Re: [OpenSTA-devel] Open Source Load Testing

[Daniel S. <da...@Op...>]

I had to smile when I read the first line of the press release:
> RadView Launches World's First Commercial-Grade Open Source
> Internet Performance Testing Product into $1 Billion Market

First? ... really? :)

Reading more we have:
> Companies that require commercial support, additional productivity
> features and compatibility with third-party protocols have the
> option of purchasing WebLOAD Professional directly from RadView. 

So, their intentions are "exactly" the same as Cyrano's were back in
2000 ;)  Here's where you can find out what those "additional
productivity features" are:
  http://www.radview.com/product/Editions-Comparison.aspx
The biggy is that you need to go to the commercial version if you
want to do distributed load generation.

When we took a tool that was about to be released commercially and
decided to open source it, the big issue was the commercial
libraries that were used and had to be ripped out - this effectively
meant taking a number of steps backwards and destabilizing a fairly
stable product base.  I wonder if RadView had similar hurdles?

Corey Goldberg wrote:
> There doesn't seem to be a huge number of developers interested in
> perf/load tools as has been seen in other Open Source tool
> communities (OpenSTA, JMeter, Grinder, etc).

This is my #1 theory of what is stopping OpenSTA becoming more
successful, getting better, and progressing as a project.  There
simply aren't developers out there who have to regularly do
performance testing (and therefore are driven to get involved).
The people regularly doing performance testing either don't have
the time to get involved in development or don't have a skillset
that allows them to do it.  WebLoad will have the advantage here in
the fact that RadView will be sponsoring developers (presumably
their developers) to work on the open source tool - just like
Cyrano did with OpenSTA until it all fell to pieces ...

> possibly since this is starting from such a mature code base it
> could be different.. but who knows.  

Much of OpenSTAs code was very very mature commercial code before
it was "released" as OpenSTA - some would say this was less than
helpful ;)

The cynic in me suspects that RadView are doing this because they
realise they are losing too many sales due to the availibility of
tools like OpenSTA.  Better to at least get there potential customers
on the right track ...

As to whether this can help or hinder the future of OpenSTA ...
I personally can't see it helping, it will dilute an already
weak potential developer pool - maybe some code and ideas could be
shared but I don't think we're lacking any code, ideas, or available
libraries (open source ones) as it stands, just the developer time
(or funding) to improve OpenSTA is what is really lacking. :shrug:

I'll be following WebLoad to see what happens.
Cheers
/dan
-- 
Daniel Sutcliffe <Da...@Op...>
  OpenSTA part-time caretaker - http://OpenSTA.org/