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Comment by MrTonyD | Hacker News Reader

I was a Product Manager at Oracle when we decided to integrate Java. It seemed like an odd decision to those outside Oracle, but at the highest levels in Oracle we were circulating a Microsoft internal presentation about how Microsoft was going to use the dominance of Visual Studio to defeat competitors across the application space. So Oracle had no choice except to support Java as the alternative to Visual Studio. So Java and all Open Source support were really done only to the extent which self-interest demanded. We had floors of kernel engineers fixing Linux to make it work (it was barely functional back then.) And we coordinated with HP, IBM, Sun, Red Hat, and others so that they would encourage and pay their engineers to support Open Source. The idea that Open Source is somehow separate from business and market forces ignores its history. And the idea that Open Source is always positive is equally absurd. I've been working in open source for decades now, and the big winners are often the same rich companies which are extracting the wealth of our society - as they get software for free while the engineers provide work without getting the true "fruits of their labor". Does it make sense for multi-billionaires to get this software for free? Really, the Open Source idea is very messed up in an economy with distinct winners and losers.

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As a fellow ex-Oracle (although a coalface support minion coming through an acquisition), and with all due respect, I downvoted your comment because it looks like a bit of an incoherent rant with no apparent link to the post.

What Rhaman is saying is: the wide Java portfolio is dying because people are not making enough waves around the JCP to keep Oracle on the straight and narrow. Nothing to do with opensource, the JCP is a very different project from traditional opensource development.

The JRE has never been a "real" open source project, but rather a proprietary system that opened up enough to develop a caring community. The problem is that, at the moment, the interests of Java's owner are not aligned with the interests of such community, and not enough people seem to care.

This has nothing to do with Java being "open source" or not; in fact, a real OSS project would happily fork at this point (as it happened with OpenOffice), but the Java community cannot really do it. It seems pointless to debate the merits of OSS in a situation where there is no OSS; it's like saying "We supported Windows out of self-interest; but let's talk about the pros and cons of opensource...".

> The JRE has never been a "real" open source project

What does that mean? Compare Java to other open source projects of similar magnitude (and there aren't many; maybe only Linux, which is actually bigger). Linux is even more exclusive than OpenJDK, and just like Linux, companies with appropriate resources often make changes to the software even if those changes aren't contributed back (or contributed but not merged).

> and not enough people seem to care

People will care once many start to actually feel it. Oracle's interests are probably not aligned with mine, and may or may not be a cause for concern for me, but so far Oracle's actions wrt OpenJDK don't harm me at all. The investment in the platform feels to have only grown in the past few years.

> but the Java community cannot really do it

Why not? I think it most certainly can, but at this point there's not enough motivation to do it.

Look at what Oracle is doing to Google for the sin of refusing the JCP process. Do you think they wouldn't do the same against any Java fork with a realistic chance of supplanting their implementation? The details are not important, they'll throw the book at you and find something that sticks.

The current situation (OpenJDK open but not a realistic choice in most production deployments; Oracle JDK/JRE remaining as de-facto gold standard; a process that forces strict compatibility tests on any competitor) can be fine from a certain point of view, but in practice it means that Java is not a traditional community-led OSS program. Rather, it's a program where the OSS community helps a company improve their software. RedHat is not the only Linux build with significant marketshare, and I won't get sued if I write a different POSIX system.

> at this point there's not enough motivation to do it.

No there isn't, that's what Rhaman is saying. But what he's also implying is that the direction of travel has changed inside Oracle, and people outside do not seem to realize it. IMHO it's fairly obvious where things are going (you'll stop "installing Java", and only develop and deploy in the Oracle cloud or similar Oracle-sanctioned environments).

> OpenJDK open but not a realistic choice in most production deployments

This is news to me. I'm aware there are differences, but "not a realistic choice"? Can you elaborate?

I think openjdk is used in production. It's even going to be used in android in the future. You are incorrect that openjdk is not production ready today.

I didn't claim it wasn't production ready, the parent post did.

> It's even going to be used in android in the future.

