And it's not going to stay that way through legal bludgeoning. Where's the technical innovation? Where's the work that's going to make working with an Oracle database package something less akin to being chased by a swarm of bees? Where's the developer tooling which doesn't make SQL Server Management Studio look like a paragon of user experience (which it very much isn't)?
Where's the documentation for PeopleSoft which actually makes any sense? (I suspect the product itself no longer makes any sense, which would explain much).
It really feels like Oracle once had amazing technology but fell into the trap of an unmaintainable nightmare and have fallen back on the legal route to try to retain their dominance.
Codd, at IBM, invented the relational database (though not SQL). And yet, Oracle got their rdb to market before IBM. They subsequently marketed it as a way to integrate heterogeneous systems - which IBM could not do (they had to champion their own machines). Amazing - stealing fire from the gods (as Microsoft later did...)
Unfortunately, while the community advantages of having a dominant interoperation mechanism are real - like having a common tongue - it rewarded the means of attaining dominance. A sales culture. A zero-sum game. It's not enough that I win, others must lose.
I've used a vast array of databases over the years, from Open Source to expensive vendor stuff. Oracle always seemed ridiculously overpriced for what you got. MS Sql Server is the most common enterprise RDBMS I've encountered and is by no means cheap (at enterprise level) but by goodness it's wonderful compared to Oracle.
