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Comment by rswail | Hacker News Reader

Oracle making the change due to licensing is like a dictionary definition of hubris, considering how their own license enforcement operates.

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Oracle doesn't have some ideological preference for licensing. Oracle just wants what is best for Oracle.

Right - don't anthropomorphize the lawn mower.

why, cause he hates it?

I think you mean hypocritical, instead of hubris.

As much as I dislike Oracle's biz practices (I'd not touch their db product with a stick), they do a lot of FLOSS devt:

https://opensource.oracle.com/ (almost endless list)

But then they have take FLOSS projects and abandoned them, see OOo for instance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice#/media/File:...

Looking through that list, most of the big projects (OpenJDK, Mysql, Opengrok) were inherited as part of acquisitions.

Oracle has been a prolific contributor to the Linux kernel.

https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/oracle-is-the-1-contribu...

XFS is really important for (their) database performance, so quite a lot comes out of Oracle for it. You might also know that btrfs began at Oracle.

https://www.google.com/search?q=oracle+blog+xfs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs

"Chris Mason, an engineer working on ReiserFS for SUSE at the time, joined Oracle later that year and began work on a new file system based on these B-trees."

> Looking through that list, most of the big projects (OpenJDK, Mysql, Opengrok) were inherited as part of acquisitions.

I see this argument a lot, but I'm not sure how it detracts from their continued development. Oracle funds many engineers working on OSS and, despite having CLAs in place, retain the permissive license for most of them. In some cases they've acquired closed source software and made it open source (e.g., JRockit stuff). They're a major contributor to OSS.

Oracle takes hostages, they know how to avoid being taken hostage. Not hubris, just tactics.

It would be hubris if they tried to then take the moral high ground.

It's not hubris or hypocrisy, it's a profit maximizing entity maximizing profit that's it

They wrote the playbook. They know what's coming. Ruthless and smart!

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