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Comment by kossmoboleat | Hacker News Reader

I don't think any customer would like this.

As a former Oracle employee (also there via acquisition) I can confirm that they don't care at all about anything but the money. If adware makes money, that's OK for them. And, yes, they don't care about nerd outrage and I'm also sure that CxOs of Fortune 1000 companies don't care about adware (or us) too. Even if they care (and they probably not), they cannot afford to avoid Oracle DB and/or Java in any case. I'm sure they try in many ways to avoid to spend the insane amount of money Oracle products cost.

Ah, and yes: it is an awful place to work. For the same reason: they don't care about anything but money... Employees are COGs, nothing more, nothing less. If you find the right niche, you can live a quiet salaried life there for some years, btw... like probably in any other giant company.

Anyone care to explain how they somehow haven't ruined VirtualBox yet?

It's on the way. The performance and feature gap between VMWare and Virtualbox is widening everyday.

I highly recommend a section of Bryan Cantrill's talk where he covers Oracle - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2100 lasts two or three minutes.

For someone who can't watch videos, can you summarise?

Listen, and understand! That Ellisonator is out there! It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you give it money.

On the contrary, ask.com is quite happy with this. They are paying Oracle, therefore they are the customer. You are not.

This is really tragic, since the Java language and VM are nice pieces of technology. Unfortunately Oracle is killing them. I'd never use them for a new project now.

Indeed. JVM used to be widely regarded as crap, and Java as a slow, bloated language. And while Java may still be a bit bloated, it's no longer slow, and JVM became an awesome piece of tech, bringing tons of real advances in things like garbage collection algorithms, and supporting a nice ecosystem of very powerful languages.

So while Java managed to fix its reputation itself, Oracle is doing everything in their power to break it again.

At least we have Ruby, Python, Node, and OpenJDK. They can't ruin every ecosystem.

Come to look at it, you have to work really hard to ruin a programming language. Kudos to Oracle for figuring out how to reach this almost impossible goal. s/.

I'd never use them for a new project now.

Why not? There's a tool called javapackager that makes a self contained app install for Linux, Mac, Windows that doesn't require the user to install the JRE, if you're doing desktop projects. For servers this stuff is irrelevant anyway.

Java is mostly open source too, so if you wanted to make your own system JRE installer setup, I guess you could (though OpenJDK isn't identical to the Oracle JRE).

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