Oracle Tells White House: Stop Hiring Silicon Valley People and Ditch Open Source
techdirt.com
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Oracle is a company whose survival is based almost entirely on its legacy software and deep ties to government. It's surprising that their stock price has been going up over the past 10 years.
The government would definitely function better if it started using open source software.
For a long time, big companies like Microsoft and Oracle would spread lies about open source; claiming that it is inherently inferior to commercial software - Yet if you look at the vast majority of tech unicorns these days, practically all of them use open source software at their core. The proof that open source is superior is not hard to find and yet it seems that companies like Oracle are still playing the same old game of trying to fudge the facts.
I'm worried that the next wave of propaganda will be around cloud services. Big companies like Amazon will get their hooks into government and start spreading lies about how cloud services are better than open source containerized/orchestrated solutions... Then after 20 years this will again be proven to have been a lie... And the cycle of deceptive lobbying will repeat.
[0] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/latest/UserGuide/what...
The legally-meaningful thing is that they are willing to sign a HIPAA BAA and accept responsibility, not certification.
A friend of mine works in IT in one of the largest banks in the world and he half-jokingly says that they only have two requirements for buying software: 1. it must be expensive 2. it shouldn't really work
The success of Oracle and others is built on "90% of software engineering is maintenance"
With a paradigm shift from on-premise, Desktop to mobile-cloud the old oligopoly is finally under attack.
But you're also heavily dependent on the roadmap of that provider, and they do get their margin. If it turns out you can staff, develop, operate, and maintain everything you need in-house sustainably then go do that.
I would also argue against open source being objectively superior unless your metric is "how accessible is the source code of the software". There are plenty of cases where closed or open source is the superior solution for a given need.
As for my opinion, I think the government needs to work with commodity providers like aws, azure, gcp, etc to get commodity infrastructure services that are certified and usable by any government agency and invest in strong ownership of the development of government-specific software.
Competing on level playing fields results in efficient markets, which asymptotically trends towards profits going to zero.
Investors don't want honest competition, they want exploitable privilege.
That is a huge assumption. In reality they are just positioning themselves, they are a business and government contracts are always extremely juicy and profitable. Oracle is just after the $$.
For me, I would feasibly agree that their comments are good positioning, however the vehement attack on Open Source, in particular, sounds more like the canary in the coal mine.
[0] http://www.techrepublic.com/article/oracles-rising-open-sour...
That article, cites another article, which cites another article, all saying they are opinions. The last is behind a paywall.
I mean, I agree with the argument that there's an impact, but that isn't a citation for it.
Based on...what? Certainly, the current administration is opposed to much of the non-defense, non-criminal-law-enforcement function of the federal government, and eager to cite budget concerns in that context, but I don't see much evidence that it is generally budget conscious beyond that.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-agencies-respond-...
Medicaid and anti-poverty:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/us/politics/trump-budget-...
Dept of labor: -19.8% Dept of the interior: -10.9% Dept of state and intl aid: -29.1% Dept of Justice: -3.8% Dept of Housing and Urban Devl: -13.2% Dept of Education: -13.5% Corps of Engineers: -16.3% EPA: -31.4% DOT: -12.7%
http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/23/politics/trump-budget-cuts-pro...
Also, by budget conscious, I mean the individual department's budgets, not the overall federal government's budget, which has been a wreck since Reagan (minus 2 years of Clinton).
You know, like that one from last week, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-25/trump-din...
Most post-industrial countries have concluded they need fairly strict controls on how power and money co-mingle.
But the teaching of how power and money works and corrupts is so abysmal in the US that many are miraculously continually surprised every time they see it.
If Hillary or Bernie or even Jill Stein had won, this would still be true. It's not about the person. Laws, enforcement and diligence is needed here. Democracy doesn't come with an autopilot.
PostgreSQL + employee is going to be cheaper than Oracle + employee in either case.
Of course after all the political theater this usually ends up with them adding what they want but getting blocked at cutting anything.
As an investor, I'd be concerned if they weren't doing this.
Read a few of them. None of them I've sampled are as aggressive, towards promoting themselves and denigrating other solutions, as Oracle's was.
That said, as an investor, I doubt someone would look this as negative as "we can no longer compete on any remotely level playing field and need the law to prop us up." Given my limited knowledge of Oracle and Larry Ellison's marketing tactic, this would just be in a long line of marketing speak trying to portray everything non-Oracle in bad light. If White House follows up on the marketing speak, they get a lot of government contracts and makes a lot of money. This is good for me as a shareholder.
What would concern me, again with limited knowledge of Ellison and Oracle, is if they just rolled over and played dead and pretended that OSS and SV were not a threat to their business. That as an investor would send the alarm bells ringing.
Contrast this will the duopoly of Facebook and Google. Robbing the world blind while also wanting credit to be the “good guys” and who totally “aren’t evil”.
FWIW Oracle employs 150,000 people at about a 150 B market cap. Facebook employs 17,000 people at a 450 B market cap.
Oracle is bad in many ways, but it’s slowness and inefficiency does not represent a threat to global democracy and stability like Google and Facebook do.
ALSO: Oracle has hired about 15,000 liberal arts graduates over the last 4 years as part of their “Class Of” program. Many of these people, and I worked with them, would not be in the middle-class today if it weren’t for Oracle considering their degrees/background. Program has had mixed success, but in a time when all companies either want a CS degree of 3-5 years work experience, I’ve never forgotten what an opportunity Oracle offered those people.
I'd love to read a post-mortem, or some technical explanation of what goes wrong on projects like these. Does the code just not work? Is everyone purposely just billing time and milking the contract, or does it start with competent analysts and developers trying to deliver working software? And if so, how does it get from there to here? Is this a typical gov contract thing that I've just not seen by working private sector?
If anyone has any resources on this sort of thing, I'd love to see them.
* Gmail, Google apps
* Dropbox
* Slack
* GitHub
* Zendesk, Intercom, Salesforce or whatever
All of them are closed source. There is a lot of truth in the fact that one can only 'rely' on closed source products for non-infrastructure software. Only developers use open source products as such. Happy to be given counter examples.
Oracle doesn't want to compete with Slack, it wants Slack (and others) to be on Oracle cloud/databases.
See the logos under "More companies who love Slack" on the page:
Developers make it useful to customers.
It makes no sense to then claim this as a reason why the US Government shouldn't use or rely on open source. The US Government is large enough that if it were a company it would have major in-house developer cost centers.
That’s like saying a (mechanical) car by definition is a product for mechanics. Firefox.
I don't get your car analogy. Mechanical engineers had to design the car, and mechanics are needed to service cars. People who are either of those are free to do it themselves. What's the point?
A business owner can't just fire up Linux and watch their bank account rise. There is a specialist job there to connect the business owner with the service that they need - unless, of course, the business owner happens to be a technical specialist.
If Oracle really wants to compete it would start by reducing the prices of its commodity products.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170328233007/https://www.forbe...
The only shorts for which I've ever been rich enough are in clothing stores - and my comforts extend beyond my clothing.