Category: personal

TL;DR

• My responses to PRs and issues were sluggish, especially during the pandemic. I am sorry, and thank you for sticking with us.
• We aim for reasonable, not instant, turnaround.
• Expect a quick maintainer look at every PR within 3 business days.
• Full review typically follows once CI is green and AI review items are addressed or explained.
• We will not mass-close old issues. We are revisiting them with AI assist and closing for the right reasons.
• We are formalizing labels and dashboards to make navigation easier. Details will follow in a short, separate post.
• Suggestions are welcome.

I want to be very honest with you: my responses to pull requests and issues have been sluggish for quite some time. This affected the whole rsyslog project, because in the end it always comes back to the limited capacity of the maintainers – and most often, that means me.

We are working hard to change this. It will not mean ultra-fast turnaround times, but it will mean reasonable turnaround times. We have already made important steps, and AI will play a key role in improving this going forward. Still, this is work in progress, and I welcome your suggestions.

Continue reading “Sluggish Responses – And How We Plan to Do Better”

Seventeen years old, raw “armchair philosophy” — but surprisingly close to what I still believe today.

While reflecting on my current work, I remembered a text I had written in April 2008 during a discussion with a friend in biology. It’s an unfinished “armchair philosophy” piece — raw, dense, and hard to read — but it still reflects many of my core beliefs about IT systems. I’m publishing it unchanged as an archival entry, because the foundations it sketches are still relevant today.

Continue reading “An old and possibly important text rediscovered…”

Some (very) large companies really believe in their purchasing power – to mutual disbenefit. I wanted to share an anonymized case with you. One, that unfortunately is not totally uncommon.

The case: we got an inquiry from a large enterprise quite a while ago. They wanted support and help for a (as they said) large new product development that would probably sold as a solution. Rsyslog being a small but not unimportant part in it. We put quite some effort, including teleconferences, into answering their initial questions about rsyslog and our services. When it than came to the actual purchase the potential service volume began to shrink.

What first looked like a solid project to us ended in discussions about how to use the smallest possible support contract. Then, we were asked to provide quotes for an interesting amount of development hours (but without details about what to develop). In the end run, all of this has vanished now and we are at a very small support contract level. Still we are getting hinted that there will be “large follow-up orders”. For the pretty small volume actually talked about, we already had discussions and reviews of terms and conditions. Just to get you an idea: hiring a lawyer to evaluate the requirements would probably cost twice or more of the overall purchase volume.

Still, we are professionals. So we made changes to the agreements provided, avoiding of course everything that would put undue risk or cost on us. Not unexpectedly, this came back today for negotiating and the request for even more teleconferences. I need to mention that the setup effort by today was already larger than the intended purchase volume.

As such, this was our response (in italics):

many thanks for you mail. Unfortunately I need to tell you that Adiscon is no longer interested in pursuing this opportunity.

Please let me explain. It is our policy to not accept terms and conditions other than ours for purchase volumes as low as we are discussing here. It is by far more cost effective for us to skip these business opportunities than to try to engage. We have tried our best to accommodate your needs and provide help in getting this project going, but we are at a limit of what we can do for small purchases.

I know that you will now mention there may be large follow-up purchases. In our experience, this is actually very seldom the case and so we also have the general policy to be very conservative in evaluating opportunity potential. The overwhelming experience is that customers with concrete plans always do much larger initial commitments.

We need to abide to our practice-proven policies also to guard our customers. They trust us that we provide great and reliable service. We can do so only if we only enter into mutually-beneficial contracts.

I understand that you are limited by your policies in how far you can go. I understand that you may never do a larger commitment for an initial project as part of the its policy. We fully understand that position. But in the end result everything boils down to incompatible policies and thus inability to find common ground with reasonable effort. As such we recommend to watch out for a different service provider.

Some of you may think it would have been professional to keep on negotiating. But I don’t think so: We may miss an opportunity. Right. But our really overwhelming experience is that projects that are initiated like this one usually fail, and cause a lot of harm while doing so. My personal experience is that if a large corporation is actually interested in services, they either

• provide a larger initial investment (they know what they need)
• do a test-purchase for small value without the need for a full contract (they know it is inefficient to negotiate 100 hours for a purchase of a couple of hours)

I really, really learnt that if the corporation does not want do give you a chance to provide a real quote for development needs and insists on full contract for small purchase – they do not really know what they are after. Or they are just after getting an unfair benefit. Or are generally too hard to work with to make sense for a small service provider. None of this is the foundation for a great cooperation.

I think in such cases it is ethical to say “no”. It’s actually important to do so: our customers trust us in providing great value to them. And that is only possible if we do not engage in what looks like really bad deals.

I am starting a dedicated site in German language. It is available at www.rainer-gerhards.de. The site will differ considerately from this one here, it won’t just be a translation. It will focus primarily on local things and those that my fellow Germans will probably be more interested in. The focus of this site here will remain as is and will of course be updated.

Really no big news. But after roughly 10 years I managed to revamp my personal web site. This time, it’s destined to be slim and stable. The majority of content is on other sites, e. g. my syslog blog or github.

I still find it is useful to have kind of a personal home in virtual space. So here it is, and it is severely renovated. Let’s see when it gets the next brush-up…