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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

> amount high enough that it's sure to bankrupt Oracle

And hopefully leave a radioactive crater large enough to dissuade anyone from ever trying this one again.

I've been wondering if it would be possible to create an Internet movement large enough to impact Oracle's bottom line. Encourage employees and managers to immediately drop their business with Oracle, both as customers and as vendors. Encourage Oracle employees to quit and find more ethical places to work. Oracle has crossed a line here, and I wonder if we can kill that beast before they kill us. Or at least take them down with us.

This has already beginning to happen. Almost all of $work's customers (industrial plants, all sizes) have Buying Guidelines that forbids a new solution to be bought if it needs an Oracle database.

> if it would be possible to create an Internet movement large enough to impact Oracle's bottom line

We did that. That's why they bought and tried to kill MySQL.

Which was amusing as Postgres is by most measures the better system (yes, I know streaming replication wasn't easy on earlier versions and that was a definite plus for MySQL).

Amazon had a celebration when they turned off their last Oracle system ...

> drop their business

I doubt it. Oracle has done a great job dissuading new business by suing customers for discussing benchmarks, suing customers for discussing security, auditing customers, jacking up prices, jacking up penalties, suing everyone else, etc... Plenty of reasons to drop already.

Everyone left stays because they're in deep and migration would be worse.

> Oracle has done a great job dissuading new business by suing customers for discussing benchmarks, suing customers for discussing security, auditing customers, jacking up prices, jacking up penalties, suing everyone else, etc...

Do you have some sources, or specific instances I could do my own searching for? Feel free to email me privately. I'm somewhat serious about trying to kill Oracle in retaliation for what they've done here.

Sure.

Threatening benchmarkers:

    * https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2018/05/the-dewitt-clause-why-you-rarely-see-database-benchmarks/
    * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886333

Buy competitors then switch terms on unwitting customers:

    * https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/22/oracle_shoddy_service_license_denials_aimed_to_force_adoption_of_cloud_service_lawsuit_claims/
    * https://outline.com/YUFYFK

Threatening security researchers:

   * https://boingboing.net/2015/08/11/oracles-cso-demands-an-end-t.html

Oh yeah they sue employees too:

    * https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/26/oracle_sues_employee_undo_arbitration_loss/

There's also something that bit me personally, probably in the fine print somewhere. If you drop support, you have to pay 3x to get back into it. Something like "treble fees".

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