Mastodawn

rgbDesigner Sep 17, 2024

What's funny about Oracle is like, most tech companies, people probably feel *skeevy* about, but also most tech cos have done 1 thing you Like. Lots of people love their Apple products. You might be annoyed at Google right now but there was probably a time they made you happy in some way. Microsoft? People do like XBoxes. OpenAI has fans!

But NOBODY interacts with Oracle on purpose. Even coders don't *pick* Oracle. There's no brake on you just *resenting* Larry Ellison.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnipresent-ai-cameras-will-ensure-good-behavior-says-larry-ellison/

Omnipresent AI cameras will ensure good behavior, says Larry Ellison

We’re going to have supervision," says billionaire Oracle co-founder Ellison.

Ars Technica

mcc Sep 16, 2024

Most humans go their entire lives without ever having a reason to have a distinct thought about Oracle. But if someone did decide to start developing outright hatred, for Oracle, there would be no cognitive dissonance cost to this. Even if there's an Oracle product you like it's probably something they purchased from another company, and you could always identify at least one way in which they made it worse

Rachel Stantz Sep 16, 2024

@mcc I once described Oracle as a "lich”. I stand by this assessment.

Fiona Sep 16, 2024

@mcc And the one thing they did that could've been positive (releasing Java source) they choose to do in such a messy and annoying way that it certainly doesn't create positive feelings either.

neocat_laugh_sweat

mcc Sep 16, 2024

@airtower "our source is open but our header files? Those are supercopyright"

Fiona Sep 16, 2024

@mcc Also:
1. "Here are some sources that should make a JDK, but good luck building it!"
2. "You still got it to build and want to test standard compliance? Nuh-uh, trade secret, gotta pay a fortune for us to do it!"

Dan Herbert Sep 17, 2024

@mcc I might be misremembering, but I'm pretty sure the API Oracle sued over pre-dated them open sourcing Java. It's one of the reasons the lawsuit was so petty. By the time it had worked its way through the courts, Google had switched over to the open API so they were suing for stuff that no longer applied.

(One of the many reasons why I have strong negative opinions about Oracle)

clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛Sep 24, 2024

@danherbert @mcc The header files were from the GPL-licensed OpenJDK, and Oracle sued Google because Google distributed their own Java implementation under the Apache license and copied the interface definitions. OpenJDK is several years older than Oracle's acquisition of Sun, and Android launched before the acquisition too.

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 Sep 16, 2024

@mcc Hey, many moons ago I personally helped steer a large company away from a US$500K Oracle acquisition, in no small part based on a detailed argument that the vendor was Oracle.

ocdtrekkie Sep 16, 2024

@mcc I wanted to argue with this. Like I like both MySQL and Virtualbox. But I also liked both of them before Oracle had anything to do with them... and I certainly couldn't pin anything Oracle did that actually made them *better* in any way.

I feel like something something their ERP platforms at a certain scale have to make *someone* happy? Right? Somehow?

Raven667 Sep 16, 2024

@ocdtrekkie @mcc oh God no, what a weird glitchy web0.5 piece of shit.

Jim Winstead Sep 16, 2024

@mcc Sometimes I wonder if it helps or hurts that I have Oracle on my resume, or I should just call my time in those trenches MySQL all the way through.

It’s funny to me that they seem to rarely be included when you see lists of big tech companies.

Kelson Sep 17, 2024

@mcc This.

Often more than one way.

Kelson Sep 17, 2024

@mcc And as someone who's used both MySQL and Java since before Oracle bought them... 💢

The Doctor Sep 17, 2024

@mcc And they are indescribably lucky.

Adam ♿Sep 17, 2024

@mcc Here's another reason to think about it, Megan Ellison, Larry's daughter, founded Annapurna {Interactive, Studios}

Haelwenn /элвэн/

@mcc In fact biggest reasons I have for hating Oracle is how much they destruction they did on Sun's products.

Susanna the Artist 🌻Sep 17, 2024

@mcc Right now, the Oracle implementation is the shining beacon of hope in our enterprise IT system, which should tell you just how horrific the old system is.

