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acangiano

He makes excellent points, but let's compare the two scenarios for a moment.

A) Helping out Twisted, they'd have gotten:

* Kudos from the Twisted community for their contributions to the project;

* Less code required.

B) Creating Tornado, they got:

* To avoid other people's code they didn't like in the first place.

* All the credit. They are the authors of the framework, not just contributors;

* A fresh start. A project designed to their needs;

* Ability to lead the project in the direction they like;

* No stigmas attached (e.g., "Twisted is too complex");

* Major kudos from a large community of developers interested in "real-time" web services and applications;

* Tons of free publicity to the project and FriendFeed/Facebook's open source initiatives.

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This is deeply silly. More fame and glory? So one day, Bret Taylor leaned back, rubbed his hands and whispered to himself 'Yesss, I shall write Tornado for fame and glory. Before I start I must briefly consider how I'll keep all the screaming teenage fans away and what to wear at the ticker-tape parade'. Or perhaps he just wanted to solve a problem he and his team had. And having done that, was nice enough to open source the solution.

I removed my "fame and glory" comment as it was misleading and didn't truly represent what I think. I'm not arguing that he/they premeditated it and did it for the glory. Their priority was getting FF done, undoubtedly. However, there are concrete advantages (and visibility) deriving from their choice.

To avoid other people's code they didn't like in the first place.

'Not Invented Here' syndrome. A bad reason.

A fresh start. A project designed to their needs

That's shortsighted. Maybe the short term goals had different accents, but in the long run, Twisted and Tornado have the exact same goals.

Major kudos from a large community of developers interested in "real-time" web services and applications

For rewriting something that already exists and not doing an significantly better job and arguably a worse job? Applying those resources to Twisted would also have yielded this result.

Tons of free publicity to the project and FriendFeed/Facebook's open source initiatives.

Also belongs under A. Large contributions to OSS would yield that same effect.

A fresh start. A project designed to their needs Ability to lead the project in the direction they like

You are assuming, without any reason, that they wouldn't have had that chance with Twisted. If that wouldn't work out, they could easily have forked Twisted, effectively taking over the project.

"'Not Invented Here' syndrome. A bad reason."

That seems a little strawman-ish, honestly. On the contrary, they embraced the technology and architecture of the app.

What's wrong with looking at something like this.. an important infrastructure piece... liking the idioms and architecture but having issues and thinking .... We have a benefit the Twisted guys didn't have... we have prior art... a map of this territory ?

I don't think anybody here has a strong conviction that FriendFeed was _right_. But you and others seem to have a strong convication that they were wrong, and all I think....and I think others here too.... all I think is that it is silly to attack them and be so certain they were wrong.

These are talented developers. Smart guys. With a little bit of business talent, too.. All of us have been in complex project cycles. Who are you or anybody to pick them off like they somehow caused somebody harm? Why the intensity? What gives?

When the invention in question is core to your product, sometimes it does make sense to do it yourself. See Joel Spolsky's essay "In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome": http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html

If you don't like someone's code, and the time cost of communication with them to change the code upstream is likely to stop you from meeting deadline (or they have a different final vision), creating something tailored to your own needs is the only solution.

> That's shortsighted. Maybe the short term goals had different accents, but in the long run, Twisted and Tornado have the exact same goals.

Actually they don't. Twisted is "an event-driven networking engine written in Python"

Tornado is "an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and tools that power FriendFeed"

Note that the scope of these things are completely different.

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