure agreements have run out by now, so this seems like the right time. Meanwhile, things were happening at a furious pace in the Linux community.
The 2.3 feature freeze is instructive - 2.4.0 was not released until January, 2001 - 16 months after this "freeze" went into effect. Over the next months we'll see plenty of reasons for the delay in the 2.4.0 release; Linus was famously not a great release manager. But releases which failed to arrive were the norm back in those days. Free software was much like proprietary software in that regard. One has to look back to realize just how much better we have gotten at getting software releases out in a reasonable period of time. The IPO filings were beginning to pile up - much to your editor's chagrin. Actually reading those things is a painful chore, and we felt that we needed to examine all of them. The relative newcomers out there may be wondering who that LinuxOne company is. So were we, at the time. LinuxOne materialized out of thin air, slapped its name onto a copy of Red Hat Linux, and called itself a Linux company. They clearly hoped to get in on the general mania and make a bunch of money before people caught on - they nearly achieved it, too.
Lineo got spun out of Caldera for a couple of apparent reasons: (1) to isolate the DR-DOS lawsuit which was being pursued against Microsoft, and (2) to try to double the number of public offerings. The first objective was achieved, and the suit was ultimately successful. In the end, though, Lineo still failed to get off the ground.
Old-timers will remember the Linux Mall - that was the place, once upon a time, where we bought our Linux CDs (and stuffed penguins too). Yes, we actually bought Linux on CD and waited for it to show up via mail, though it may seem a little strange now. The Linux Mall, and its founder Mark Bolzern, were fixtures in the early days of Linux. As Linux grew and bandwidth increased, though, the Linux Mall was having a bit of a hard time of it. The name was famous, though, and the site got a lot of traffic, so companies interested in getting into the Linux hype were interested in it. It may be getting a bit ahead of the story, but this is as good a place as any to let it be known that one of the things that the Linux Mall wanted to do with its new-found wealth was to acquire a media outlet like LWN. It was part of the bigger plan of creating a full-featured e-commerce "mall" centered around Linux. We considered the offer long and hard, but, in the end, declined it. Just as well: the Linux Mall missed the IPO boat and got folded into EBIZ, which, in turn, eventually went bankrupt. Had we taken that path, there would be no LWN now.
LWN has only rarely operated booths at conferences, but we did have one at the Comdex Linux Business Expo. For the curious, here's a picture from the event featuring LWN editor Rebecca Sobol. That week's LWN edition was produced from that booth after the floor closed, under the watchful eye of security guards who didn't think we should be there. Your editor remembers it as one of the coldest experiences of his life. During the show, we subjected to constant, highly-amplified screaming obnoxiousness from the large booth being run by LinuxToday - the acquisition, it seemed, had put that site onto a rather less dignified path. The other thing LWN was doing at this event was talking with potential suitors. One of those was a company called Atipa, which was operating a large booth of its own. Atipa was a VA-style Linux box vendor with a grand plan for a Linux portal site which would, eventually, be the place people went for Linux information. They thought that LWN would make a good addition to that portal, and were pushing hard to make a deal. We met a few times with Atipa's CEO, a charismatic man who told a good story. The company, he said, was going to outdo even the coming VA Linux IPO, which was already clearly going to be big. Along the way he was going to pick up companies like Applix and open-source the ApplixWare office suite - something which would have been nice at the time. He stated flat out that he was soon to be a billionaire, and that we could share in that bonanza. It was quite the tale, but we tended to walk out of these meetings believing every word of it. With some distance, though, the glow always faded. We wondered why our visit to the company's headquarters revealed a building almost devoid of people. The magic "profit happens here" step in their plans seemed less inevitable when looked at later. In the end, we did not take this deal. Thereafter, we received (unverifiable) word that Atipa's investors started asking some harder questions and found that, perhaps, they, too, had allowed themselves to be charmed more than they should have. Atipa rather abruptly found a new CEO, the IPO never happened, and investors, presumably, lost their money. Also at the Linux Business Expo, we met with some representatives from O'Reilly. They were getting the O'Reilly network off the ground, and thought that LWN might make a good addition to it. They eventually offered us a deal (which looked more like a traditional angel investment than an acquisition) and a network affiliation which would have given us a portion of the revenue from the ads they sold. Your editor, who has a lot of respect for the people at O'Reilly, has always had a bit of regret at turning down this offer. It was an opportunity to get business advice from some very smart people. But it would almost certainly have been fatal to LWN once the advertising market fell apart. Meanwhile, the acquisition of Cygnus by Red Hat led to a fair amount of online worrying about whether Red Hat was set to take over Linux by virtue of employing a number of GCC developers. Such fears look a little silly now, but they seemed real then.
