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Comment by spamizbad | Hacker News Reader

One level above junk. Yikes.

The problem with Oracle is how much utterly and directly depends on them. They still are the authoritative source on "what is Java" and stuff like SAP directly depends on Java and in many cases Oracle Database (the supported alternatives are AFAIK IBM's mainframe stuff and MS SQL, but I only ever saw Oracle whenever I had the misfortune of having to dig into SAP).

If Oracle goes down, a lot of businesses are going to be in a lot of trouble, and there will be a lot of fighting over the scraps.

oh no, not the hierarchy of consulting! the horrors. Better grab your nearest gpu and open model to replace them.

SAP has largely switched over to their own HANA database for new deployments. Even before that their "AnyDB" database worked with pretty much any backend and is still supported. The reason you see oracle has less to do with what SAP wants and more to do with "It's what the company/engineers have already used/set up in the past".

Regarding Java, SAP has long switched over to openjdk (though oracle java is supported in some cases). Specifically, they have their own custom fork of openjdk "SapMachine" precisely to be independent from oracle (FYI: if you look at openjdk upstream you will see many core contributors are employed by SAP)

In general, I would say that the actual tech companies that have to interact with oracle's stuff are generally very well equipped to drop them or have already done so. The bigger issue are legacy "consumers" of oracle (e.g. if Pepsi has their data in oracle DB), which often do not have such contingencies.

yeah, like my university's whole accounting system...

It's rare for a large company to simply close down. Usually someone buys it out of bankruptcy, and keeps the profitable parts going. Database licensing definitely makes money.

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