Oracle refuses to accept pro-Google “fair use” verdict in API battle

I wasn't very impressed.

Specially regarding the programming language for storage procedures, GUI tooling and lack of support for distributed transactions across cluster nodes.

The 10M+ pulls (and 3.8k stars) on Docker Hub suggests that MySQL is still getting a ton of use.

Um. No.

Unless they're doing something quite eccentric with it, developers will target the standard MySQL api, and the application will then work with any of the MySQL/compatible database servers:

- Oracle MySQL Community Edition

- Oracle Standard/Enterprise Edition (i.e. paid versions)

- Percona Server for MySQL

- Percona XtraDB Cluster

- MariaDB

I tend to use/recommend Percona Server/Cluster (for dev/prod respectively) but as long as the MySQL-version is compatible (i.e. the fork has the SQL/engine features your application needs) it's likely that other factors (e.g. PXC has Galera replication built in, is completely open source, and has commercial support available if you want it) will be more of an influence to the decision on which to use.

- Shared-something database clustering - true scale-out database clustering without writing sharding logic into your application, worrying about hot spots, or sacrificing significant performance due to overhead

- query offload to storage for bulk reads

- Flashback - someone wrote a bad update that might have messed with some data? You can tell the database to set your view of the database back to before that update to verify, and then decide if you want to move the whole database back, or just extract the records that were changed by that query

- fine-grained permissioning - have a table with credit card numbers in it? Give everyone access to it, but the credit card numbers are all obfuscated

- replication - block-level? statement-level? real-time? real-time with delay? Whatever you want. In fact, you can say "Hey, replicate this database to another datacenter, don't make it synchronous, but don't let it get more than 10 minutes out of sync"

- also, btw, when you need to failover that database, if you're feeling really brave, oracle can do the whole thing for you automatically, because their database client will notify a watcher that a majority of them have lost the necessary access to the database, but can talk to the standby, and the watcher handles the failover

I could go on and on. There's just so much intelligence in the Oracle database platform. Would I ever pay for it? No, it's better to build applications that don't need that level of sophistication. But if you're a big company who doesn't want to write software to be smart about data storage and recovery, Oracle does an amazing job at just guaranteeing your data won't go away.

On the business apps side of things, I think their software is mostly terrible, but I also think that they do focus on problems that OSS typically has not. If you are a manufacturer of satellites, there is probably not an OSS ERP solution that will work for you. If you need to store 300,000 personnel records, there's probably not an OSS HCM solution for you.

None of this means that they're not eventually doomed nor that they're not shitty, but it is very fair to say that their software deals with hard problems that OSS has not typically focused on.

More seriously, I'd turn the question around. BASE requires you to think hard about a lot of things that ACID gives you for free. The benefits are better performance and scalability. But if you're not certain you need that performance, why go through the extra trouble?

(That said, it also depends of the data model. If you're certain your data is key/value without any relationships and will always be key/value, a key/value store is likely appropriate. If you have something more complex, I don't see it.)

For instance, "C as in ACID" enables a CEO to say things like "the number of records in the personnel database should be N, the actual number of people I have hired." Or "number of cars produced should be less than or equal to the number of engines purchased." Or "at the end of the data analytics run, there should be a single summary object for each region, containing accurate statistics of sales figures." Or "every Bitcoin transfer that has been executed should be reflected in the corresponding users' wallets." In general, C as in ACID encompasses any kind of property that can be expressed over collections of records, where these properties are application-specific, user-defined, and checkable functions over total system state.

Use case for yesterday:

- create a user and it works, create a default access right for this user for one of our most important service;

- if this doesn't work, cancel everything.

Now I had the creation of user working, but the creation of the access right had some problems unrelated to the code.

Without a transaction, this bugs led to 100 of user accounts created without a default right access, and we had to clean it up after ward.

With a transaction, this bug would have not affected us in any way.

Transaction are safety net for data corruption. When you are using mongo, you have to manually do that logic again, and again and again.

In my experience, most mongo coders don't do it, and their DB is riddle with duplicates, incomplete inserts and such. Transactions give it to you, for free.

There are many other wonderful things about transaction:

- free manual rollback. Even when you don't have an error, reverting an operation is one line of code. Even if it affects many tables. Doing that with mongo or redis is terrible.

- free race condition handling. This one is huge because race condition are very, very hard to deal with. E.G: you want to limit the number of comment per day for untrusted users. You just add the comment, THEN check if you have more comments that acceptable, and if yes, roll it back. This way if your system if flooded with comments, you never have one slipping through.

