Also, Oracle just sucks in general. Larry Ellison is a notorious jerk and philanderer. Oracle's entire business is based on the success of one expensive database product from the 70s, which is mostly still in use due to decades-long vendor lock-in of stagnant enterprise giants like SAP, IBM, most banks and a good chunk of the DoD.
Notorious jerk is an understatement. He’s literally a garbage human being and a liar.
My last company was entangled in the Oracle web of vendor lock in. Before renewing our contracts, Oracle wanted literal access to our proprietary code - much of which is older code that mixes business logic and logic that works directly with Oracles products. Many of the algorithms we had implemented were 100% proprietary and secrets - not something we want just anyone to see, especially a competitor. On top of that, this company had IT contractors that had built all kinds of functionality using one off features only available in Oracle - shit that didn’t scale with new and upcoming use cases but also just a huge pain in the ass to migrate off of.
People think AWS or Azure risk vendor lock in. Oh boy you do not know what true evil actually is - Oracle literally prays on this happening. It’s the foundation of their business model. Not features, not innovation, nothing else - but solely ensuring your customers have no alternative but to use your products at whatever cost you want or drown in litigation.
Humans love to see the bad guy lose. Larry Ellison has built a business out of lock-in and lawsuits against his own customers. People hate to see that kind of antisocial behaviour rewarded.
No, them fighting on the side of what's good for the industry is what makes them the good guys in this case, not the fact that they're fighting Oracle. If the positions were switched, I would be biting my tongue and rooting for Oracle.
Yeah, let me know when PostgreSQL does distributed transactions across database clusters, or provides a proper development environment for stored procedures.
What about removing Oracle's devs contributions from Linux kernel?
yawn There are other databases systems doing that, no need to depend on Oracle. For example: http://erlang.org/faq/mnesia.html which is also associated with a programming language known for its quality distributed computing.
Removing contributions to the Linux kernel? I don't think so. The kernel is free software and people contribute to it knowing that it is free software, so they cannot hold any code hostage. Once you release as free software, you give up that control.
I’ve never heard of anyone who actually uses mnesia for real or would consider it prime-time. I’m no Oracle fanboy but comparing their DB to mnesia is like comparing an oil rig driller to a fisher price screwdriver.
> never heard of anyone who actually uses mnesia for real
I didn't till I had to become one of them this year. Mnesia is real, it's prime time, but not in place of something like Oracle.
> comparing an oil rig driller to a fisher price screwdriver.
Better analogy would be Comparing SQL Server to Redis. Mnesia is, at it's heart, a(n optionally) Transactional K-V lookup that can be run distributed. It's use case it works VERY well, but I wouldn't consider it a substitute for Relational storage.
Basically, as soon as something is released as free software, you must have the 4 freedoms: use, study, share, improve. This means, that it is not important, who contributed the code and what else they did, in the context of using that code in any of the 4 freedoms ways. It frees the code from the control of the creator in that sense and the creator cannot take it back. Anyone who releases as free software will give up such control.
Oracle once having provided something to free software (My guess: They only did it because the GPL forced them to.) does not mean, that we have to like Oracle. These two things are not connected.
I am not sure about the state of Mnesia, however, I wrote, that it is an example. If I had found a Wikipedia list of DDBMS, I would have posted that. However, I am sure knowledgeable people will be able to name a few more.
Linux would hardly gotten where it is without the contributions from everyone getting paychecks from IBM, Intel, Oracle, NVidia, AMD, Apple, Sony, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Huawei, Samsung among many others.
Which is kind of ironic, hate them, but then willing accepting whatever comes from them, 'cause hey it is free.
You could also say that Google wouldn't have gotten anywhere without Linux, as they really depended on lots of cheap hardware and software. Humans are connected, which is a great thing (that what makes us human).
There are many conflations in these statements of yours, but one of the more offensive is that corporations are responsible for an individual's open-source contributions because that individual draws a paycheck for something else. What's the corporate equivalent of a bootlicker? An NDA-licker?
What I don't get is how someone can hate companies like Oracle, wish that they would disapeer out of the face of the earth, and at the same time jump of joy when a couple of lines get added to the Linux kernel, by the corporation they want to nuke.
if they offer it under gpl, it's no poison chalice. why do i care who does the right thing? what's good is good.
i would be more worried when they propose that we all abandon this adequate gpl tool for this permissive licensed code they seriously didn't write, but here's ten fantastic contributions they made.
That's a good thing right? I mean, I'm not implying that Google is on the opposite side of this, but still, I'd wager most people on HN would love to be a Larry Ellison (riches aside), where you get start a product today, and still be relevant with that same product 40 years from now.
I honestly don't get the Oracle hate from HN people, even if I do understand it from the Slashdot folks.
I previously worked at Oracle for years in the dotcom era and I can tell you the company culture was horrid. It was completely sales driven, sales people would often lie to customers and promise the product had a feature which it either didn’t have or was not well supported and then have to fly in expensive consultants afterwards to fix the resulting shitshow.
