Sign in / up

back to article Life imitates satire: Facebook touts zlib killer just like Silicon Valley's Pied Piper

Facebook engineers today emitted a bunch of open-source compression and database tools during its @Scale conference. This software is used actively at hyper-scale within the sprawling social network. The California giant wants to share some of its source code with the world and hopefully get some useful patches in return. Here …

COMMENTS

Post your comment
House rules Send corrections
Add to 'My topics' unstar *
  1. Justin Pasher

    Apples and oranges

    It's a little unfair to compare a multi-core capable zstd to single-core zlib. Try comparing it to something like pigz and then see how much improvement there is. It looks like the compression ratio is pretty negligible, which the compression/decompression speed is a big difference (but that's where multi-core capabilities would be expected to shine).

    2 0 Reply
  2. Ken Hagan Gold badge

    zstandard sounds like two ideas in one package, where one of the ideas (a branchless and multi-core implementation of deflate) would have been useful but has been hijacked by a non-standard algorithm.

    2 0 Reply
  3. UKHobo

    sounds like it's time for Facebook to..

    PIVOT!

    0 0 Reply
  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    No one is going to use this

    Giving up your right to sue Facebook over a patent basically means if you use this software you'll have to immediately stop if Facebook infringes on one of your patents. So heavy use of this in a way that made it difficult to stop using it would basically give Facebook free reign to infringe on any of your patents!

    15 0 Reply
    1. gnasher729 Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: No one is going to use this

      Not quite. You can always remove the software, and then sue their ass off. Or sue their ass off, and risk being sued for copyright infringement.

      0 0 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: No one is going to use this

        I don't think they can sue you for copyright infringement. The copyright licence makes no mention of patents. There is a separate grant of patent rights that terminates if you sue Facebook. The PATENTS file was added yesterday. The version of zstd in Debian doesn't have it.

        However, I am not a lawyer and have not been particularly diligent in checking those facts. Follow the links and check for yourself if it's important to you.

        1 0 Reply
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: No one is going to use this

      I would not be so sure.

      All recent licenses have a mutual assured destruction patent clause. Even the IPR in Internet standards usually comes with one. The actual wording differs, but is usually lifted out of GPL3 or Apache. I always found that rather hilarious - when it suits Cisco it offers its IPR in what is literally a cut-n-paste GPL3 while at the same time having a "you touch GPL3 without VP permission, we fire you" clause in their contracts.

      So having these clauses has neither prevented people using software, nor prevented people suing each other.

      0 0 Reply
  5. gnasher729 Silver badge

    Seems you can countersue

    I read the license grant that you linked to, and while you lose the license if you sue Facebook for patent infringement, it looks to me as if they explicitely say that if Facebook sues you first, and you sue back for patent infringement unrelated to this code, then the license stays untouched.

    1 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Seems you can countersue

      I read it as saying that if you sue Facebook for ANY patent (not just ones related to zstd) that you lose the license. So who is going to risk embedding this technology in their products, which would mean losing the ability to sue Facebook for infringing on one of your patents if you aren't able to recall/update your products to remove zstd?

      2 0 Reply
      1. Adam 52 Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Seems you can countersue

        These days, a whole load of "professional" programmers will just cut-and-paste from Stackexchange, so if this takes off then it gives Facebook and easy way out (or an easy way to delay a case until it becomes too expensive for the other side to continue) of any patent troubles.

        1 0 Reply
  6. Dan 55 Silver badge

    Yes but what's the Weissman score?

    We need a comparison between the two.

    4 0 Reply
  7. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    "a state-of-the-art probability compressor"

    Douglas Adams would have been proud.

    12 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Go

      I thought Douglas Adams would probably be happier with a probability expander, or maybe an infinite probability expander!!

      0 0 Reply
      1. David 132 Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        "Infinite compression - we simply declare it Somebody Else's Problem"

        0 0 Reply
  8. Paul Shirley

    FSE already under patent attack

    Hold off on the compression until the patent situation is resolved, a bunch of (bogus) patents related to FSE are already causing trouble...

    0 0 Reply
  9. Belperite

    Very good

    When do they include features for inserting sponsored posts and adverts in files compressed using it?

    2 0 Reply
  10. Joe Gurman

    But is it middle out?

    And can Dinesh find a girl who will hat with him over it?

    1 0 Reply
    1. Valerion
      Reply Icon

      Re: But is it middle out?

      And will it handle 3D Video?

      0 0 Reply
  11. Benchops

    What they really need, is a box

    0 0 Reply
  12. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

    Why we have Zip

    The Zip compression format exists because the owner of the previous ARC format wouldn't share it. So someone made a better format instead.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_(file_format)#History

    And a similar story:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics

    The lesson from history is to say No Thank You to Facebook, even if this time it's their tool that is better. The conditions are still troublesome.

    Exception if you're a programmer who is getting into bed with Facebook anyway, such as inventing the new Farmville or something. Maybe involving imaginary friends unless Facebook points out that that's what they do already.

    2 0 Reply

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

Forgotten password ?

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like