Oracle & IBM failure leads to 8-day outage for American Eagle's ecommerce site

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6 pointsrobk3 comments

It's a very interesting event.

I have seen many IT managers that rely on proprietary software because they believe that "having a company behind it" helps solve problems. In reality, this shows not having full access to the internals of the software is much more dangerous than not having a company to sue when everything fails.

Yeah, but your really just shuffling costs around. You're either paying up front for a supported product or paying for staff that knows the unsupported product. In this particular case they got hosed by a shitty product, but that doesn't translate into a reality of not having access to the internals of software being (always)dangerous.

It's always dangerous. It's not always that something like this happens but, at least, with open-source and a competent support team (your support team should always be competent anyway) you can, at least, be aware of any risks you may be subject to.

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