@mcc "don't make the mistake of humanizing Larry Ellison"

arclight Sep 17, 2024

@mcc I did my time as an unwilling Oracle admin. I'm ambivalent about the software - it's a pile of intractable legacy, more tedious 'meh' than anything. But Ellison has spent at least three decades justifying being yeeted into the sun. He's ine of the original overfunded authoritarian tech dbag - nobody should lose sleep over despising Ellison.

Pär Björklund Sep 17, 2024

@mcc if you're in the Java ecosystem, GraalVM is extremely good and impressive despite being an oracle product

mcc Sep 17, 2024

@Paxxi it sounds like the engineering on the last ten years or so of Java has been absolutely great! I cannot use it because I don't want to hire a lawyer

Jason Fowler Sep 17, 2024

@mcc mySQL and Java are the okay products that Oracle bought

Billy O'Neal Sep 17, 2024

@mcc @PeterSommerlad obligatory @lmanul https://goomics.net/62/

Goomics 62

Compromise_bi_flag

@mcc Part of why I like Oracle Cloud's free tier of services is because it costs them money to give me something.

There's a certain poetic humor to it.

наб Sep 16, 2024

@mcc even the ars technica writers fell into the classic trap of anthropomorphising larry ellison :/

@mcc there's Oracle VM VirtualBox. I don't understand how and why it continues to exist but I feel like I should stop talking before it stops existing

Tim Sep 16, 2024

@tendstofortytwo @mcc virtual box, like the jvm, came from their acquisition of Sun. I too am surprised in both cases they haven’t managed to screw them up, though I stopped following Java after Oracle got their hands on it and sued Google over trying to implement its APIs.

mcc Sep 16, 2024

@stiv @tendstofortytwo that's what I was thinking, yeah.

ShadSterling Sep 16, 2024

@stiv @tendstofortytwo @mcc didn’t they wreck the licensing for everything Java-related? Something like changing the license for new releases to remove the guarantee that you can always keep using it without paying license fees, IIRC

@ShadSterling @stiv @tendstofortytwo @mcc yeah and they also absolutely fucked downloading runtimes for anything more recent than Java 1.8 (from what I remember)

The only reason I still have to deal with Java crap is Minecraft and OWASP ZAP. At least Microsoft is smart enough to actually include a JRE with the game so players don't have to deal with Oracle's inexplicable decisions

vriska, thief of light

@beeoproblem @ShadSterling @stiv @tendstofortytwo @mcc this is iirc explicitly to encourage applications to ship their own JRE instead of using the system one, since they no longer have a hard backwards compat guarantee

@leo @ShadSterling @stiv @tendstofortytwo @mcc I guess I should be directing some of my ire onto OWASP then in that case.

Still seems like a really bad idea RE security patching. Instead of one tool managing some number of installed runtimes it's an unbounded number of tools which may or may not be secure themselves all needing to maintain JRE installs separately.

ShadSterling Sep 17, 2024

@leo @beeoproblem @stiv @tendstofortytwo @mcc I remember when the point of Java was portability. If you have to ship yet another copy of the JRE with each app there’s no portability advantage.
(But I guess it’s no worse than distributing docker containers)

0xC0DEC0DE07EA Sep 17, 2024

@leo what the hell? That is terrible! Yeah, let me just pester the vendors of every single Java-based piece of software I run at work to give me a new release on a monthly basis… that’s going to go well.
We literally delete the censored JRE and symlink back to the system-managed one. I suppose when Fortify or Squish or whatever breaks based on a JRE compatible issue, I know who to tell the security folks to be mad at…
@beeoproblem @ShadSterling @stiv @tendstofortytwo @mcc

@c0dec0dec0de @leo @ShadSterling @stiv @tendstofortytwo @mcc I know right.

Because nothing says security like maximizing the number of folks/systems you need to trust in order to stay up to date.

