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Comment by gboudrias | Hacker News Reader

Man, Oracle really does not give a shit about its reputation.

You wouldn't give a shit either if you could get nearly 10bln dollars for it.

Most people would sell their mother for that amount, and it's a bit hard to come to your investors and say well guys we could've gotten 10bln which would give you a heck of a dividend but we cared about our reputation too much so we passed on it.

Yeah, but how much have they expended on this legal adventure already? It has been going on for ~6 years now and there's no end in sight, no clear victory for anybody. Doesn't Oracle have better things to do?

Considerably less than 10bln, say even if they spent 100m on legal fees, that's still about 1% of what they would end up earning that's 1:100 return on investment no one would in their right mind would pass on that.

OK, but it is still a roll of the dice and there are costs beyond legal fees. 1:100 is _highly_ unlikely. Lawsuits are a crappy way to make money for a software company.

Creating a startup to service the CIA is a pretty crap move too; Oracle's launch was largely fueled by creating the database for the CIA in the late 1970s.

You mean like Google(Keyhole/Google Earth) and Facebook which both received funding from the CIA through their investment company In-Q-Tel?

https://www.iqt.org/

If you're going down that path, might as well reference that the research done by Page & Brin that created Google was funded in part by DARPA.

How about someone with a shred of dignity and decency

They bought Sun specifically to sue Google don't see them giving that up easily

"most" or "some"?

They are not going to get $10^9 for it, they are asking for that much because asking is free.

But then, when the rubble stops bouncing and the companies come to an agreement, that high watermark will help them negociate an actual price that is both reasonable but higher than what otherwise would have been.

Some background on the shift to Oracle from Bryan Cantrill (creator of DTrace at SUN Microsystems) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc

He wasn't thrilled about it.

Best quote from this video (there are a ton): "Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison".

Bryan is a smart funny guy, but he's an opinionated asshole that represents everything wrong with silicon valley engineer "rockstar" culture.

I didn't rewatch the video, but have seen it and met him dozens of times back in the OpenSolaris then Joyent days. He seems to simplify things to portray cause and effect that do not exist due to the complexity of real life.

I trust his ability to engineer a brilliant product, but I don't trust his ability to create a lovable product - it's all about the engineering goodness to him, and not solving the real world problems. Joyent's financials and yearly change of directions will probably back that up...

Oracle is Oracle - there are good things and bad things about a process driven company with 2000 products, but understand there is massive bias in Bryan's video - he didn't get his way and he wants people to know it.

Oh, I understand that, but I find the video entertaining, and I will say that I often have trouble finding viewpoints from places like Oracle, IBM, and SUN. Ever notice how there are tons of videos/tech talks from Microsoft, Google, and the Open Source crowd, but places like Oracle/IBM/SAP it feels very vaulted?

As a former product manager from one of the vaulted companies we had tons of video around business benefits and use cases, but very little on the implementation part. Look for the curated video channels for the big vendor players.

Big Corp doesn't care about this sort of thing, and Oracle's reputation in the community can hardly get any worse.

Big Corp doesn't care when it comes to potentially getting $10 billion dollars, that's for damn sure.

How many people here would just go "oh nah, it's OK... go ahead, we don't want any money. Do your thing Google!".

Oracle is a dumpster for talent.

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