Slightly relevant - about Oracle and its single-minded pursuit of money over all else:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m
It makes no sense to me to hear people working at for-profit companies complaining that other companies only exist to make money. It's inconsistent, at the very least.
Open source is great, volunteering is great, sharing and giving stuff away is great, etc., but businesses and corporations only exist to make money for the people who own them and work for them.
It's asserting that they only exist to make money. Or that that is in any way natural.
For a company to focus entirely on making money when they don't have enough money to operate is, let's say, understandable. But since companies are run by humans, and humans are quite adept at balancing different goals at the same time, it's not at all beyond reason to expect a company that is making money hand over fist to also focus on more than just that. It's not at all bad to judge them if they choose not to do that, nor to consider them worse than other companies that both make money hand over fist and choose to focus on more than just making more money.
It is in no way inconsistent to work at a for-profit company and complain that another company only exists to make money. Even if you are the chief executive of a for-profit company that both makes money and has additional goals beyond that, you aren't being inconsistent. But if you aren't the chief executive? If you are an employee whose day-to-day job actually isn't directly to make money, even if it is, somewhere above you, being guided by that goal? That doesn't even come close to inconsistent, IMO.
Most businesses are making money. That's not the same as being all about making money. Confusing the two is a really good way to discount the companies who manage perfectly well to make money without losing their souls to that goal[1].
[1] - I'm not really saying Oracle is one of these companies; I've never worked for them or interacted with them (though I've heard plenty of tales). I'm taking issue with the broader statement, because I think it's a fundamentally problematic lens to view the world through.
Good shareholders should look for management exhibiting high levels of integrity. Like Warren Buffet said :
"In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you. If you hire somebody without [integrity], you really want them to be dumb and lazy."
At least in the public's eye, Oracle has lost the perception of having any integrity.
Sadly not. One of the tragedies of capitalism is that it's much easier to run a profitable business by sharking everyone than by being a good citizen.
The optimal ethical position for profit is not the same as the optimal abstract ethical position.
This is why markets are a bad thing. If profit is your only measure of morality, you don't have a working mechanism to protect you - and everyone - from choices that produce short-term gains but long-term disasters.
... well, that's extreme. The ownership of the company should be working to avoid long term disaster. In most industries this happens all the time.
Actually, some of the main instances they don't (financial industry) is because of government support. If you're allowed to fail and get bailed out, then there's no reason to avoid disaster.
Actually, that should be circumstantial. The primary reason for a business to exist is because it provides value to its customers. If the value provided (and monetized) is more than the business' operating costs, it gets to continue to exist.
Shareholders are an artifact of unnatural growth, not a fundamental property of business.
maybe that's the world you would like to see, and maybe one day we will have it, but it's not the world we currently live in.
why is it so hard for some to accept that money is, overall, by far the strongest motivation force out there? Remove it, and >95% of population will not show up for their crappy work next day. it might not be the best motivator overall and has some drawbacks, but it works so far surprisingly well and we came to this situation by long evolution.
Because the evidence is circumstantial at best. Money, is of course important. But the strongest motivator? Not for many people.
What if you took away 100% of people's time off? No weekends, no evenings? Nobody is coming back to that either.
There are plenty of companies that exist to make money and have additional goals.
But, gigantic, publicly traded corporations don't fall into that category, and they exist exclusively to make money. If they tell you otherwise, their PR people are trying to fool you.
I'm also tempted to say a business whose number one goal isn't making money for its owner and employees should probably be registered as a non-profit or a charity or something else, and not a corporation, but I guess there's no reason they couldn't be a corporation.
Um, what does "corporation" mean to you? Can you identify anything that you would call a "non-profit" that is not also a corporation?
BTW, I agree with the idea that companies shouldn't only be about making money, but also care about other things, like the welfare of their employees. But companies like that are virtually nonexistent among America's tech giants.
To me, Oracle discounts and in some cases shows disdain for, being a good corporate citizen.
Edit: I'm talking about the Oracle database products, not Java, the stuff they acquired with Sun, etc.
Shall I go on?
Sun Microsystems, obviously
Android was released in September 2008, with the first phone in November. At that time Sun was in acquisition talks with IBM (and maybe HP), which fell through in 3/09. In 4/09 -- about six months after Android was released -- they announced their agreement with Oracle[1]. That's hardly enough time to even prepare such a lawsuit, let alone carry it through, and obviously Sun had much greater concerns at the time.
[1]: Because no such action had ever gone un-sued.
[2]: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_acquisition_by_Oracle#Hist...
In the meantime, though, it seems like Android is about to adopt Oracle's OpenJDK, under the open-source license granted by Oracle.
FWIW, Google does it too: https://www.scribd.com/doc/40513712/Google-v-US-Complaint
And I understand, the cases are not the same at all, but it highlights that Oracle is hardly the only tech company who will take to the courts to help themselves make money.
The surprising part is when customers of BigCo could be borderline labeled as fans - for me, at least.
This can get ugly - and expensive - real fast because in a large enough corporation it is stupidly easy to miss a detail and this will then be used to put in a claim of a few 100K worth of extra licenses that you need to buy to make the problem go away. It's the mafia, only now with bits and bytes and weird licensing terms that only they know how to interpret.
This is one of the main reasons why everything I do uses open source. The only time these companies still get some money through me is when I buy new hardware and MS levies their tax.
If all Oracle and Microsoft wanted to do was to 'sell some products and services' that would be one thing. But really what they want is to extract as much money from companies that use their products as they can get away with and if they have to use strong-arm tactics on sufficiently locked in customers to get that they'll be more than happy to do so.
The obvious defense - you don't have to do business with them at all - is one that is becoming a more and more viable choice. Twice now I have encountered a company that had transformed their internal applications to be web based using Apple products rather than Microsoft and licensing terms and costs were the main reasons given. I suspect this is going to be a trend of sorts and maybe this will be one backdoor that will allow 'linux on the desktop' to enter companies too (it would allow them to re-use the hardware they already have).
Of course MS has a whole 'TCO' dog-and-pony-show to prove that you'll lose money that way, based on all kinds of funky reasoning which sounds believable to pointy haired bosses.
It would be nice if 'the new Microsoft', Oracle etc. stopped waging war on their customers.