According to Bryan Cantrill, you don't need to be open minded about Oracle. It's a waste of the openness of your mind. He says what you think of Oracle is even truer than you think it is. He believes there has been no entity in human history with less complexity and nuance to it than Oracle.
Bryan warns, "Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn. You stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- the lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, the lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle."
It's wild that cease and desists and audit notices are becoming common ways to punish someone for just... not renewing your contract.
Tech companies and oligarchs are incredibly entitled.
Then stuff like distributed transactions, raw disk access for databases, among other niceties that people reaching to Postgres or MySQL probably never heard of, but many Fortune 500 enjoy, even if one for checking bullet points on RFPs.
Postgres comes second, after getting all puzzle pieces together, some of them also commercial.
The fact that there are so many people motivated to code alternatives to Oracle products says a lot about Oracle's business practices.
I'll also sincerely ask: Does anybody at Oracle know how I can get in touch with their HR department to find out what ever happened to my Sun 401k plan? Because nobody will answer my calls, and it's a lot of money of mine plus 33 years of interest they owe me that they're holding on to, which they inherited from Sun and then disappeared from all known records (except for a record that says it once existed and Oracle has it, but no other info), and they won't pick up the phone or return my email, no matter how "sincerely" I ask or how long I wait on hold.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44370636
sprash 4 days ago | parent | context | flag | favorite | on: Ancient X11 scaling technology
> 1994
Apparently you have to be criticizing X11 for more than three decades now. Since you seem to know your stuff, could you please post a link to your git repository containing your personal display server that solves all the problems?
DonHopkins 4 days ago | prev | next [–]
Since they bought Sun Microsystems, Oracle now owns the rights to the NeWS source code, so unfortunately I'm not legally allowed to post the NeWS server source code on my Github page, although I spent many years unsuccessfully fighting to make NeWS free and evangelizing it to anyone who would listen, like RMS and my colleagues and customers at Sun:
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/rms.news.txt
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/news-ooo-review...
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/questionaire.tx...
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/grasshopper.msg...
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/sevans.txt
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/Explanation.txt
[...]
sprash 4 days ago | parent | next [–]
> Oracle owns the rights to the NeWS source code so I'm not allowed to post it on my Github page.
They are certainly not making any money with it right now. All patents should be expired by now. Have you ever sincerely asked if you are allowed to publish the code? [...]
DonHopkins 4 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]
[...] Ha ha! Good luck, kiddo. Have you ever tried asking a lawnmower for favors? Do you really think "sincerity" would help?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728
https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s
[...]
How about a simpler solution, just relicense everything to BSD / MIT.
I think some projects have done that in the past, but probably none where a big company owns the copyright to most of the code.
Their stock is 50% higher than it was a year ago.
Not quite sure this is doing them damage.
And anyone who is sympathetic to the request, knows that campaigning for the protocol break would require disrupting two or three levels of management above them, forcing powerful people to deal with something they don't care about. And that would be interpreted as wasting important people's time.
So the organization, as a decision making entity, is incapable of recognizing, much less considering, requests for an exception to default behavior.
I worked with a business that operated this way for many years. Even when there were overwhelming reasons to break process, the spark and tinder never got anywhere near each other.
Everyone between the spark and tinder empathized, talked to "somebody" to demonstrate they "tried", and to create an alibi for the inevitable "no" response that came next, while quietly doing everything they could to smother that spark, before it burned them.
They successfully weaponized open source by giving something for free and clawing back step by step (i.e. closing open source VSCode plugins), and leaving parts which does drowns competitors most effectively open.
Also they act like their open source code is “Free”. They firmly control it, yet act like they don’t.
Microsoft’s image didn’t improve a bit in my eyes.
They are responsive to the community and merge community PRs. That's already more "open" than, say, SQLite.
Sure, they don't give away merge rights and keep exclusive control over the upstream copy. But how many "open" projects have a second maintainer at all? I mean, more than one person (the original author) with merge access.
The code is free. You can always fork it and use it however you like. That's always been the deal you get with open source.
Sure, it's nice when the upstream maintainers always do only the things you like, and you never need to fork. But that's a separate quality, unrelated to the code itself being "free" or "open".