The VA IPO was not just the peak of the Linux bubble - it could well be the peak of the dotcom bubble as a whole. It was not possible to watch that stock rise to well over $300 a share on the first day and not be overwhelmed by a sense of unreality. Still, it seemed like no more than what Linux deserved, and people somehow expected it to continue.
Once upon a time, Caldera Systems was supposed to be among the biggest winners in the distribution sector - they had the business connections and the distribution channels. "Linux for business" got the company far enough to do an IPO, but not much beyond that. This is, of course, the company which eventually became the SCO Group. Caldera was well overshadowed by LinuxCare, though. The distribution business always looked like a hard one to maintain over the long term - that is why Red Hat was trying to be a web portal company. Services were going to be the real gold mine, and LinuxCare was going to be at the top of the Linux support industry. The company got money from left and right (a funding round produced offers of ten times the target amount) and hired a long list of well-known Linux hackers. Need we say that LWN's editors paid a visit to LinuxCare during this time? It was a hard time for LinuxCare to discuss acquisitions, since the IPO process was already underway, but discuss they did. So we went to the famous San Francisco headquarters. Your editor's memories from that day are strong. LinuxCare was filled with hundreds of people who all believed they were on the way toward an IPO that would exceed even VA Linux; suffice to say they were happy about the prospect. Meanwhile, though, a couple hundred of them were all working in a single not-very-large room called "the barn"; it resembled, more than anything else, a school lunchroom filled with long tables. Everybody worked on a laptop because there was no room in their tiny piece of table space for anything else. They all complained about having colds. It looked awful. LinuxCare's negotiator was an ex-fighter jet pilot who retained the "top gun" attitude. When valuations were discussed, we were told that offering LinuxCare's pre-IPO shares at $50-60 each was being generous to us. Issues like editorial control were not really even on the table. In the end, we turned this deal down, but with a feeling like we were throwing a winning lottery ticket in the trash. Of course, subsequent events showed that we need not have worried about this particular missed opportunity.
The Andover.Net acquisition was announced at LinuxWorld in New York - LWN was there, of course. The initial deal included a massive pile of cash to be handed to Andover.Net's shareholders, but people questioned that handout to the extent that it eventually went away. Andover.Net's owners had to content themselves mostly with VA Linux shares, which, already, were worth considerably less than they had been on IPO day. In the end, Andover.Net turned out to be a good buy for VA Linux, once it became clear that the Linux-installed computer business was harder than it had looked. We were approached by a VA executive at LinuxWorld to see if we were interested in maybe being acquired sometime. By then, though, we had so many offers that we couldn't really give them all serious consideration. So we did not pursue that opportunity. But, at this event, we did talk with some representatives from ZDNet, who were also looking for a Linux site to buy. The offer they made was, by far, the most generous of any. By some reckoning, we should have taken it. Certainly it would have come out better than most of the other options we had. But ZDNet would have exercised more editorial control than we would have liked, and, being already a public company, it didn't offer that IPO "pop" that we somehow thought was our due. So we ended up not taking that path.
To your editor, Eazel never made sense from the beginning. There was, truly, no revenue model. Indeed, it seemed like a scam designed to draw venture money for the purpose of writing Nautilus. To that extent it succeeded, but the investors cannot have been happy in the end.
This was the point where LWN announced that it had been acquired by a company called Tucows. We had, in fact, been talking with them for some months, and had made the decision in February. It took some time, though, for the lawyers to hammer out the final agreement. In the end, we were probably exceedingly lucky: market conditions were going downhill in a hurry by this point and, had the negotiations stretched out much longer, Tucows might have started looking for reasons to back out of the deal. Or maybe not. We went with Tucows for a number of reasons, but at the top of the list was that they were clearly smart and decent people who, while arguably being carried away by the bubble like the rest of us, clearly had a functioning business underneath it all. Their acquisition of LWN never yielded the benefits they were looking for, but the people at Tucows always treated us well and we still count them as friends. Perhaps we were smart, or perhaps we were just very lucky, but, in retrospect, we came out of a complex, high-stakes process having made what was probably the best possible decision. The Tucows acquisition made it possible for LWN editors Rebecca Sobol and Forrest Cook to join as regular staff members. It also positioned us within a safe harbor for the dotcom crash, which was already in progress. But the story of those years will be the subject of next week's installment.
Page editor: Jonathan Corbet |
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