That people continue to use ORACLE products is one of those misteries I can not understand for much thought that I put into it.
But people have a hard time resisting free stuff.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33199750
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38075210
In the OP's case, I have several comments:
- Companies should always be able to explain why an account was closed. If the person violated a policy, the exact line or paragraph of the policy should be given to the customer along with a detailed explanation of how the customer violated the policy.
- Companies should always notify customers when they close an account or when a customer is violating the terms of service. These notices should clearly explain what the customer did and should explain how they violated a policy.
- Companies should expect their automated systems and employees to make mistakes. They should rectify mistakes when they are found.
I think Oracle treated dijit and the OP horribly. I think Oracle should do a root cause analysis to determine why they misbehaved, fix the problem, reinstate the account (assuming the OP is telling the truth), and publicly apologize. Internally, Oracle should learn from this and fix their processes and communications.
“Don’t anthropomorphise the lawnmower”.
Let us not forget that they bankrupted the second largest city in the UK, it’s hardly an isolated incident.
They are exactly as evil as people say, I know its hard to reason, there’s always shades of grey after all, but I know of know of no other consistently one-dimensional company.
Examples? I know several large companies that spent tens of millions to get _away_ from Oracle.
You don’t stay in business for long while burning every single bridge.
The standards for acceptable behavior from a supplier / business partner are a little higher than just doesn’t fuck over every single contract.
The one that got the manager responsible sacked, but is still managed by the same CEO (and owner) that appointed him?
source: was a PM for a BU that was acquired by Oracle
Usually, they just increase prices by a lot once the customer is locked in.
Stay far away from Stargate.
Edit: Java is usually pretty good, too. At least the open source stuff. Maybe stuff like GraalVM too but they had that locked down in licenses for a while and I don't trust Oracle at all.
That was literally the only reason I was willing to give Oracle a shot.
If I lost it, I'd just have to do building locally.
Are people still able to provision those instances in other regions? If so, which one(s)? I'm just using the legacy free one for now, the 2GHz AMD with 0.5GB RAM.
I don't think the forever-free tier allows cross region instances. You may just need to register an account in another region where they have more resources, but it's anyone's guess where Oracle still has them.
It's a neat playground but as should be blatantly obvious it's not worth investing too much time into, because they can make it disappear without recourse for no reason without warning.
I signed up a personal Oracle Cloud account to make use of their always-free tier of VMs. I was lucky to be able to get 4 of the VM.Standard.A1.Flex instances which have been running fine for a couple of years now. I've heard various tales of people on the free tier getting instances/accounts deleted for having idle instances, but presumably my backup of them is enough to stop them from being registered as idle (I've got a couple of websites running on them too, but they're just for my use).
Oracle know this, in fact, they rely on it.
If they are trying to win a big corporate contract you know a good way to get it? :
The dude who has an enormous amount of say is head of I.T. at EnormousBeanFactory, the world’s largest supplier of canned beans. Is it a sexy industry? Nope, but they do 3 billion a year in beans.
This dude is in his mid 50s, bald, out of shape, big glasses, and is likely very single. He has a comfortable wage but he’s not rich. He hasn’t gotten laid in 20 years.
Send in the energetic and charismatic Oracle salesman, instantly invite this guy for all expenses trip to Aspen to discuss the deal, but don’t make it obvious, a few 5 star lunches locally first. When in Aspen make sure this guy has the time of his life, got it? Here’s 20k expense account, this guy is going to have a weekend he is not going to forget. Do I need to spell out the details for you?
Once he’s back at his job and had a few days to recover then land the fish while the memories are still fresh, as long as your product MINIMALLY functions, they’ll sign.
Of course I personally think this is atrocious way of doing business, but I am wise enough to not let my rosy ideals prevent me from seeing the reality of the world, so there it is. That’s why “people continue to use ORACLE” products.
You are often relying on the altruism of the C-levels to care about people more than the “vibes” that sales people can give off, which just happens to be helped by expensive lunches, trips, invitations to shows with VIP seats, and being welcomed with beaming smiles and open arms like a celebrity at their HQ.
Obviously its not just Oracle that does this, all the large companies do it- even the ones you think have crappy support like Google.
These are hard things to turn down, and if you think you can you’re probably wrong.
And after that stops applying, you have spent a huge amount of work managing your software around their idiosyncrasies. So doing the same for another supplier looks like a huge (probably unsurmountable) task.
I use one of these servers for hosting some non-critical things, but nothing that I run there is particularly CPU intensive, so I was just forced to set up a cronjob that periodically spikes the CPU to 100% for a few minutes.
[1] https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...
Only when their accounts are swiftly terminated, they start crying for help on HN.
There is a lot of upside for Oracle based on their position relative to others and Ellison does not have to manage his political capital the same way non-founder CEOs do (he made this move long before Trump’s second term).
My main point is saying one of the largest software companies in the world is "bad" or "makes things worse" says nothing. You need to give specific examples. Also, it's hard to believe that Oracle never gets anything right. Really? Everyone of their thousands of employees does bad work? All of their products are "bad" and have no good points? That does not pass the laugh test.
Java.
It's prolly gonna be hard to find any specific metrics to show that, though. But I remember everyone thinking that all of the Sun offerings had gotten worse after the acquisition. And OpenSolaris got axed altogether, of course. And Java had a series of security embarrassments.
Licenses apart - Java actually improved, but Oracle's name is so tainted that a lot of people ran for the hills the moment they acquired Sun. Solaris support on a lot of platforms used by my employer simply vanished within 36 months (in enterprise terms, that's instantaneous) because every customer started working on a migration/exit strategy as soon as they learned of the acquisition. Once a critical mass of customers was headed out, it got dropped as a platform by a lot of developers, and eventually Oracle itself put it on life support.
So yes, Oracle's name is THAT powerful it can kill you by association. Lawnmower story etc.
After the acquisition I could not reach kernel developers the ones that remained and package management fell into the bog of eternal stench. Generic examples would be moving binaries into /tmp and moving an Oracle specific fix into place because they knew not how to do package management. Eventually it became impossible to do package verification. By this point we had moved most customers off Solaris, HP-UX and AIX over to Linux out of cost optimizations and making everything cookie-cutter but I was happy to depart from maintaining Oracle Sun systems.
At another company I worked for we replaced everything acquired by Oracle to forked alternatives. This was less to do with technical reasons and more to do with legal liability risk as Oracle could at any moment force licensing, change license terms, drop free support, etc... So as an example we moved from MySQL to Percona MySQL. We also quickly moved away from Dyn DNS due to concerns from the federal government and our lawyers as Dyn (Oracle, also being a competitor) could monitor DNS traffic and profile our customers.
Before that, OC4J used to be the first to implement a new EJB version etc. The project basically froze in time when oracle bought it, receiving minimal bugfuxes only.