Interesting analysis of WebLOAD open source strategy

As some of you may know, I've been involved with the OpenSTA project (although not much for a long time). I still have an emotional bond to the project and still read the developers mailing list... Following Radview's recent announcement, the developers mailing list has had some discussion on the topic. Despite Radview's claims of being the first, OpenSTA began life in much the same way. The only difference is that OpenSTA was released almost immediately as open source. OpenSTA was destined to be a commercial load testing tool. Cyrano (the company that was creating it) decided to release it as opensource with a plugin API so that they could sell commercial plugins that extended it's abilities. People would also be free to write open source plugins of course. OpenSTA was first released... errrm... well so long ago, I can't remember, around the year 2000?. Dan Sutcliffe posted this enlightening analysis of Radview's recent move. In his analysis, he highlights a key limitation in the open source version:

Here's where you can find out what those "additional productivity features" are: "http://www.radview.com/product/Editions-Comparison.aspx":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.

No distributed load generation? OK, well they need to make their money somehow... From the preliminary checks that Bernie Velivis has done, it doesn't seem that it will take much to get you close to needing a second load generator. I recommend that you check out Dan's full post. It's an enlightening read: (posted with permission minus one typo ;-)

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 their 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