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by Marc Logemann.
Original Post: FogCreek: the reality check
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I think every blog reader with focus on software development knows Joel Spolsky’s Blog. Especially posts like “how to recruit the best developers in the world” or “we have only top notch hardware” gathered some momentum in the past. Admitted, his blog is excellent and he does quite good marketing for his company. He can even write about his ASP to PHP compiler without being flamed for taking that approach to have a cross-platform product.
But lets do a reality check if the blog is aligned with FogCreeks excellence in providing nice technical solutions. I take “FogBugz” as example because i am customer and because its most likely their flagship product. If i would write blog entries about how great the company is and how even greater the developers are, i would expect a little bit more than what they offer at the moment. I asked them half a year ago about 64bit support on linux. For those who wonder why this is a problem at all on a LAMP environment, they use a shared object Apache module to provide some functionality. Every developer most likely knows that shared objects are machine dependent because they are essentially compiled C or C++ programs.
Lets see what i posted and what the reply was:
Linux 64bit support
Hi,any news on this sad issue? I mean more and more hosting companies are migrating to 64bit linux images (as its the case with my hoster) and its really ugly that FB doesnt support this because of an uncompatible shared object.At least a roadmap would be nice…Marc logemann (25. September 2006)
I wish I could give you a roadmap on this one. We understand there is increasing demand for 64bit Linux support. Unfortunately, we need to get a 64bit Linux machine in here to build on. Most of our Linux building right now is done through virtual machines, but getting a binary for a 64bit machine requires a 64bit machine.We’re looking into it, but I don’t have any timeline for you.Eric Nehrlich (17. Oktober 2006)
That was briefly what was written in the forum half a year ago. He is mentioning the problem to get a 64bit machine for testing FogBugz installation on such an environment. Is it safe to say that getting a 64bit machine is nowhere magic these days? Its an investement that is definitely too low to think about, we dont talk about an IBM zSeries here right?Furthermore its quite clear that the 99,9% of the FogBugz files are definitely working on 64bit machines because its nothing more than software that runs on LAMP. Its only their shared object, how hard can it be to initially do a compilation of that shared object on a 64 bit machine (i offered them a root account on my machine so that they can do it) and to supply this “alpha” version to interessted customers?Joe talks a lot about how FogCreek is doing and makes book recommendations like “Founders at Work”. Instead he should think about customer satisfaction, especially when you can get it so cheap.
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