Whole-known-network
<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@whitequark" class="u-url mention">@<span>whitequark</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://chaos.social/@gsuberland" class="u-url mention">@<span>gsuberland</span></a></span> I figured upstreaming would either blow up in my face or get me a really good relationship with them.</p><p>My mental calculus was that they're a tiny company (like two dozen people or so), I'm a very happy customer showing off their product all the time on my birdsite (at the time), and paying them several thousand dollars a year in support contract fees on top of the... probably around $20K? initial outlay for the seat over the years of upgrades.</p><p>And I'm offering to nearly double the speed of their product and not even asking for anything in return.</p><p>While they would be legally within their rights to sue me for breach of contract, actually doing so would be monumentally stupid.</p><p>So I decided to take the risk and tell them about it.</p>
<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://ioc.exchange/@azonenberg" class="u-url mention">@<span>azonenberg</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://chaos.social/@gsuberland" class="u-url mention">@<span>gsuberland</span></a></span> hahahahaha amazing</p>
<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://chaos.social/@gsuberland" class="u-url mention">@<span>gsuberland</span></a></span> "... so check your email, I've sent you an authorization on company letterhead to keep it up as long as you maintain an active support contract."</p><p>A few months later when I was visiting friends and family on the east coast, I stopped by their offices, only about a 2-hour drive from RPI where I was visiting some former classmates who had settled in the area.</p><p>Had pizza with the VP of ops I had spoken to before, their VP of engineering, my support engineer, spent several hours discussing everything from proposing improvements to the material library (having detailed Dk/Df data for specific cores and prepregs vs just an average for a given material) to looking over source code and discussing more optimization potential.</p><p>Later on I got an NDA for partial source code access, cleaned up my patch more, and upstreamed it. It just released in v19 a few weeks ago.</p>
<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://chaos.social/@gsuberland" class="u-url mention">@<span>gsuberland</span></a></span> He said he looked me up on linkedin and as soon as he saw I went to RPI (where he did his undergrad a few years before me) he knew what was going on.</p><p>Then went on to say "Sooo we've talked to our lawyers, and they say we can't have people going around breaking our EULA willy-nilly. You do realize what you did was against the terms of our license, right?"</p>
<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://chaos.social/@gsuberland" class="u-url mention">@<span>gsuberland</span></a></span> After a couple days of crickets from my usually very responsive support engineer, I got an email asking me to join a call with a VP.</p><p>I figured this was gonna be really good or really bad.</p>
<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://ioc.exchange/@azonenberg" class="u-url mention">@<span>azonenberg</span></a></span> hahaha</p>
<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://chaos.social/@gsuberland" class="u-url mention">@<span>gsuberland</span></a></span> I literally got fed up with how slow the solver was, threw it in VTune and IDA, rewrote the inner loop of their matrix solver in assembly, patched it into the binary, verified I got the same results, and got a 40-70% speedup depending on workload.</p><p>Then I sent them a "pull request".</p>
<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://ioc.exchange/@azonenberg" class="u-url mention">@<span>azonenberg</span></a></span> lol how did that come about? worked there, or just patched it in?</p>
<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://chaos.social/@gsuberland" class="u-url mention">@<span>gsuberland</span></a></span> See the line about AVX in the log file?</p><p>Yeah. That was me.</p>