I accompanied Sales Account managers with fellow female engineers to client meeting where they, and I’m not kidding, discussed which strip clubs they would go to after the meetings.
If Apple is a designer culture, and Google is an engineer culture, then I‘d say Oracle is driven by a hierarchy of sales culture.
Another perspective is that Oracle is one of just a few tech companies left that has a proper dedicated research lab that does long-term research without asking about profit. I worked on my research project there for six years and nobody once asked me how we were going to make money from it, let alone talked about sales. That’s pretty special these days.
Oracle even paid me a senior developer salary while I worked on my PhD. Hard to say that’s ‘completely sales driven!’
Yeah but saying it to me (a male) would still be tone deaf, right? There are no locker rooms even in locker rooms these days. All I'm saying is, it being in front of me is disgusting enough.
I'm not afraid or uncomfortable with expressions of sexuality but a boardroom is hardly an appropriate place for it. I don't understand the argument that just because something is a normal part of life it somehow becomes ok to talk about it anywhere. Taking a shit is a normal part of life, that doesn't make it ok to discuss your weekly bowl movements in the board room. In different social settings there are different levels of comfort between people. You can be ok with strip clubs, there are perfectly valid opinions for and against them, but I come to a board room to discuss business, not your sexuality.
If it was the topic of the board meeting, definitely not appropriate, but otherwise it's just the conversation was not meant for you. Can you imagine the abuse I'd catch if I complained about overhearing women talk about their periods? Or, to make it more fair, planning some kind of hypersexualized bachelorette party.
Please explain to me how it's worse? I find it offensive because it's discussion of sexuality and a sexually charged topic in a massively inappropriate setting. If I was a female, why should I feel worse? Just because the performers there are female?
Yes. It's like saying if your colleagues are using the N-word and making racist statements, would African Americans in the room feel worse than the white people? Yes they would.
No matter how "woke" or allied you think you are, there's no way the lived experience of a white person reacts the same way to people reinforcing systemic racism than that of those who have to live under that experience.
It would be really good to have a product which is relevant after 40 years WITHOUT adopting business model of an organized crime syndicate. In other words: Having a product which is relevant after 40 years.
I've worked at Oracle in an engineering (not management) position, and I've seen the (tail end) of the way they interact with acquisitions. I tend to be somewhat guarded about talking about it -- I don't see a benefit to me badmouthing a former employer. But, I'll be open and honest for this comment.
The analogy I use to describe Oracle is that they're this kind of massive lumbering beast that just lays around and occasionally swallows other companies alive and whole. Then those companies run around inside, burning existing customer good will for a while until Oracle finishes digesting them or generating whatever news-reports or vendor lock-in they wanted in the first place. Then Oracle goes out to find another company to eat.
I saw a slow movement with my particular department away from developing useful software towards, "just keep on releasing things, just keep on trying to figure out what looks good at trade shows, just keep the department moving forward like a zombie while it gets eaten away and resources get shifted to new acquisitions and lawyers and salespeople." The software wasn't even a secondary concern, it was just a very minor part of the company that happened on the side. Writing code was a side-effect of the business, our real business was sales and grand promises and multi-year contracts that everyone was going to regret.
As a developer that wants to build products that actually help businesses and users, it felt really, really bad -- and my impression interacting with other parts of the business and other departments felt the same. Like they were just kind of lumbering on, that they existed because a few companies were locked in or were still buying them, and a few more dollars could be extracted before they starved to death or until their staff was fully absorbed into new projects.
I won't go into any more specific detail than that; for better or worse I feel like I have some responsibility to be a little vague. But by the time I left I was convinced that any company Oracle bought or any project it maintained was doomed as soon as they touched it. It's one of the reasons I won't work with Java -- I just don't want to tie myself to a technology that's owned by a company like that.
The current case with Sun is to me perfectly in character with the company. Oracle bought Sun, killed everything that made it Sun, and now their lawyers are out trying to extract every last penny they can get out of its mostly rotted corpse, all under the guise of 'protecting their investment' or whatever.
I'm very cynical on Oracle now, and I wasn't even at the company very long. Since moving on I've been able to work on industry-scale software that's actually being designed for customers and that actually cares about helping them accomplish business goals. It's a massive breath of fresh air that I'm still grateful for to this day. It makes a huge difference to be able to get up in the morning and feel like there's an actual reason you're going to work beyond buying Ellison a new yacht.
It's one of the reasons I won't work with Java -- I just don't want to tie myself to a technology that's owned by a company like that.
Somewhat amusingly, Java becomes more dangerous to use if Oracle wins this case, because they would then be able to kill OpenJDK and any other implementations whenever they want.
Not everyone strives for a relevant product just because of vendor lock-in, I'd wager most of HN would rather make good, portable products that only stay relevant due to continued hard work and incremental feature upgrades.
I ... don't know about everyone else here, but personally I'd rather become a McAfee than an Ellison. At least John has this thing called sense of humor.
