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Comment by shepherdjerred | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, but then you have to use Oracle

I've used Oracle Cloud, and it's actually pretty nice and well-designed at least from my point of view. It gives the AWS Dashboard a run for their m̵o̵n̵e̵y̵ egress fees.

But I still don't run anything important on it or push the limits of the free tier. Oracle doesn't have a good reputation. Also "Oracle Unbreakable Linux" is literally just RHEL rebranded, but it's not a community project and they don't like to acknowledge it so it feels particularly shameless; especially since they are selling "support" for it.

Bear in mind that premier support is included for free for cloud customers. So for example ksplice and dtrace are included. Ksplice is fantastic and it's really worth it.

I also have an arm machine hosted, good if you want to compile stuff, but the networking has been super flaky and unreliable. I would definitely not call their service nice, when quite often you can't login because network issues. Also their separate identity(legacy stuff)/cloud service dashboard was also confusing.

People have reported having their Oracle servers shut down without warning for the horrendous crime of... running IRC servers.

That's not an uncommon clause in terms of service; IRC servers tend to be DDoS magnets. Other common nonos are game servers and streaming hosts.

Hosting is one of those things you really ought to spend 10 minutes reading and find out what you are and are not allowed to do. It's basic due dilligence when you're renting someone else's hardware and bandwidth.

Let's not poo poo actual competition. If Oracle _wants_ to compete with AWS that's a pretty good thing for everyone.

Yet signing any contract with Oracle is risky, and i would rather pay more than risk dealing with Oracle itself.

but yeah, more competition is always good.

Yes, it's definitely good if it causes AWS, GCE, Azure, etc to increase allowances to compete, even if you (like me) plan to never touch that Oracle service with a ten foot pole attached to someone else's computer.

You're not the only one. Almost everyone that did significant deals with Oracle at some point has this opinion.

Plus they hired away a ton of AWS engineers to build their competitor right down the street from AWS headquarters. I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand.

People aren't dismissing the product, they're dismissing doing business with Oracle regardless of the product.

I want to compete in the Olympics, but whether that actually happens is a different question.

Can someone educate me on why Oracle is bad? I don’t have much experience with dealing with them as a company. Only used their database before.

They also have really questionable business ethics. At one startup, I caught them grabbing an unauthorized copy of our customer's source code when we were on-site at the Emerald City to tune it. It wasn't a rogue engineer, either; it was an order at least from their manager and probably higher. At another startup, we pitched a shared-cache idea to take advantage of our hardware. They declined to work with us, then included exactly that feature as a marquee element of their next major release. Then I worked at Red Hat, where anger over their re-badging of RHEL as OEL (among other deeds) ran deep. Over and over again, they've abused partners and customers and even employees. They were the most evil company in the industry before Facebook and others even existed.

See also: Bryan Cantrill's "lawnmower" talk about what happened to Solaris after the Oracle acquisition. https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc

https://ariadne.space/2021/07/14/oracle-cloud-sucks/ this person had their account terminated for the crime of running an IRC server.

They also have a track record of leaving dials in their software that are very easy to turn on but now mean you need to be on a higher license tier and will ding you in an audit and expect penalty fees for it (e.g. various flags in Oracle DB, Extensions Pack [1] in virtualbox, Java features[2] like Java Flight Recorder)

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/d1ttzp/oracle_is_...

[2]: https://upperedge.com/oracle/top-3-reasons-oracle-java-users...

They tend to have aggressive sales, high degree of lock in, and high license costs.

You basically get stuck paying lots for Oracle software and that doesn't directly equate to value the software provides

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