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Comment by gear54rus | Hacker News Reader

What social/political force do you see opposing that trend? Or why is that a bad omen?

Maybe this is just idealizing the past but it used to feel like for the most part people wanted to be good and do good work and play fair. Some people were cutthroat vultures but it was distasteful and you would see pushback.

These days it's expected. Doing good isn't even in the discussion unless it's being cynically mocked. Evading taxes? That makes you smart...

Even being devoted to your work is conflated with being exploited by your employer, and with the way things are it's understandable.

I hope we see some idealism return to American industry. It'll take a reversal of the plundering of the middle class.

> Maybe this is just idealizing the past but it used to feel like for the most part people wanted to be good and do good work and play fair. Some people were cutthroat vultures but it was distasteful and you would see pushback.

It seems that in the past things where somewhat different. The sole focus on maximizing shareholder value is something that happened quite recently. A lot of people trace that to Jack Welch who took over General Electric in the 80's

I highly recommend https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Broke-Capitalism-America_and/... if you are curious about it.The book documents well the transformation which gave us the modern version of US companies.

Jack Welch was an unrelated sideshow. The biggest change was the development of "shareholder primacy" which very quickly became dogma in the business world: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=63145

Socially and politically I don't see much opposition. Nobody in Congress is getting mad about paying for Oracle and nobody protesting in the street even knows what their product is. And realistically, that's probably just how Oracle likes it. The less you know about them the better, their job is twisting the arm of your favorite business and little else.

At least in the field of software, Oracle probably considers the proliferation of free software an enemy. But even then, Oracle mastered the art of obfuscating open interfaces and charging people money for support contracts. It's hard to choose any one thing that kills Oracle, but high-quality free software probably goes a long way towards forcing them to change.

> Or why is that a bad omen?

Oracle is a do-nothing company in the most literal sense. You can only have so many of them around before capitalism as a whole collapses under the weight of it's own incompetence.

> Oracle is a do-nothing company

Maybe this is true wrt their main product, I neither know nor care about it. The sooner it leaves this Earth, the better for all of us as far as I am concerned. But both OpenJDK (and Java generally) and MySQL have been on fire since they were acquired by Oracle. Compare the stagnation during the last few years under Sun with massive features that's been coming to both more recently:

https://dev.mysql.com/blog-archive/the-complete-list-of-new-...

Java got many shiny things, a few examples off the top of my head: an almost pauseless GC leagues ahead of all FOSS competition, modules, Go-style green threads, many language features like immutable records, ADTs, switch expressions, etc. Things like value types are on the horizon.

Oracle is by far the main developer of both the language and its most popular implementation. Adoptium and company mostly just take the source and repackage under their own brand.

> Oracle is a do-nothing company in the most literal sense. You can only have so many of them around before capitalism as a whole collapses under the weight of it's own incompetence.

Pretty hyperbolic. There's already a reply to your post that talks about what Oracle have done with Java, but rest assured that Oracle has and does employ armies of developers - as well as sales people and the rest of the big software ecosystem. Whether you like what they build is another thing - it's hard to get excited about boring gigantic ERP systems for example - but saying they don't do anything is absurd.

Ideally stakeholder capitalism. Bad omen because otherwise people will just discard capitalism altogether.

"Stakeholder capitalism" exists so people can talk about what they ought to be doing in language vague enough they never have to actually alter their behavior in any tangible way.

Turns out it’s hard to build unambiguous moral systems in a complex reality.

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