Lol, like that was a choice Google made freely, rather than something they were forced to do.

OpenJDK might be OK in many circumstances (as I said, requirements vary) but you might want to avoid that particular case study.

I'm going to be blunt: you claimed "OpenJDK [is] not a realistic choice in MOST production environments" (emphasis mine).

I asked for evidence for this bold claim, since many production environments I know are using OpenJDK successfully, under heavy loads and without crashing. So... evidence of your claim?

Can you elaborate on why OpenJDK is not suitable for production deployments? I thought Oracle's JDK/JRE were based on OpenJDK's, with only minor changes.

Obviously it varies depending on requirements, but my experience is that openjdk tends to be a crashfest and/or end up being incompatible with a lot of stuff out there. The Oracle JDK/JRE invariably Just Works. It might be all a cargo-cult phenomenon (i.e. devs still testing only with Oracle builds out of tradition etc etc), it might be that Oracle have fabulous build tools not seen elsewhere, I honestly don't know; this is just what I see.

I used to experience random crashes with the OpenJDK several years ago, but haven't noticed that recently. Are you still seeing those issues or did you give up some time ago based on the aforementioned crashfest and haven't tried it in the last couple years?

One thing about OpenJDK is that the debug symbols are freely available so you can try and create a core dump and analyse why the JVM crashed. You can't do that with Oracle's or IBM's JDK AFAIK.

It's likely and believable that the different flavors seem to run at different speeds with different architectures. I also wouldn't be surprised to find the Oracle implementation to always be faster. I have a real hard time believing that OpenJDK has some huge flaws that prevent its production use as a blanket statement.

Hell, way back in the early 00s I remember having to use the JRocket JDK instead of the Sun one due to some weird corner case- so I am fully aware there are cases you can run in to that would necessitate one implementation over another. But calling OpenJDK unfit for production at this point in it's life is either FUD or straight lack of knowledge.

What are you running that OpenJDK seems to be so incompatible with? I've literally never had an issue with OpenJDK 7 or 8 and I've deployed applications that serve millions of requests per day in many flavors of OS.

On ARM the Oracle version is considerably faster than OpenJDK.

> for the sin of refusing the JCP process

That is one interpretation; I can think of others.

> Do you think they wouldn't do the same against any Java fork with a realistic chance of supplanting their implementation?

I think they wouldn't sue anyone complying with their very clear, very standard OpenJDK license. Google, apparently, thinks the same, and has now decided to comply with the OpenJDK license, too.

> OpenJDK open but not a realistic choice in most production deployments

What? AFAIK, Google, Twitter and plenty other companies run their servers on OpenJDK. It is absolutely realistic for most production environments. In fact, Oracle's JDK differs from OpenJDK only in a few monitoring features.

> Oracle JDK/JRE remaining as de-facto gold standard; a process that forces strict compatibility tests on any competitor

That's just not true. The Java standard is the standard, OpenJDK is the reference implementation and one of the most widely deployed implementations.

> RedHat is not the only Linux build with significant marketshare,

Neither is Oracle's JDK. OpenJDK, IBM's JDK and Azul's Zulu all have good market shares.

> and I won't get sued if I write a different POSIX system.

Probably not, but you wouldn't get sued (or, at least no one ever has been sued) if you comply with OpenJDK's open source license. You may well get sued if you don't comply with Linux's open source license, too (which happens to be the same as OpenJDK's).

> and people outside do not seem to realize it

Perhaps, but what's the difference? If they start doing a bad job with Java (so far they seem to be doing fine work), the community will fork OpenJDK.

I went through a similar experience with Clipper and Turbo Pascal/Delphi, both were widely used and we thought they would last forever.

When doubts started to appear 20 years ago, companies slowly moved their new projects to other stacks.

They are still around and have been updated to more recent versions, but it hardly matters to most devs.

Oracle being careless with mobile OSes support and bringing out stupid enterprise frameworks like Oracle Mobile Application Framework, has made people even go back to C++ for writing portable code for mobile OSes.

would someone mind explaining, or linking to an explanation, of what bits of Java are open source, and which aren't?

phrased another way, which bits are missing that prevent an individual from compiling and running Java programs on the JVM using open source software.

