OVH CEO forbids publishing patches to keep his developers | Hacker News Reader

OVH CEO forbids publishing patches to keep his developers

twitter.com

74 pointsbyroot45 comments

Translation:

Last time we shared a patch, someone poached our developer, since then I've forbidden to publish patches.

To someone asking if it wasn't more of an internal issue:

  https://twitter.com/olesovhcom/status/357588819287093248
  I'm not interested in talking about that.

Then later he rant about "the true motivation of GitHub".

He must be a great boss to work for. Next step: forbid developers to tweet and to write blogs…

...and block access to Hacker News!

Oles is pretty much insane, having interacted with him (albeit indirectly) a couple times

Indeed, not exactly "open source" but "Github". cf : https://twitter.com/olesovhcom/status/301964179890401283

Yeah, it become clear tweet after tweet, that his obsession is something like: "GitHub is a tool to steal developers".

yes my preciousss they wantsss to steal our developersssss. :)

Sounds like that developer dodged a bullet. Anybody else working for him should take the hint.

This is not an accurate translation.

Here you go:

"The last time we shared a patch, they ended up poaching our guy. Since then, I've forbidden to publish diffs"

Patch and diff mean the same thing in this context, AMHA the original translation is a legitimate clarification. But guy does work better.

And when he is asked if the problem should be to keep the employees rather than hide them he added "the subject does not interest me enough to continue the discussion".

Whaaa OVH--;

https://twitter.com/arcanis/status/357587837446656000

For extra context, the company that poached a developer was Google:

https://twitter.com/olesovhcom/status/301964179890401283

Translation: "To get your best staff poached by Google, just let them publish patches on github.com".

I find it interesting/odd to blame GitHub. (he does in a later tweet, saying it let them see the "real GitHub")

Anyway, just some good ol' drama.

I think the whole 'poaching' term is hilarious. If you're afraid of 'poaching' you should just... you know... treat your employees with respect and make sure they are happy with their job. If they are they won't get poached. Simple.

Your perspective is just as naive as this guy's, just in the other direction.

If your employees are so happy and you are so confident that they won't leave, might as well publish their resumes and contact info on your website.

If you're afraid of 'poaching' you should just... you know... treat your employees with respect and make sure they are happy with their job

Even if you have happy employees and you are treating them with respect, you should be afraid of them being poached.

Bullshit. The two things don't even correlate. The fact that you even think so is astonishing.

Well I as employee currently am in the exact position. A few interviews I had in the last year (I work from home for 7 years now)

- Do you allow remote work?

- No

- Then you have to more than triple my current salary (it was double but one company accepted it)

- We will call you.

Treating your people properly and with respect could help a lot.

Why not? It's not as if it will make a difference - developers are already bombarded daily with many recruiters, some of whom actually represent good positions at good companies.

The market for programmers right now is very efficient. If someone isn't being paid well enough, or treated well enough, than they can get on the free market, this problem will resolve itself very shortly.

What this company is doing is basically security through obscurity, except made hopeless by the fact that I have no doubt all of his developers are being courted frequently via non-company channels.

It's very common for upper management to have profiles on corporate websites. I also know one small-medium company off the top of my head where most of the technical leadership are on their website, too (most sans direct contact information, but that's hardly difficult to come by if you're looking to hire someone).

I don't recall the name, but I recently encountered another company (I believe a startup that showed up on HN) that appeared to have most of its staff displayed on their site. I remember not so much because it was unusual in itself, but because it was extremely prominent. This company was obviously very proud of the people working for them, and quite pleased to let the world know.

>publish their resumes and contact info on your website

Quite a few companies do. The fact is: If you love your job, you won't leave. It's not a hard concept.

Oles is a very "nice" guy. I had a couple of servers at OVH and one time we've been DDoS'ed, we hade no idea why, but Oles wrote an email to us telling us that he's terminating our contract and banning us (after 2 years there). We had no clue about who that was that attacked us. I replied and asked him why he was doing that. He told me: "You should ask yourself. You've made some enemies, deal with it".

The main job of any CEO is to destroy the career aspirations of his most talented employees.

Right. Because by doing that he is sure to greatly increase the value of his organization.

As I understand Hacker News (... this is just my opinion ...) it is a forum for people who want to found companies based on technology and grow them big, and the people who want to work for them or with them on those ventures.

If your mindset (as a founder or as an employee) is that the CEO's job is to "destroy career aspirations" or otherwise exhibit PHB-like qualities, then that's not an attitude worth keeping. Why? Because if that's how you feel about CEO's and bosses in general then you'll end up being a bad CEO/boss or working for bad CEOs/bosses.

The job of a CEO is to build a great team, secure them the appropriate resources to do great things, and make sure they are motivated and focused on a shared set of goals.

In other words: the main job of a CEO is to advance the career aspirations of his most talented employees--because that will create value for the organization in the long-run.

I think you missed pdog's sarcasm.

