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Comment by vtail | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why this move should piss off anybody in the OSS community. Oracle is a private company and as such has only obligations to its shareholders. They may or may not support and/or promote OSS projects as they see fit, same as every one of us. It's their free choice.

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Look at what kind of headway corporations like google have made in the mind of consumers when they go above and beyond the shareholder mantra. Oracle might make short term gains on their terms but they have started to poison a whole new generation of developers.

Oracle is not a person to make such a decision; it is its shareholders who should decide how they want to spend their money. I wouldn't want to have a tax (as an Oracle investor or a private citizen) to support OSS. I may want to contribute my money and/or code as a donation, but that will be my own choice.

I don't want to support Oracle's sailboat racing. So, I don't own any Oracle shares. Pretty simple, isn't it?

Larry Ellison pays for that out of pocket.

Webpages are not a complement to Oracle's business model, thus what makes sense for Oracle and Google to open source are vastly different. If you look at what Google open sources, it's all compliments to their business model. Google doesn't open source technology that it makes money from.

As to going above and beyond in regards to open source, you'd have to look at where NetBeans came from Sun. Look where all that open source got them.

The reason is that Oracle inherited the stewardship of so many important projects when they bought Sun. After the purchase they have not said 'OK guys, new management; we don't do the open source thing; so long.' Rather they put the knife into various projects in different ways, seemingly at random. This behaviour taken in sum has an unsettling effect on the outlook of any project that Oracle is still involved with. How long will Netbeans itself survive? It's anybody's guess.

It's not just one case of support being withdrawn. It's Russian roulette.

That they are free to make this choice doesn't mean the community needs to roll over in accepting it. A response to this news that doesn't indicate displeasure would lack integrity.

Oracle is a private company and as such has only obligations to its shareholders.

This is not a fact, it's merely an article of faith of the religion known as Capitalism.

That is a certain world view, indeed. Milton Friedman had an excellent argumentation defending this world view: http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/fr...

I'll try to read that over the weekend, but I'll just note that it's not difficult, especially for someone of Friedman's stature and intelligence, to construct an internally consistent exposition of a particular worldview. That is to say, I hope he accounts for falsifiability. ;)

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