My last company was entangled in the Oracle web of vendor lock in. Before renewing our contracts, Oracle wanted literal access to our proprietary code - much of which is older code that mixes business logic and logic that works directly with Oracles products. Many of the algorithms we had implemented were 100% proprietary and secrets - not something we want just anyone to see, especially a competitor. On top of that, this company had IT contractors that had built all kinds of functionality using one off features only available in Oracle - shit that didn’t scale with new and upcoming use cases but also just a huge pain in the ass to migrate off of.
People think AWS or Azure risk vendor lock in. Oh boy you do not know what true evil actually is - Oracle literally prays on this happening. It’s the foundation of their business model. Not features, not innovation, nothing else - but solely ensuring your customers have no alternative but to use your products at whatever cost you want or drown in litigation.
What about removing Oracle's devs contributions from Linux kernel?
Which is kind of ironic, hate them, but then willing accepting whatever comes from them, 'cause hey it is free.
What is schizophrenic is having a community that hates big corporations, but happily takes anything they decide to offer,
i would be more worried when they propose that we all abandon this adequate gpl tool for this permissive licensed code they seriously didn't write, but here's ten fantastic contributions they made.
I only see that among FOSS folks, seldom among other kinds of activism.
Removing contributions to the Linux kernel? I don't think so. The kernel is free software and people contribute to it knowing that it is free software, so they cannot hold any code hostage. Once you release as free software, you give up that control.
I didn't till I had to become one of them this year. Mnesia is real, it's prime time, but not in place of something like Oracle.
> comparing an oil rig driller to a fisher price screwdriver.
Better analogy would be Comparing SQL Server to Redis. Mnesia is, at it's heart, a(n optionally) Transactional K-V lookup that can be run distributed. It's use case it works VERY well, but I wouldn't consider it a substitute for Relational storage.
I honestly don't get the Oracle hate from HN people, even if I do understand it from the Slashdot folks.
I accompanied Sales Account managers with fellow female engineers to client meeting where they, and I’m not kidding, discussed which strip clubs they would go to after the meetings.
If Apple is a designer culture, and Google is an engineer culture, then I‘d say Oracle is driven by a hierarchy of sales culture.
Isn't Oracle a legal driven company [0] :)
Another perspective is that Oracle is one of just a few tech companies left that has a proper dedicated research lab that does long-term research without asking about profit. I worked on my research project there for six years and nobody once asked me how we were going to make money from it, let alone talked about sales. That’s pretty special these days.
Oracle even paid me a senior developer salary while I worked on my PhD. Hard to say that’s ‘completely sales driven!’
And so what anyway? Google is also good at supporting things not sales driven means that Oracle isn’t?
There's plenty of lab research going on.
I personally think stripclubs arre a waste of money, but I know femenists that would take exception to either of those above.
No matter how "woke" or allied you think you are, there's no way the lived experience of a white person reacts the same way to people reinforcing systemic racism than that of those who have to live under that experience.
The analogy I use to describe Oracle is that they're this kind of massive lumbering beast that just lays around and occasionally swallows other companies alive and whole. Then those companies run around inside, burning existing customer good will for a while until Oracle finishes digesting them or generating whatever news-reports or vendor lock-in they wanted in the first place. Then Oracle goes out to find another company to eat.
I saw a slow movement with my particular department away from developing useful software towards, "just keep on releasing things, just keep on trying to figure out what looks good at trade shows, just keep the department moving forward like a zombie while it gets eaten away and resources get shifted to new acquisitions and lawyers and salespeople." The software wasn't even a secondary concern, it was just a very minor part of the company that happened on the side. Writing code was a side-effect of the business, our real business was sales and grand promises and multi-year contracts that everyone was going to regret.
As a developer that wants to build products that actually help businesses and users, it felt really, really bad -- and my impression interacting with other parts of the business and other departments felt the same. Like they were just kind of lumbering on, that they existed because a few companies were locked in or were still buying them, and a few more dollars could be extracted before they starved to death or until their staff was fully absorbed into new projects.
I won't go into any more specific detail than that; for better or worse I feel like I have some responsibility to be a little vague. But by the time I left I was convinced that any company Oracle bought or any project it maintained was doomed as soon as they touched it. It's one of the reasons I won't work with Java -- I just don't want to tie myself to a technology that's owned by a company like that.
The current case with Sun is to me perfectly in character with the company. Oracle bought Sun, killed everything that made it Sun, and now their lawyers are out trying to extract every last penny they can get out of its mostly rotted corpse, all under the guise of 'protecting their investment' or whatever.
I'm very cynical on Oracle now, and I wasn't even at the company very long. Since moving on I've been able to work on industry-scale software that's actually being designed for customers and that actually cares about helping them accomplish business goals. It's a massive breath of fresh air that I'm still grateful for to this day. It makes a huge difference to be able to get up in the morning and feel like there's an actual reason you're going to work beyond buying Ellison a new yacht.
Somewhat amusingly, Java becomes more dangerous to use if Oracle wins this case, because they would then be able to kill OpenJDK and any other implementations whenever they want.
It's either an elaborate joke, or McAfee wrote it himself. Or both.
In any case, if I was an US citizen and had to choose between him and Trump, well, that would've been a very hard choice. They both deliver.