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Comment by xyst | Hacker News Reader

Yup. One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.

I avoid anything Oracle. Their licensing model is hell. Their products are usually terrible compared to competition. Cloud products are subpar. Products tend to require a support contract since it’s proprietary dogshit.

Some tidbits of Oracle and Larry Ellison (founder, CEO):

- in the early days of Oracle DB, it was benchmarked and compared against other RDBMS and Oracle DB was found to have poor performance. Ellison and Oracle tried to get the professor fired and introduced language into their EULA preventing benchmarking [1,2]

- then there is the growing list of controversies documented on Wikipedia [3]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150313140846/https://starcount... (2015, archive.org)

[2] https://danluu.com/anon-benchmark/

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Corporation

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Also in terms of security, Oracle's "forks" are decades behind. They managed to make RedHat unsecure with their own dogshit changes.

There are so many CVEs for Oracle specifically that are just bad default usernames and passwords, where they still dispute the CVE reports because it is "intended behaviour".

So ridiculous...

Pretty sure oracle have made a habit of going after security researchers who use responsible disclosure pathways also.

RHEL also introduced some.... interesting changes few times, like re-enabling ciphers removed from upstreams because their clients needed them for something.

I remember our amazement on how we failed audit on having a cipher enabled in OpenSSH version that had that cipher removed in upstream...

I always have to chuckle a little when git tells me that Azure DevOps is too unsecure to connect to because of a deprecated cipher they still use today :D

Losely related: I've audited so many BSD instances that were using MD4/NTHASH in their passwd and shadow files because they wanted to keep compatibility with their Windows infrastructure... it's stunning to see what is still possible in terms of misconfigurations. Things that should have been removed a long time ago.

The neat thing about RHEL is that there's a single 'crypto-policies' package which configures available TLS versions and algorithms for everything in the system: TLS, SSH, IPSec, DNSSEC, Kerberos and so on.

Regarding SSH, the FUTURE policy removes AES128, HMAC-SHA1 and DH Group 14.

But Oracle did manage to make Linux unbreakable, so there’s that.

SQL Server did something similar too. There’s a famous Reddit post that goes deep comparing it to PostgreSQL but can’t name it for takedown reasons.

Takedown reasons?

Takedown == getting issued a scary cease-and-desist warning letter by high-paid lawyers.

The switch -> https://web.archive.org/web/20170808183612/http://imgur.com/...

The full article: https://web.archive.org/web/20190919121901/https://www.reddi...

Yet people are really happy to buy into Oracle because they have a free tier[0] (which, you probably should avoid anyway[1])

Or they argue to exhaustion that MySQL (not MariaDB) is totally fine for production, despite decades the company who now owns MySQL strangling companies to near death over minutia.

It boggles my mind.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34503883

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514359

It reminds me of the old saying.

> Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM

Nobody ever got fired for buying, Oracle or Microsoft or any big incumbent. The same could definitely not be said for choosing any free software.

Ironically RHEL is IBM now.

I can imagine people being fired for going with Oracle.

Fail to make your budget work 5 quarters in a row and see how long you last. ;)

Or wait for a legal case to come up: someones getting fired, wether its you or a scapegoat you sacrifice.

No really, nobody ever gets fired for going with Oracle or any of the big blue chip dumpster fires.

Any org with deep enough pockets to afford Oracle at scale has a deep enough org structure and bureaucracy that those huge wasteful projects produce nothing but promotions.

My Oracle free tier VM got destroyed without any info with no prompt or anything.

Then my account was put in such state where I couldn't even pay to upgrade it to paid one

> Or they argue to exhaustion that MySQL (not MariaDB) is totally fine for production, despite decades the company who now owns MySQL strangling companies to near death over minutia.

Who you gonna trust, billion dollar corporation, or man that sold that DB off to them then started making a fork ?

> Who you gonna trust, billion dollar corporation, or man that sold that DB off to them then started making a fork ?

Oh, that’s easy. neither.

I use postgres predominantly.

I mean you can just use it as a free VPS, have backups of everything and you should be fine

Oracle is now in the keep customers locked in business rather than the get new customers business.

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