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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

The initial question was polite and reasonable, as was @mhils's response. What wasn't at all reasonable was the follow-up email from IBM (same person?) accusing him of a "thinly veiled extortion attempt". Maximilian is not obliged to provide a release schedule to someone who isn't paying him, and it wasn't at all unreasonable to suggest that if IBM really needs a timetable they could pay for it.

Heck, IBM could probably put together their own internal release of mitmproxy today if they cared that much.

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IBM is a cash poor company that just doesn't have the resources to pay for the software it sells.</snark>

Seriously though, I am kind of curious why IBM can't cough up cash. I'm guessing it takes a while to set up a vendor in their system. So they probably //could// pay for a support contract, but by the time they set it up they'll have blown through some internal deadline. Or maybe this request is being made from a lower level person and someone in their reporting chain has blocked the idea of setting up a support contract.

My memory of IBM is they're pretty insular, the particular person involved could just not understand what open source is. For instance, I was hired into a team in Boca Raton in the late 80s because my resume said I had experience with multiple Virtual Machines (VMs). I actually had experience with VMS, which was an operating system from Digital Equipment Corporation. When I asked my boss about that, her response was "What's VMS? What's Digital Equipment Corporation?" Which was a very strange thing to say as they had (more than) decimated IBM's S/36 and S/38 sales. Later on when I worked for the AIX division, I found many people who were clueful.

I think what I'm saying is:

1. IBM is a big company. It's probably not accurate to judge the whole organization from one person's interaction.

2. You can survive at IBM without understanding the outside world. (though I'm just extrapolating that assertion from what I saw in the 80s,90s and late 2000s.)

This is what it's like at GE. Stocked with people who have been there their while life. They extrapolate what they know (GE) to the outside world and hence fail to understand almost everything impacting them. The people who come there mid-career are a distinct, and marginalized, class who don't really fit in (mostly because they aren't dillusional).

I don't think the initial response was really reasonable. Expecting an open source project that your company is leeching off of to care about your customer's problems is pretty tone deaf. Asking about a release schedule: fine. Trying to pressure the project into releasing sooner by talking about regulations: dick move.

> Heck, IBM could probably put together their own internal release of mitmproxy today if they cared that much.

They could, and so could I, and most people here if they wanted to. That doesn't mean it's an unreasonable question to ask. If anything it's exactly the sort of question you would ask if you planned to make your own release, so you know if it's going to be worth the effort.

Agreed. See my first sentence:

> The initial question was polite and reasonable, as was @mhils's response.

I think you’re right; the conversation was civil until the requestor started accusing the maintainer of extortion.

Some people in this thread didn’t read that far, and now seem to be to twisting reality to defend their judgement.

There was a follow-up?

Not being a logged in Twitter user, the remainder of the thread is hidden to me.

Third picture in the same tweet:

> I'm assuming your response to my request for the next mitmproxy target date was a joke rather than an official project response or, worse, a thinly veiled extortion attempt. In reviewing the project's official documentation...

Thank you @lolinder!

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