You forgot being able to chain 84 buzzwords in a single sentence. Also known as half-Ballmer.

OVH Salaries are known to be super low (25k-40k€) ... this is may be the reason why they do not want to stay in the first place.

I think it's in the norm of French salaries (or I don't know good companies)

It's more or less the norm since most French companies are crap for tech workers, when you find a good one you can be paid a good salary.

You know that 100k is not normal in the rest of the world. 40k€ is a senior pay (average) in Europe

40k€ average pay in Europe for a senior ? You don't know what you're talking about...

A junior engineer begins - at least - at 35k€, a senior will ask at least 50-60k€ + extras.

Different countries different cost of living, even with the same currency.

Paris it's normal to earn 35K for a junior.

OVH is in the north of france, the renting of an apartement in this area is cheaper and salary also.

I tried to translate some of his tweets. could somebody French check out what is he talking about there?

http://translate.google.com/#fr/en/%C3%A0%20nouveau%2C%20tu%....

again, you're not there. I do not have complained of losing "that guy." I said that it allowed us to see the real github

atrement: your tweet should be "not sharing code on github" "refusal to have legal investigations related to digital." is better?

No one yet who does not read what I wrote. I complain about legal investigations discrete causes. reread ..

Free pub wikileaks? shit to deal with? 6-month delay in the USA? takes your blackjack pub, not wants.

week we will publish pro .. but here on our servers. not on github.

a guy who tries to leave, leave. I have not, it is to fuel the bigdata from github

A few corrections:

again, you're not there. I do not have complained of losing "that guy." I said that it allowed us to see the real github

atrement: your tweet should be "not sharing code on github" "refusal to have legal investigations related to TOR."

Yet another guy who does not read what I wrote. I complain about legal investigations TOR causes. reread ..

Free advertisement from wikileaks? shit to deal with? 6-month delay in the USA? keep your free advertisement, not wants.

next week we will publish them .. but here on our servers. not on github.

a guy who tries to leave, leave. What I forbidden, it is to fuel the bigdata from github

NB: It's forbidden to run a TOR node on OVH.

The TOR discussion is totally unrelated ;D

Well, because of this tweet he takes a lot of backfire from other stories. eg IIRC a few years ago it was forbidden to host an IRC server on OVH.

yeah, the translation lost TOR, tx for the corrections.

I wonder what is it about 'fuel the bigdata from github'

https://twitter.com/olesovhcom/status/357802100224294912

  A guy quit for his own reasons, no regrets.
  But we were able to see the true motivation of GitHub.

https://twitter.com/olesovhcom/status/357803844790530048

  Sites like GitHub allow to index, make the stats,
  the actions of the dev community

NB: the second one is not in proper French so I translated literally do not make much sense in any language...

What does this relate to?

If it is kernel updates or anything installed on a customer's machine and he refuses the customer access to the code, he is in breach of the GPL.

I think it is time I looked for an alternate location to host the things I have on OVH servers, I don't want to be offering financial support to this sort of thing if I can help it.

It relates to some patches for openstack.

And before anyone asks, OpenStack is Apache 2.0, which does not require you return source if you use/distribute modified binaries [AFAICS].

That is correct, v2 of that license has requirements for attribution within source and IIRC requires the same license to be maintained on that code (but not linked code) if it is redistributed, but has no actual requirement to distribute the code or derived works. Earlier versions of the license also required attribution visible to the users of derived, but that has been dropped.

v2 of the Apache license has been declared GPL v3 compatible which is why some people think there is an explicit code sharing clause when there isn't (IIRC if you mix GPLv3 and ALv2 code the result should be considered GPLv3).

That considered OVH aren't talking about not taking part as the licenses says they should which settles my mind on that count, though they have marked themmselves as a company I probably wouldn't want to work for.

He has another problem with OpenStack; he made this claim:

> @tcarrez on nous a fait clairement comprendre qu'il y a aucun espoir de reprendre nos patchs sur MOVE si c'est pas dans la roadmap/sponsor.

We were clearly made to understand that there was no hope to take our MOVE work if it wasn't in the roadmap/sponsor.

> on veut pas de nos patchs. nos besoins ne sont pas dans la roadmap. il faut payer pour la modifier.

Our patches aren't wanted. Our needs aren't on the roadmap. You have to pay to change it.

Thierry Carrez is the OpenStack release manager, sits on the technical committee, and posted some links on OpenStack's open governance (which don't mention a roadmap; the term may have been used loosely). As long as they keep talking[1], this may still end well for everyone.

[1] https://twitter.com/olesovhcom/status/357881953661353985

He also claimed that he didn't exactly object to paying, but I'll believe it when I see it.

> on pensait d'être le gold chez openstack, mais il y a des obligations qui nous refroidissent

We thought about becoming gold at OpenStack, but there are some obligations that cooled us off

I'm having flashbacks to the Python trademark mess. From what I know of OVH, the CEO is the owner, so there's no effective oversight. He'll drag the company down with him.

OHV? over-head valve?

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