- Some parts of tha JavaFX pipeline are different

- ARM compilers are different

- The Swing font engine used to be different

- Tooling that many devs depend on, like the Mission Control

- The AOT native compilers and tooling for embedded Java

Not an exhaustive list.

OpenJDK is fully open source. Oracle JDK is built on OpenJDK but changes a few things here and there.

* Oracle JDK has a different font rasteriser, maybe some other bits like sound are different as well

* Oracle JDK has Flight Recorder support (that's a commercial feature)

* Oracle JDK supports both C1 and C2 JITs on ARM64, AFAIK an open source implementation of this is coming to OpenJDK 9, likely Oracle JDK will keep the existing implementation

* Oracle JDK has additional commercial features like resource management [2] and application class data sharing

OpenJDK vanilla is AFAIK not TCK-certified. However there are TCK-certified OpenJDK distributions [3].

TL;DR: OpenJDK is fully open source

[1] https://docs.oracle.com/javacomponents/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WZpmylHbFM&index=8&list=PLX...

[3] https://www.azul.com/products/zulu/

> The JRE has never been a "real" open source project

It is real open source. Its not a community-driven bazaar-model development effort, but that doesn't define "real open source" (its just something enabled by, but not required for, open source.)

> The problem is that, at the moment, the interests of Java's owner are not aligned with the interests of such community, and not enough people seem to care.

There's two ways to not care:

1. I don't care if it goes away, since who uses that stuff anyway? 2. I don't want to invest anything to further the project, but I really like using it and it's crucial for my business!

At this point I think the latter is the problem.

> the Open Source idea is very messed up in an economy with distinct winners and losers.

Except Oracle getting rich on say, Linux, doesn't hurt me if I am running Ubuntu, Debian or Gentoo. In fact, if their patches are any good, due to the GPL, it helps me.

Now, if I develop open source software, I might or might not be able to extract as much of the value generated as if I was making it a proprietary product. On the other hand, the total reach and value of the project might be magnified just because other people (and also for-profit-corporations) can take it and extend it and use it. I might see less of that value myself but:

a) It might not be my primary goal to capture as much value as possible, just to get enough money out of it so that I can continue working on that project.

b) The "size of the pie" that the same project is worth as open-source, specially for developer tools, is much much larger than if I kept it proprietary. So, in some cases, I might be able to capture more absolute value that way, even if I am helping some huge megacorp get filthy rich too (which is what would happen if I got a 'normal' software job, anyways).

Making your software free to me is not quite an ethical imperative in most cases, but it is a personal decision that can make a lot of sense, even if the entity that will profit the most from your software in monetary terms might not be yourself. The flip side is that, all things being equal, a great open-source software is likely to have a higher impact (and bring you more fame), than a great proprietary program. Specially for infrastructure, libraries and the like vs user-facing software.

If Tim Berners-Lee had been paid for the world-wide web what his contribution ended up being worth to the world, he would be the world's first trillionaire. On the other hand, if he had insisted that he get paid for all uses of the web, the web might have never come be to (or might have lost to a much more "corporate" system, under the control of one or a few companies).

> Except Oracle getting rich on say, Linux, doesn't hurt me if I am running Ubuntu, Debian or Gentoo. In fact, if their patches are any good, due to the GPL, it helps me.

It does if they manage to get in a position where they "own" enough of what you're using so that they can force their choices on you.

Red Hat has been in such a position for a long time now, and their world domination agenda has been steadily hurting non-enterprise Linux users in a higher and higher proportion.

> Red Hat world domination agenda has been hurting non-enterprise Linux users

How come? I'm a non-enterprise Linux user and I don't recall ever being hurt by anything RedHat did?

Well, depends how you feel about systemd, maybe?

RH was playing nice for as long as they were the underdog fighting the established Unix vendors.