- free ability to split your process in small units. You can create subtransaction inside transactions, and just say you want to rollback one but accept the other part. This give you huge granularity on your error handling.

Basically you get precise, clean, strong and easy reliability for close to nothing.

As soon has you have many untrusted users using your system, it becomes a fantastic asset.

Then they used that sound infrastructure to do evil with, as they had intended to do all along.

Those people that took the slogan seriously were used.

Maybe go reread about the case? It was basically breach of contract and thus quite different.

The basis of Sun's lawsuit was that Microsoft had a license to implement Java™ and part of that license was the requirement that their version would be compatible as defined by the compatibility test suite.

In their attempt to "kill cross-platform Java" they failed to be compatible and so Sun sued and won.

https://fsprojects.github.io/Paket/

But I agree, even Yarn/npm is better than the current state of dependencies for F#

- Paket keeps checking for new version on every build request with no way to switch that off to my knowledge

- There is no easy way to run the executable without dropping to the terminal (Ctrl+Shift+P -> fsharp doesn't show a "run current" or anything similar).

- The go-to-definition functionality doesn't work; highlighting and pressing f12 doesn't do anything (though hovering pointer on a function shows a tool-tip for what its worth).

The build works fine, syntax highlighting works, linter works well too. Not very sure if I should spend more effort to develop a full application (I want to build a REST api) because my target deployment platform is Linux and I'm not sure if F# on Linux is production ready or not (genuine concern and happy to get feedback on it).

First of all this is moving the goalposts significantly and is also an impossible standard. I would say that Apple and Microsoft are more ethical than Google but the question is of course along what axis?

  He failed to make half the world use his 
  company's products, among other things.

Anonymity is one thing but there is no other way of solving this problem without collecting user's data.

On the other hand, Oracle seems to have embraced it.

IBM would have been in a much better position to push OS/2 and supplant Microsoft's OS offerings if it would have had a monopoly on the PC's supporting it's PC interface.

https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/entry/oracle_solaris_moving...

Personally, I'd say this is similar to Microsoft's decisions around Windows 10.

Also, maybe Oracle's "lock your customers in and then extract as much profit as possible" history is guiding decisions? If there's a rearchitecture cost to migrate to cloud, then why would you do it with a company who already $&#@ed you over?

Either way "on-premises licenses" sounds weird so I'm likely to stick with "on-premise licenses" regardless. Sorry.

Ha, if that were true, it wouldn't even be that bad. In the niche I work for, what they sell is not even as powerful as their existing on-premises product.

Not that it matters: they simply won't sell or even develop new on-premises, so you either go to their crappy cloud services or you just migrate away. There are now entire companies based on "move your existing Oracle solutions to our product with the minimum fuss and enjoy real power, not a cut-down version of what you already had three years ago".

$800 million from their cloud offering in a single quarter is nonsense?

Mind you, Oracle was suing Google for using the header files themselves; since Google could have easily just typed up their own versions that did the same thing, it's almost more of a "plagiarism" case than a "copyright infringement" case: they shipped something that was exactly from Oracle, rather than just paraphrasing it. Oracle was probably in the right to sue over that.

But re: APIs—there's much more well-resolved case-law for this, coming from the gaming vertical: games have copyright, but game designs (including things like their network protocols) do not. It has both pros (Microsoft can't use the Minecraft IP to sue Terraria or Factorio; people can advance AI by writing bots that play Starcraft) and cons (the iOS and Android stores being saturated with mechanical clones of each successful game) but it's very certainly "the way things are."

Since APIs are a byproduct of software development, it is hard to see how it should be copyrightable under the second stance, but easy for the first.

Perhaps granting copyright, but setting precedence that basically any use is fair use, is a good compromise.

Sure, but they didn't copy said document. Comments, documentation etc. were not used. Implementation was not used.

The things that were the same were the method signatures and side effects. Is that copyright? I would argue its clearly not.

If someone copies a paragraph of my novel and claims fair use, I won't get very far on the amount-and-substantiality front by saying "but they basically took all of the part that they copied".

What's the difference between the signature of an API and the semantic meaning?

Of course he would, that's his job. How does Android "directly hurt" Oracle?

Even if eventually found to be in the right, a random guy with a GitHub repo is not going to have the resources/will to effectively defend himself.

To that end, do you have any suggestions on making things better? Do you contribute to any organizations that are trying?

Imagine, if you will, all that Sun IP in the hands of Google instead of Oracle. ZFS might have gotten a license friendlier to Linux, Solaris could have stayed open source, and I would put money on Google having spun Java out into a completely open foundation that wouldn't have done what Oracle has done with new EE versions.