While at CodeCon, wmf told me about Electric Cloud.

I've been reading through their technology description, and I have to say it sounds like they've just re-implemented a small portion of Vesta. Their dependency detection mechanism sounds almost exactly like Vesta's (and for that matter ClearCase's). The only thing which sounds new to me is that they fire off many build pieces in parallel without knowing whether they're doing them in the right order. If it turns out that they did some build steps in the wrong order, they re-execute those portions. This approach sounds dumb to me. Why not just do it in the right order every time (which is what Vesta does)?

Even worse is that they call their tool "plug compatible with make". So they're working really hard trying to take an old, known broken model and beat it into something scalable without redesigning it at all. Great idea.

Now how to I tell the USPTO that I have prior art for their "patent-pending automatic conflict detection and correction technology"...