But since most of them folded and adopted Linux, and especially after Oracle upped and forked RHEL6 to make Oracle Linux, the actions from RHHQ has taken on a more controlling nature.

At Oracle we did an analysis of all the major Linux distributions worldwide. Red Hat was just a major player in the United States - among others. We decided that we needed someone to work with in order to help Linux compete with Microsoft - so that Microsoft wouldn't be able to control all the APIs and we could use our support of Linux as a "sharp stick" for negotiations between Larry and Bill. (Improving Linux more unless Bill stopped competing with products from Sun, HP, IBM, Oracle, etc.) So improvements to Linux and associated desktop applications were intentionally curtailed based on Bill's concessions.

So we worked with IBM, who was also feeling the pressure from Microsoft, and IBM effectively "took over" Red Hat by providing investments, providing executives, and assigning hundreds of engineers to work on Red Hat Linux. That is what propelled Red Hat to become dominant. Since some of the changes to the kernel were just for servers - running things like Oracle, and not useful to the typical Linux user, that became Enterprise Linux.

So what you are claiming is that Oracle, with IBM assistance, made RH into what it is today?

Yes. That is exactly true. When Oracle started working on Linux it was only useful for print servers - and I created a white paper for Larry analyzing its shortcomings (lots of functionality missing from the kernel.) So we, along with IBM, Sun, HP, and others, committed tens of millions in resources to making Linux an actual competitor to Windows. And we kept improving it until Bill made enough concessions, and then we stopped. But by that time Linux had been turned into a real OS, and over the next few years it became a "success story" for open source. But that misunderstands the reality of the hundreds of people we had assigned to make it work and to turn Red Hat into a real company. After that, it could be argued that we stayed involved in open source in order to keep it from succeeding too much as part of quietly negotiated side agreements.

Yes, Oracle benefited from Open Source, but it also invested into Open Source and others benefited, too. That's the real key: Most people get out more than they put in by using Open Source instead of supporting proprietary software from few proprietary vendors for programs many people need.

> I was a Product Manager at Oracle when we decided to integrate Java. It seemed like an odd decision to those outside Oracle, but at the highest levels in Oracle we were circulating a Microsoft internal presentation about how Microsoft was going to use the dominance of Visual Studio to defeat competitors across the application space. So Oracle had no choice except to support Java as the alternative to Visual Studio. So Java and all Open Source support were really done only to the extent which self-interest demanded. We had floors of kernel engineers fixing Linux to make it work (it was barely functional back then.) And we coordinated with HP, IBM, Sun, Red Hat, and others so that they would encourage and pay their engineers to support Open Source. The idea that Open Source is somehow separate from business and market forces ignores its history.

And the idea that Open Source is always positive is equally absurd. I've been working in open source for decades now, and the big winners are often the same rich companies which are extracting the wealth of our society - as they get software for free while the engineers provide work without getting the true "fruits of their labor". Does it make sense for multi-billionaires to get this software for free? Really, the Open Source idea is very messed up in an economy with distinct winners and losers.

If you only use permissive licenses, free software can result in large corporate monopolies. Copyleft licenses help counter this. Linux, GNU, VLC, FFmpeg, etc are all good examples of this.

In the same paragraph you indicate that Oracle and other companies paid for people to work on open source projects, then bemoan that companies get the work for free. The signal is a little mixed, care to clarify your stance on this?

Some engineers got paid by oracle to work on open source software. But there are still contributions from others who weren't paid by oracle, and yet oracle is extracting a lot of profit from said software (more than what they paid, because of the 'free' contributions from the unpaid engineers).

And everybody is wealthier as a consequence.

Oracle's clients pay less for a solution than they would otherwise, Oracle can compete on this area, some engineers get paid by Oracle to improve a commons, and everybody else gets a more functional system for free.

Ok, maybe somebody worked there against their best interest, but that somebody wasn't coordinated by any big corporation, and should look onto fixing himself only. The ecosystem as a whole is healthy.

>And everybody is wealthier as a consequence.

Well, except for those using Java.

Because Oracle screwed it up.

> Because Oracle screwed it up.

