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Comment by eduction | Hacker News Reader

you act like he violated some high moral commandment by badmouthing a customer. Wasn’t Reuters a sun customer you badmouthed? Wasn’t oracle a sun customer?

Wasn’t this guy you are badmouthing, asking you questions about Oxide tech, also arguably a customer, looked at more soberly?

I just don’t get the high horse. You’re going to defend llnl and Sandia and the nnsa no matter what, since they’re customers? Not badmouthing a customer is the eleventh commandment? It’s something folksy and nice scott McNealy said. It starts losing its charm when you bash people over the head with it in public humiliation rituals like you’re in the red guard or Khmer Rouge.

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Well, this wasn't badmouthing a customer -- it was showing contempt for customers, full stop. As for the accusations of hypocrisy: the example you picked (a deep cut!) was a Sun customer who insisted that we disable DTrace for their application so their customers (who were also Sun customers!) wouldn't be able to instrument the software that they had paid for. So ironically, I was in fact operating in defense of their customers. (I have generally told that story with the ISV anonymized -- but you clearly found an example where I named them.)

Broadcom is definitely not an Oxide customer -- and the (misguided) questions that were being asked were not about them becoming an Oxide customer.

Finally: isn't it a little hard to argue that I'm public humiliating someone who I am not naming?

We are back to where we started. When I said in my first message that you basically outed this person, you said it didn’t matter as the tone of the (hitherto private) exchange gave them away anyway. Now you move the goalposts back to the original position and claim you kept them anonymous.

> I have generally told that story with the ISV anonymized -- but you clearly found an example where I named them.

It was on one of the OaF podcasts about dtrace. I worked for Reuters at the time and contempt for their customers was definitely a thread that ran through some parts of that org, even as it made a bunch of us feel very icky.

(I still have a side quest to find / talk to some of the people involved on 'our' side of the fence about this!)

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