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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Anyone on the in-crowd who can share a bit about Oracle's motivations here?

I recall a Bryan Cantrill talk about how Oracle is this completely amoral machine that just wants to make money, and how that drives their every decision [0]. Is this no longer the case? Or is it, and if so, how does improving MySQL and giving it away for free making Oracle money? Or was it always hyperbole and Oracle is improving MySQL because they want to be nice?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2047s, that link starts at the beginning of what's popularly known as "the lawnmower rant", it's delightful.

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Oracle paid a lot of money to buy Sun, and basically ended up with two products- selling support for Java and MySQL. Letting MySQL rot would have been pretty bad for their pocket book (especially as others have noted that postgres has been cutting into their market heavily).

In Bryan's defense, the lawnmower rant is pretty true- they are a simple company. They focus heavily on making money and abandoning things they aren't in a good position to do so from.

Selling per-cpu-core licenses and support contracts, great! Experimenting on or converting small projects into new markets? Not great. Fleshing out OpenSolaris into a product that could rival linux? Dead end.

Maybe it could have worked out, but the lawnmower didn't care about a product that had too few users to make money from. OTOH, even Facebook uses MySQL... All they need to do is invest enough to maintain market share to get support contracts.

> Experimenting on or converting small projects into new markets?

Bringing MaximeVM out of research labs into the market as GraalVM.

First RDMS to support Perl and Java as stored procedures.

Join venture with Sun for Network Computer thin clients.

> Fleshing out OpenSolaris into a product that could rival linux?

Every OpenSolaris sales is one sale less from Unbreakable Linux, so in a day and age where UNIX === Linux, a company like Oracle has chosen what makes more sense monetarly.

I doubt that IBM is getting lots of new AIX customers.

And in the end, except for a timid offer from IBM, no one cared to rescue Sun.

FANG would buy them if they had somehow managed to stumble forward to the mid-2010s.

Zero offers from any of them, so.

I don't think that FB were in a position back then. I was very surprised at the time that Google didn't buy them. Microsoft would never had gotten it past the regulators.

I guess I'm cynical, but to me looks like Oracle renewed interest in MySQL after PostgreSQL gained momentum. MySQL is not really a competitor to Oracle but PostgreSQL overlaps with both of them.

Oracle is selling Enterprise features and Support, i am sure they make a lot of money with MySQL.

Oracle, compared to their image is quite technically adept — they did a splendid job with OpenJDK and they have plenty of long-term R&D projects like GraalVM.

Yeah so, all of that seemed to happen after that Cantrill talk. How did Oracle suddenly turn from a pure license contract squeezing company into a tech leader again? I mean, they had to hire great engineering talent to do all this. And convince them to work for Oracle. What's the narrative I'm missing?

I'm not familiar with the internal stucture of Oracle, just tired of the imo unfair bashing of them (at least compared to all other companies).

But I guess they must have had at least sane management that tried to keep the existing mindshare of acquired projects (as far as I know many people went from Sun to Oracle directly for example), as well as finding new talent. And also, the acquisitions made sense and were done at a comparatively good price so I guess they are good lawnmowers with long-term plans (but terrible PR)?

>Yeah so, all of that seemed to happen after that Cantrill talk.

The talk was in 2011, Oracle purchased Sun in 2010. So basically their continuous work on OpenJDK has nothing to do with the talk at all.

I heard they were poaching whole teams with a massive pay bump

Mr. Cantrill might be engaging in hyperbole. Big companies are big though- lots of people in charge of lots of things, and often they wander off in different directions. It doesn't make sense to model their behavior as if directed by a single hive mind.

Companies do have a culture though, the reason Amazon warehouse employees have to piss in a bottle can be traced back to Bezos and his laser like focus on controlling costs.

Big enough companies are the stereotypical paper clip AIs everyone fear, but with money. Anything seemingly moral action by them is simply a cost-analysis on how the public opinion will effect their profits.

No it’s 100% still correct.

likely support and keeping customers from migrating to postgres

and yes, Oracle is 110% focused on the bottom line. Preferably this quarter

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