I am quite involved in the Java community and I don't see it. How did Oracle screw it up?

Support for mobile OSes.

You could have had JIT/AOT for Windows Phone and AOT compiler for iOS, but they never cared.

Now C++ and C# reign as the languages to go for portable mobile native apps.

This may well have been a mistake, but it is being addressed now, though probably not aggressively enough. Also, depending on how Google integrates OpenJDK into Android, we may soon have Java (real Java, that is) on the world's leading mobile platform.

So far Google has been integrating OpenJDK 7, still curious to see if they say anything at Google IO.

How is it being addressed?

You mean the communication to leave to the community the porting of OpenJDK to mobile platforms? Or having the RoboVM guys at JavaONE, but giving them zero support other than publicity?

I am not confident that Google will move away from their fork, most likely they will adopt something else, specially with ChromeOS and Android merging.

> How is it being addressed?

http://openjdk.java.net/projects/mobile/

Well, how involved are you? Did you see much good work this last 5-6 years from the part of Oracle? Could there be anything more they could do to downplay Java and alienate the community?

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2987529/java/insider-oracle...

https://jaxenter.com/oracle-and-javas-planned-obsolescence-1...

http://fortune.com/2015/09/07/oracle-cuts-java-execs/

http://www.zdnet.com/article/a-close-look-at-how-oracle-inst...

http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/09/oracle-purges-java-evangel...

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2469593/open-source-too...

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/11/apache...

https://dzone.com/articles/oracle-announces-jigsaw-delays-pu...

https://jaxenter.com/even-if-oracle-is-losing-interest-in-ja...

http://alvinalexander.com/java/doug-lea-leaving-java-communi...

I am very involved, and I've seen plenty of good work, from Java 8, through the upcoming Valhalla and Panama, and to the amazing work on Graal, which is probably the biggest breakthrough in compiler technology in the past decade. Doug Lea is still working as tirelessly as ever on java.util.concurrent, and while letting the evangelists go was bad PR, it really changed little wrt to technology investment. There have been some missteps and setbacks, but while making some noise, they have been few. Don't forget that Java is huge; probably the largest standardized language ecosystem ever, and not all of its many corners can always be covered well. And when an ecosystem is nearly ten million users strong, even one percent of disappointed users is larger than most other languages' entire ecosystem.

Some resources have been taking away from Valhalla and Panama, and Java 9 has been delayed.

But that is NOT what TFA is about. That is about Java EE, which Oracle suddenly stopped dedicating resources to, but in a completely silent way.

Java SE may be next. We don't know that yet. There are some signs, but they don't matter at the moment. What matters at the moment is Java EE.

Plus, things like Desktop Java were ignored, and applets silently killed (even if it was their time, this was caused by years of neglect and security issues, and it screwed up people depending on them).

That is all hardly Oracle's fault.

Yeah, java. What a failure. Oracle killed it. Rip

Anybody said Java is a failure? Or that Oracle "killed" it? Even if they did, it would take a couple decades to get at the level Cobol today it.

What I said is Oracle screwed Java up.

By alienating the community, By not caring for security (except after all the huge negative press each time), By not innovating at a decent pace, By falling back on promises, By killing off the evangelists, By ignoring the mobile space, and in several other ways.

Not to mention the bloody Java "API" lawsuit...

> And everybody is wealthier as a consequence.

Except some got wealthier than others.

What's wrong with that?

No!

How would closed, proprietary software help?

No, the ecosystem is not healthy. Idealistic people are exploited, business as usual. It appears healthy for some Silicon Valley parasites who live in a bubble.

Let the others eat cake.

"Oracle's clients pay less for a solution..."

Not something you read every day!

If you list the Fortune 50 you will find that they all get huge benefit from Open Source. I've worked with Wall Street Banks, Monsanto, NSA, Big Ag, Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, and other companies which are extracting incredible profits from our society - often at a great cost to our society. Does it make sense to give free help to those who harm?

You've worked for all those bad companies, making money while providing them services, and you want to pin the blame on Open Source Software?