Meg Sep 16, 2024

@tendstofortytwo @mcc yeah I think VirtualBox might be the only real exception. It only spent one year as an independent project, then two years as part of Sun, before being acquired into Oracle, and I think that I've never known it as anything but an Oracle product (since I came to it through vagrant).

In that time it's never gotten really worse or better that I know of, it's just kind of there and really is the only open source desktop virtualization software worth much afaik.

The Doctor Sep 17, 2024

@tendstofortytwo @mcc I remain surprised they haven't killed it yet.

ShadSterling Sep 16, 2024

@mcc I used to think Oracle and Ellison had at least earned respect for making some very good database implementations, but this looks like it at least counteracts whatever was left of that.

(The one time I used any Oracle products it was enterprise servers chosen by a third-party provider, and it seemed no worse than the rest of the enterprise market)

@mcc I can appreciate Oracle for seemingly killing Java for all new projects nearly instantly. Of course I also hate them because it's a huge pain in the ass to get an up to date JRE when I need one because of their bullshit.

But, yeah, awful company run by awful people.

Neil Kandalgaonkar Sep 16, 2024

@mcc I also thought this was true and then I met a techie who thought Oracle Cloud was legit

Allan Chow Sep 17, 2024

@mcc when an org operates on the strength of their sales org you have to question it

Karl Auerbach Sep 17, 2024

@mcc My first interaction with Oracle happened around 1980. I was at Interactive Systems (the first commercial Unix company, in Santa Monica). We had a Unix layer on top of VAX/VMS and Oracle sent a sales team to us to make sure that their database worked on that foundation. However, the Oracle people insisted that we modify and tune our OS code to make Oracle run better and faster than their competition. They wanted us to cheat for them.

Neil E. Hodges Sep 17, 2024

@mcc We paid so much to what the government was directly doing that we ignored corporations' work on creating a for-profit surveillance state. :/

Methylzero Sep 17, 2024

@mcc Sure, it might reduce people littering and spitting on the ground everywhere in public, but at what cost? Also this crap is straight outta Westworld S03, in the worst ways.

The Doctor Sep 17, 2024

@mcc Oracle doesn't have customers. It has hostages.

`Da Elf Sep 17, 2024

@drwho @mcc This is Truth.

Glyph Sep 17, 2024

@mcc @jalefkowit oracle gave me a really good cloud computer for free :-(

Glyph Sep 17, 2024

@mcc @jalefkowit (your point is otherwise well taken; this is one reason I am a little reluctant to recommend the aforementioned free computer despite the fact that it is objectively an excellent deal)

mcc Sep 17, 2024

@glyph @jalefkowit Google gave me a pretty good cloud computer for free… then they took it away

Now I don't use cloud computers unless I'm paying for them. If I'm paying $N for the cloud computer then I believe in the future I will continue to pay $N for it and I know exactly what N is. If I'm paying $0 for the cloud computer then I believe in the future I will be paying $X but I don't know what X is

Glyph Sep 17, 2024

@mcc @jalefkowit this one comes with a stronger commitment that it will be $0 than I have received from other providers that it would remain $N. My previous provider, who shall remain nameless, started at $5/mo and through a series of end-of-life shell-game maneuvers eventually expected me to pay $75/mo for an equivalent service. So I tend to think of these things as price-over-time, and remain able to pivot off to a new provider with continuous local backups and ephemeral containers

Glyph Sep 17, 2024

@mcc @jalefkowit this commitment is hardly ironclad and I assume it may go away at some point, but I estimate using it for the last few years has saved me at least $500 by this point https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm

Always Free Resources

Learn what Always Free resources are available to all Oracle Cloud Infrastructure users.

Glyph Sep 17, 2024

@mcc @jalefkowit I should note that I have used oracle databases professionally at 3 jobs previously so we are still like $40,000 in the hole in terms of goodwill here, but it’s made an appreciable dent

Darius Kazemi Sep 17, 2024

@glyph it took me until this point in the thread to realize "cloud computer" did not mean "dumb terminal"

Glyph Sep 17, 2024

@darius by "dumb terminal" do you mean like a Sun Ray or is there some more contemporary version of this