Isn't the whole premise of capitalism that people motivated by money will build useful things for the world? How did Ellison conclude that shipping mediocrity is more profitable than shipping excellence?
Where I work uses Oracle. And every dev and sysad wants away from it. And the answer every time is "we can't support forking our DB backend cause were too tied to oracle and its bugs".
And the prices go up and up. And everyone on it is effectively trapped. Even their competitor, Salesforce, is on oracle and wants off... And they can't.
Perhaps one option is to remove government protection from trade secrets and intellectual property. Were it not for the threat of government interference, a competitor could easily arrange to get Oracle's source code leaked, and then the two of them would actually compete on quality of their support/service contracts.
That isn’t necessarily “government” but a byproduct of a particular system that has spiralled into the bowl of capitalism upon capitalism; the lobbyists negotiated those laws on behalf of capitalism. Chicken egg issue that isn’t going away given how up to the neck capitalism is wired into government.
In Europe, some protections against that are enforced by government.
There’s an article from the Pinterest devs when they migrated from node.js to MySQL. They were thinking the conversion would cost too much and take too long. They already spent a lot of time and money to create Pinterest on node as well. Plus MySQL isn’t hot and sexy. But they knew a lot of the problems they were running into would disappear if they converted.
I think it took like a week of planning and like a weekend to accomplish. And the devs got to sleep at night after that. I’m missing details, you can google the article. It’s on their dev blog. Also I bring it up because it’s the only db conversion I can think of that is documented.
Thinking you have to stick with something because of investing so much time/money even though it’s not working, is a super dangerous thing in the long term. It’s a human problem more than a systems problem.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSB_Bank_(United_Kingdom)#Mi...
A more recent one, for future reference:
https://www.theguardian.com/info/2018/nov/30/bye-bye-mongo-h...
;)
In this particular case, while I'm always against Imaginary Property, I suspect it's more the government contracts part [1].
[1] https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/larry-ellisons-oracle-starte...
Sigh. I guess that goes along with "government is evil in all sorts of ways".
Simply put, Oracle was the best product 20 years ago. Open Source DB projects were toys that would lose your data. So companies and orgs (and in our case, the govt) used what works.
We developed on that. That was what was available, and we used it and paid the licensing costs. Well, lockin is a thing; for us and our customers. If we were to spend the time making a branch to use $other_DB, we need to properly test that as well. Do stored procedures work? Is time/date working right? Is there a close mapping of privileges? Is the DB appropriately audited? Are there active devs on it?
All of those are YES for oracle. And its fuzzy about others. I'm sure we could defend using Postgres or other first tier open source DBs.... but how much work would it be to migrate? And for those customers who use Oracle elsewhere in their infra (multiple schemas for different webapps), they are unable to switch. They already have the DBAs in oracle. So, we'd have to support Oracle even after leaving.
It's a lose-lose. But I'm sure painting it in the libertarian "government interference with free trade" fits your worldview.
Because when I read
> "As a general rule, I have found out that every time there is something that doesn't make sense ("smart people who want to make money should have figured out a solution to this!")"
I see that the more likely solution is that I don't have enough information, and the surface answer is inadequate. There's a reason smarter people couldn't figure it out, and it's not because of pithy sayings. It's because the solution is a magnitude or 2 more complex than what it looks like.
Well it works like that for capitalism too. People optimize for the goal (money), not necessarily the hopeful outcome (useful things).
No, the whole premise of capitalism is that people motivated by money will build things that make them money.
It's right there in the name - "capital"-ism. Capital is the means, motive and end.
It seems surprising that capitalism is so easy to argue against on moral grounds. Surely it has some benefit for the society that lives under it?
It does seem that societies with generally capitalist systems flourish to a much greater degree than societies that are organized under any other dominant economic system.
If you knew you'd be assigned at birth to a life of 10th to 90th percentile (by status/money/class) in a non-wartime country and it would be US, UK, USSR, or China and your birth year would be 1880, 1900, 1920, 1938, 1960, or 1980, how many would choose the USSR or China?
Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands. Five of the wealthiest countries on earth, and generally considered five of the best to live in. None of those are Socialist systems. They all use the free market as the basis of their economic systems. Some with more or less government regulation, and with varying degrees of a welfare state. The same is true of the US, Canada, UK, Australia, Germany, Japan, France, Switzerland, etc. All have private ownership based economies, allowing for the vast accumulation of private wealth via business and asset ownership. Germany for example ranks #3 in billionaires globally, and Sweden ranks near the top in billionaires per capita. That is impossible under any implementation of Socialism, which requires state ownership of the means of production and does not allow such accumulation of private wealth.
The existence of government regulation means these countries do not have free markets, and all welfare programs are socialist in that they involve the government taking wealth from the people through taxation and redistributing it to those who haven't earned it by trading their labor.
>That is impossible under any implementation of Socialism, which requires state ownership of the means of production and does not allow such accumulation of private wealth.
You seem to have communism and socialism confused here, and you seem to be failing to see that socialism and capitalism exist on a spectrum, and most countries don't practice one or the other, but a mix of both.
Capitalism can and does benefit society, but so can other economic systems. Nevertheless, the purpose of capitalism isn't to enrich society, it's to enrich the owners and shareholders by accumulating capital.
The correlation between the quality or morality of a good or service and its value in the market isn't a strong one, since there are forces other than supply and demand at work determining value, and markets don't often optimize for greater societal good. If they did, agriculture and electronics manufacturing wouldn't depend on immigrant and forced labor, blood mining, and other immoral practices. Consumers put up with those things because the end result is bananas year round and cheap consumer goods.
I think the mistake comes in demanding that societies prefer only one or another model, due to projecting moral dimensions onto them which may not apply, rather than accepting a balance between systems intended to benefit the few, and systems intended to benefit the many.
As a concrete example, for the last few years I have been donating to several fanfiction authors through Patreon because I want to encourage them to write more.
I hope not because that seems hopelessly naive.