I'm still having a hard time understanding what you're saying with regards to Oracle. Oracle does indeed contribute a lot to OSS (mostly due to their acquisition of Sun), but it is also one of those "rich companies" and owned by multi-billionaires who extract most value from OSS. So what exactly are you saying?

I'm not really trying to say a lot with respect to Oracle. Except perhaps that their interest in Open Source is really not philosophical - it is strictly profit driven. That has real implications to those who adopt Open Source or view it from a philosophical perspective.

The prevailing view that corporations benefit society the most simply by focusing on profits for shareholders is almost entirely philosophical (we cannot prove this, although many economists would probably like to).

How would closed, proprietary software make the situation any better?

Free & Open Source software benefits everyone, which sadly includes bad actors and companies you (and maybe I!) don't like. But don't forget about the "everyone" part, which is the most important one!

Not always - I can't see FOSS like Hadoop or Spark benefitting anyone except large corporations and (maybe) universities.

Of course, not everything is useful in the same way. In any case, being useful to public universities alone is a big win.

But in my opinion, any software being FOSS is benefitial, even if you cannot deploy it yourself for your toy projects. If anything, you get to play with it or learn from its source. Maybe parts of it are useful to you for your own project. You cannot do this easily (if at all) with closed proprietary software.

Governments are large organizations that are supposed to represent and benefit everyone.

> Free & Open Source software benefits everyone

Good software benefits everyone.

Whether it's open source or not is irrelevant.

I disagree, good software doesn't necessarily benefit everyone, and when it does, there are different degrees of benefit. I cannot benefit from software I can't look at or use.

It is definitely not irrelevant whether software is FOSS or not. It's the whole point of the GNU project, the FSF and of the Free and Open Source software movements. I'm not going to write a manifesto about the reasons here, but surely you must be aware a lot has been written about this in the last few decades that cannot be dismissed with a flippant "it's irrelevant".

I think we get too caught up in binary thinking - why limit our choices to the current definition of Open Source. Isn't it possible to redefine open source using laws which could be implemented by the government? We could simply ask ourselves "What is good for our society and the world" and then work to define Open Source to fit that model. At any rate, I don't believe that we should be giving free software to companies which are helping to undermine the values of our society. On the other hand, I would like to see all software be free to everybody who is trying to help or trying to learn. We have to stop thinking in the current dichotomy.

I cannot comprehend a situation wherein open source is negative. Clearly it might not be the most lucrative path but we are all net consumers of technology.

What's the better alternative to billionaires getting their software for free?

It's unlikely that companies will contribute manpower to software if they then have to pay for it too. If you have a better strategy I'd like to hear it.

> What's the better alternative to billionaires getting their software for free?

Billionaires paying for their software?

It would be very hard, not to mention almost impossible politically, to make only billionaires pay for free software. You'd probably end up making everyone pay, with billionaires paying a bit more than most. Would that be good for OSS and for the users, I wonder?

So we need to implement user restrictions licensing codes software audits etc and ensure that there are no benefits to companies embracing free software ensuring their contributions dry up.

Not precisely a winning strategy

> ... We had floors of kernel engineers fixing Linux to make it work (it was barely functional back then.) ...

It reminds me a story about evolution.

It says that the wheat (or the corn) is a successful specie because it is grown by man at a wide scale.

Those Oracle engineers are like bees collecting pollen from the Linux flowers :-)

It's a two-way link.

> We had floors of kernel engineers fixing Linux to make it work (it was barely functional back then).

When was "back then". Are you talking about the 1990s or the 2000s?

You are not talking about RedHat Linux fork "Oracle Linux", right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Linux

What do you mean by 'integrating Java'? You are comparing Java to Visual Studio, which feels like comparing apples to orchards. AFAIK the vast majority of Java programmers use Eclipse, Netbeans or IntelliJ. Oracle has had JDeveloper since 1998. So what was Java being integrated into?

