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Comment by augustz | Hacker News Reader

Still true based on what I see:

Restrictions:

The Licensee hereby agrees, without the prior written consent of Cognitect, which may be withheld or conditioned at Cognitect’s sole discretion, it will not:... j) publicly display or communicate the results of internal performance testing or other benchmarking or performance evaluation of the Software;

This is a similar style I believe to the Oracle licensing model which used to prevent similar stuff I think.

Building your stuff on a platform (proprietary) with this attitude towards licensing... I'd say run away... fast.

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Performance testing is a fickle art and publicizing misleading or non-generalizable results can be extremely damaging to a small business like this, even if the results are not representative nor applicable to most people.

Then Datomic should at least release their own, properly done and fair, benchmarks.

You say that like it's an easy thing to do.

For a relatively novel data model with potentially unusual performance characteristics, the chance of finding a properly done, fair, and generally understandable benchmark is virtually impossible.

I think the model from the user point of view has been seen many times over the years.

See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SPARQL_implementations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datalog#Systems_implementing_D...

Also the various RDF things from the days of semantic web enthusiasm.

For active competitors, maybe the various GraphQL things and

Then they should constructively respond to these misleading results not suppress publication with legal measures.

A damaged reputation is hard to repair, if even possible.

As a small business, the choice seems to be pretty straightforward--pay multiple salaries to do PR, damage control, reputation management, etc. (and compete with huge corporations with deep pockets)...or pay those same salaries to engineers to build a better product for your customers, and get your customers to promise not to create PR headaches for you.

Tech is a ruthless meritocracy, because people face challenges constantly that exceed their capabilities.

If something sucks, they will shout it to the skies. If it performs better or saves their ass on a key feature, they will shout it to the skies.

Let those shouts echo, and the equilibrium is how we decide on what's next.

Censorship is almost always a bad idea. Furthermore, you shouldn't chill the ability of people to talk about a platform if you eat your own dogfood and believe in it.

That seems like a very negative way to approach benchmarks. It could also be a PR boon--out of nowhere, the company could get positive attention for someone else doing work on the company's behalf. Assuming the technology is performance competitive. (But I don't know if it is or isn't--I've not seen any benchmarks).

A bad benchmark is something everyone can understand and use as criteria to disqualify a technology.

A license that prohibits a public benchmark is something only a few people care about.

Having seen hordes of developers on IRC, Reddit, and HN develop outdated gut reactions that they still invoke years after the fact has led me to believe that benchmark prohibition is easily worth it.

This is absurd. All databases, at some point in time, run into scaling and performance issues. Documentation by blogging and performance metrics are the only guiding light of sanity we have when these hard problems hit your app.

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