"As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple!"

"This company is very straightforward, in its defense. This company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity -- that's it! ...Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah... you talk to Oracle, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!'"

"You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle."

-- Bryan Cantrill

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc

ORACLE = One Raging Asshole Called Larry Ellison

Oracle is well known for arbitrary and complex licensing that have the effect of locking customers to Oracle under threats of audits.

Recently it has taken to pushing customers via licensing changes on to its own Cloud environment. Its incumbency in F100 companies ensures a vendor lockin that is only slowly deteriorating.

Oracle's record of acquisition and product EOL is also well known. It's responsible for the fork of Hudson to Jenkins, the collapse of Solaris, the API court case with Google (attempting to use copyright on API definitions to stop new implementations), the fork of MySQL to MariaDB, etc etc

- he'd happier destroy 10 or 100 million man-hours of good effort for a couple hundred-K of sales. see Solaris. - trying to assert IP rights on an API. see java lawsuit. - uses vendor lock-in to sell an inferior product that a better replacement is free (like postresql, mysql, etc.)

Oh yes, I think Oracle is evil, in a way worse than the worst years of M$. And larry ... is clearly the responsible party.

In my ethos, good capitalism is good itself and for everyone. Wise leaders play for the "long game" and this benefits them, their shareholders, and everyone else. This was the pattern of Sun. In particular Sun, even in the years when the UNIX wars were not very nice. larry (and bill) are simply diseased vultures who trade short term personal gain for mass global loss. Someday, while old larry will be fine, his shareholders will have nothing but a bag of sh*t.

Oh, shit. I confused Larry Ellison with Scott McNealy. Carry on.