We started off with a series of strategy meetings prior to the release of JDeveloper. We hired a small team to integrate the JVM into Oracle with the idea that we might be able to replace PL/SQL with Java within the Database. We started by bundling JDeveloper from Borland, and it was awful, so we brought it in-house to continue developing it. From there, there was a continuously evolving strategy of how we could position Java to compete with Visual Studio. Microsoft had explicit plans (internally) to add more APIs to the APIs in order to capture developers, and "not fix" other existing APIs which they had mis-implemented in order to give the impression that our products were broken. And since every deployment began with a development project, it was very important that we kept a working set of APIs to our products in Java - so that Microsoft didn't take all our customers. We had seen Microsoft harm other competitors by using those same tricks (and claim that it wasn't intentional.)

I am reminded of Aaron Swartz wearing the "My Free Software Runs Your Company" shirt: http://assets.bwbx.io/images/icUNrxSKG6Pc/v1/-1x-1.jpg

Having watched -- from the inside, for a while -- another major corporation increasingly leach off of open source (taking much, giving little -- practically nothing), I'm just adding my voice to this perspective.

I'm not inside nor advanced enough to have a... really well-informed, well-grounded opinion, perhaps. But, I've seen enough of corporate behavior, across multiple substantial corporations over extended periods of time, to speak to that.

Even their "charitable giving." Even if is starts with or has components of genuine good will, by the time the suits, PR folks, and bureaucrats get done with it, it's pretty damned self-serving.

I was part of the team choosing charities. You might be surprised to hear that we evaluated all our giving for ROI (measured in columns of print or TV time and the equivalent cost of purchased time. We also considered audience - and overlap with purchase influencers.) In general, the decision was simple - are we making more money than we are spending on the charity.

I'm not surprised one little bit.

Me either but if the charities where good ones then it seems like a win-win to me.

It's not that different than celebrities endorsing a charity for "free", they give up some time which gets positive PR and the charity gets the benefit of raising against their events.

It's definitely amoral. But it's also highly inefficient - it means that if everyone takes Oracle's approach then only charities with high levels of positive publicity get charity dollars.

Those charities who cannot generate lots if positive press can't help fund important research. Ironically sometimes research that crosses into another field and benefits another bug if research bring done.

Agreed, not saying it's an ideal or even warranted approach but it's also not a net negative, companies don't really have to do anything at all if they don't want to, though in the UK we have this concept called "Corporate and Social Responsibility" but afaik that only applies when you want some kind of funding/grant that is partially public sector.

You could (and people do) run a company absolutely ruthlessly applying only the metric of "What is the absolutely best way to make money".

Capitalism isn't nice it's just relatively efficient compared to other systems.

Personally, I was asked to submit suggestions of charities to Larry. But it was made clear to me that there had to be some benefit - preferably large ROI, since small ROI wasn't worth Larry's time. And, while it was possible to occasionally ignore ROI, there had to be a good reason to do so (in particular, if I could find something that Larry personally cared about or had the potential to have large ROI soon or influence a particular CEO who might be a customer.) So when I made a list of charities I thought were worthwhile, I couldn't justify submitting any of them to Larry. So I never got more involved with our charitable giving. What could have been the opportunity of a lifetime simply left me more jaded about our Capitalist system.

Actually giving something back is really hard in the open source space. If you don't create your own open source project you will have a hard time to integrate into another open source project.

Not to defend oracle, but if you use software legally - subject to open source or whatever licenses - then the question of whether or not you are a leech isn't relevant to anything. You'd not base any decision on it; it just doesn't matter. Someone is providing something for free, and you're using it. As intended.

re: charitable giving. If they're giving, they're giving. Doesn't matter what the motive is. "huh, they're only funding a cure for cancer/starving kids/etc because it looks good". So fucking what? What are you doing to help those charities? Typing is easy, huh!

Isn't this "leaching off open source" part of the proposed business model behind open source though? If you think Oracle is making too much profit from open source, aren't you supposed to start your own company and undercut them?

I'm not defending Oracle's activities ethically, but it seems a bit naive to expect corporations to show anything less than the most despicable, profit-seeking behavior allowed by law.

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