And that's why people should be pushing for Free Software, rather than Open Source.
20 years in the game, and I ended up agreeing with steve ballmer: open source is cancer.
Look at how bad it went for ElasticSearch and Redis, and then look how well it's going for Grafana (whose software is Free Software - besides being just great).
This is so true that Redis did not go back to being "open source", it became Free Software (AGPL).
Then, they closed the .NET ecosystem [1]. This is a bit more complex and convoluted. Closed source debuggers, changing plug-in licenses, removing nice features from open source .NET runtime, etc.
So, classic Microsoft.
Tesla stock is 63% higher than it was a year ago, does this prove that each and every decision their leadership made was helpful to the bottom line?
I hope I'm wrong though.
They're better positioned now than they have been at any other point in the past 10-15 years.
Oracle is not an abusive relationship, it's just that you shouldn't be looking elsewhere, and infractions will be punished. They are very serious about audits.
So here is the shortcut to a HN thread about this, for people like me, who hadn't heard about the case (assuming that's the one you meant):
ZFS can be run under Linux - combining the Linux kernel with ZFS is a collective work (collection) of two independent works.
(This doesn’t necessarily stop people, but it is read by Debian as “illegal enough” to warrant a splash screen on installing OpenZFS that you’re losing the right to redistribute.)
Let's say I built a magical compiler capable of compiling a Linux+ZFS kernel in miliseconds. I put it behind a web UI which accepts a Linux tarball and ZFS tarball and spits out the compiled kernel. Because of some mysterious bug I am still trying to solve, only specific Linux and ZFS tarballs work, so I put validation to hash the uploaded tarballs and only let through the ones that are known to work.
Let's peel back the curtain: there is no magical compiler and all this is doing is hashing the input kernel & ZFS source tarballs, using it as a lookup table in a cache of precompiled binaries, and spitting out the matching one, which is currently not allowed. But let's assume the compiler was real, in this case it should be fine, even though the functionality of the system is no different.
I would at least understand if one of the licenses explicitly restricted the right to distribute ready-to-use binaries as a way to carve themselves a moat so the authors are the only ones that would be able to do it (and thus charge for it). But that's not the case here, nobody is better (or worse) off whether I waste time building it manually vs reuse someone else's earlier effort of building it.
WOULD they? It depends on how important it is to have a credible threat of enforcement for GPL violations. But it’s not zero, and it’s a pretty clear violation. Which is enough to scare off most major distros - if they receive a C&D, that’d be a breaking change they’d have to push retroactively. Not worth the risk.
It seems like all this would achieve is make Linux + ZFS more annoying to use and overall everyone loses.
The licenses are incompatible on a technicality, but it doesn't mean there is anything for either side to be gained by suing?
> simply updating CDDL to allow integrating ZFS with GPL
That can't be done at this point. Owing to a decision that arose right here from a discussion on HN, the ZFS maintainers adopted a policy in 2016 to opt out of the CDDL's built-in "any subsequent version" clause for new source files:
~/scratch/zfs$ grep --exclude-dir=.git -Ire "Common Development and Distribution License" -A 2 | grep -ie "\(Version 1\.0 only\|\<only\>.*\<version\>\)" | wc -l
821
I don't associate Oracle and good will, and I don't think they care.
Oracle is one of the leading researchers in JIT compilers, garbage collectors, and language interpreters.
How does working for Oracle compare to say working at Facebook or Google with all their privacy invasion tech?
Yeah. I don't like it either, but that's the world we've built. I wish an industry as important as ours had some standards of ethics, like doctors and real engineers do.
> Are the engineers working on OpenJdk completely lacking of morals?
Oracle attempted to make clean room reverse engineering illegal by arguing that copyright applies to Java's ABIs despite our entire industry relying on that not being the case, all so Larry Ellison could buy yet another yacht. So yeah, someone continuing to work on Java after it was acquired by one of the most evil companies on the planet definitely is consciously choosing to make the world a worse place and should no longer be employable.
> How does working for Oracle compare to say working at Facebook or Google with all their privacy invasion tech?
Facebook is also on my personal blacklist, yes. Less for their privacy invasion, and more for their eagerness to make a buck by helping spread misinformation and bringing about the end of democracy in the western world.
I don't feel as strongly about Google personally, but I wouldn't argue if someone else on the hiring team felt it was disqualifying.
But that said, I think it would be dumb to jump to conclusions just based on having Oracle on the resume. You should at least ask them why they worked there, and why they left. For all you know, they had no idea how bad Oracle was when they started, and they left because they saw how evil they were. That is the exact kind of person that I do want to hire
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_...
Interpretation on the fact and metric and the need to tell I leave up to you
My favorite other example of this is when I see a UI redesign that didn't actually benefit anyone and was more a style change than anything, and sometimes actively makes usability worse (cough Liquid Glass cough) In those situations I always think "well, some designers on staff needed to justify their paychecks".
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/principal-agent-problem...
E.g. you often imagine cases like a manager making a decision that causes a short term pop in stock price (and bonuses to the manager) to the detriment of the long term health of the company when thinking about the principal agent problem. In the cases I'm thinking about, though, it's more that people rarely can do nothing, even if that's sometimes the best thing to do. E.g. large companies need to have lawyers and designers on staff for lots of reasons. But sometimes there just isn't enough work for these folks to do (even if they need to be "warm" and ready when important work comes along). And if there isn't enough work to do, these people will find work to do.
This is another reason why I think that, even though layoffs are painful, having people "milling about" without clear direction and purpose is the worst for everyone involved. These people will just schedule meetings, insert themselves where it isn't helpful, etc., just to make it seem like they have a purpose.
This could be thought of as a "variant" of the principal agent problem I guess, but this instance of "idle hands are the devil's playthings" is different enough from the "standard" principal agent problem that I don't think it's helpful to conflate these two things.
It is possible to find work in a different area at the company for such in-between times.
For example at the company where I work, a (very capable) secretary whose original role was not needed anymore, but for who there existed a very role in the future was for the in-between time assigned to assist some other department in their reporting duties to regulating authorities.
I think this is especially true at big corps with little actually meaningful work and where most people who actually care about doing meaningful work has left a long time ago.
Because it provides zero value and costs something to keep.
They gain absolutely nothing by handing over the name and brand - in fact they lose valuable brand recognition.
Obviously most people in the industry hate them with a passion (see this thread as evidence), but many see the association as evidence that they might at least have some expertise with that product set. I certainly don’t agree with their position, but it makes sense commercially.
No one thinks of Oracle when they see JavaScript.
Edit: more complete history https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44408760
I think lawnmower metaphor never was accurate or helped to get it.
Oracle is an alligator or a snake. A reptile. If you move, it will probably eat you alive. It wants to eat you, or part of you.
It also lives in the waterhole, hoarding an essential resource. Not guarding or developing it, just sitting there.
It is ancient and will never change.
It's not alligator's fault for being predator. It is it's nature
At this time, but their ownership and past behavior indicates that if Deno or anyone else tries to have a paid offering, there’s a non-zero chance Oracle will come sniffing for low effort money.
It literally wouldn't surprise me if when asked, the legal team simply responded "it's standing policy".
I’m not sure if that’s even possible under US law though.
This would be first event of that kind to my knowledge. I've been coding for 20 years and never heard anyone say anything good about Oracle other than their free hosting tier _is free_. Better late than never I guess!
Whoever thinks it's a good idea to bet on the altruism of a giant faceless corporation is dumb.
"Developer communities" tend to create issues out of thin air, and that I don't like.
In this case I'm siding with Oracle.
Only because you don't understand Trademarks. They are not copyrights.
Trademarks exists to protect consumers, so they don't mix together companies and products that have too similar name or branding. So somebody can't release a product called iPhona for $600 in the hopes that somebody will overlook the typo and order it instead of an iPhone for $600.
If a company is not offering a product based on a trademark, that trademark should actively be removed. Oracle is not using the JavaScript trademark.
[0] https://www.globalnerdy.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/oracl... (can't find original XKCD, sorry)
So, is "X abuses IP law" hatred is out of principle or because folks seem to be in love with Sun and Google and hate Oracle and Microsoft.
Seems pretty similar to what's happening today.
Honestly, oracle is a pretty effective containment vessel for fine legal minds.