My experience is that, at my first job out of college, I found out while learning SQL on the corp dev sandbox (specifically allocated for prototyping and learning SQL) that one of the functions I'd invoked had been part of some special function that we hadn't purchased. Not having purchased it didn't mean that the function was removed or deactivated or paywalled - instead, it meant that it would work and increment the "number of times this feature has been used" flag that the Oracle auditors could have used to charge my company millions and millions of extra dollars because we were using the feature.
Ask HN: Is Oracle that much more evil than other big companies?
31–40 of 54 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Oracle that much more evil than other big companies?
#32Oracle is “most evil” because they maximise the harm they can do legally and have mastered the art of lock-in and rent seeking. Often they will even acquire companies to expand the rent seeking empire. Their flagship product has strict legal requirements that you are never allowed to publish benchmarks of comparable systems and believe me they have the legal force on staff to pursue you indefinitely. They very much d…
I'd say Netflix propagandizes heavily, and they're trying to move to an ad model, and Apple does the vendor lock in thing extremely effectively.
Re: Ask HN: Is Oracle that much more evil than other big companies?
#33Oracle is “most evil” because they maximise the harm they can do legally and have mastered the art of lock-in and rent seeking. Often they will even acquire companies to expand the rent seeking empire. Their flagship product has strict legal requirements that you are never allowed to publish benchmarks of comparable systems and believe me they have the legal force on staff to pursue you indefinitely. They very much d…
Netflix is a major force behind the development and uptake of web DRM, which I'd consider pretty evil.
Re: Ask HN: Is Oracle that much more evil than other big companies?
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you think so? I did think this too until about 6 years ago but with them basically buying all of open source and AI, I kind of can’t help but use and love the products they now own. What damage to they currently do?
His comment has merit. Microsoft controls something like 90% of desktop computer marketshare and turned them into malicious adware & spyware platforms overnight.
Ok - but don't use that platform? I mean it is not like you can't switch to a Mac and avoid that whole ecosystem anymore.
Re: Ask HN: Is Oracle that much more evil than other big companies?
#35More than other big tech companies: ye. Oracle's deception machine begins with the claim that it's a tech company. It is not. It's a litigation company, not dissimilar to what we now call "patent trolls". Their business model is to infiltrate themselves into a company by any means necessary, then hold it hostage using their law department tentacles.
Have you ever noticed how their products never - ever - improve over time? Thy don't have to innovate. If they fall too much behind on a segment, they just buy some new product. To me, that's their most evil aspect. I don't care if some corporation gets held hostage by some other corporation. Let the billionaires fight to death, I don't care. The sad externality of it is the death of innovation.
Re: Ask HN: Is Oracle that much more evil than other big companies?
#36Oracle is known for being very aggressive with litigation and legal threats, exceptionally so even vs the other tech giants. On the other hand, I know an oracle dev that suffered a horrible accident and took two years to rehabilitate. Oracle kept him on paid leave that whole time despite it being unrelated to the workplace and past their usual policy. So based on that my understanding of them now is that they're more…
> they're more than a bit hostile/malignant to those outside the mothership, but not necessarily evil to each other inside it.
Like the Mafia.
Re: Ask HN: Is Oracle that much more evil than other big companies?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
His comment has merit. Microsoft controls something like 90% of desktop computer marketshare and turned them into malicious adware & spyware platforms overnight.
Ok - but don't use that platform? I mean it is not like you can't switch to a Mac and avoid that whole ecosystem anymore.
I love and hate this response. The vast majority of people don’t know or care, and I always question if the things that bother me even matter.
I just need to make windows work for video games, but it kills me that I can’t make a 1 laptop lifestyle work.
Re: Ask HN: Is Oracle that much more evil than other big companies?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you think so? I did think this too until about 6 years ago but with them basically buying all of open source and AI, I kind of can’t help but use and love the products they now own. What damage to they currently do?
Could you post a few examples of what good they did to open source? Genuinely curious.
They are also one of the most major contributors of CPython, which is the default implementation of Python. Especially in London they have a dedicated team, Faster CPython team, which (unsurprisingly) concentrates on improving performance of CPython. The team contains big name like the creator of Python, Guido van Rossum.
Re: Ask HN: Is Oracle that much more evil than other big companies?
#39Unsurprisingly -- and as happens almost reflexively on any HN post involving Oracle -- my talk from LISA 2011[0] has already been cited here. I expanded on that in my OSCON 2015 talk[1], to which I would add this: thinking about Oracle as "evil" is really the wrong way of thinking about them; to think of them as diabolical is to infuse the place with a kind of humanity (if crooked) that it doesn't necessarily contain. Oracle is soulless, which may or may not be worse than other companies, but it is decidedly different: however deluded they might be, Meta thinks that they are making the world a better place; Oracle not only doesn't harbor any such delusions, they are further genuinely confused why anyone would care about a higher purpose or calling.
Re: Ask HN: Is Oracle that much more evil than other big companies?
#40If you're an IC at an Oracle customer and you have to interact with their products, you may have a very valid reason to hate them. The people who make purchasing decisions love them. As long as you pay the ransom, Oracle loves you back. The lawyers can be very friendly if you know to stay on their good side.
This is definitely not true. A long time ago I was working for a smallish company and we were choosing between MSSQL and Oracle. Microsoft pricing was up front. Oracle is “call us and talk”. This immediately made Oracle a non starter. When I was at AWS, we could create all of the AWS accounts we wanted and do basically anything we wanted in internal accounts as long as it was tangentially work related or just to expe…
Oh, that makes sense to me. If you're a smallish company, you're not the target market. Not just Oracle, but any big cloud vendor won't lift a finger for smaller contracts.
If you're a big company, your C suite will be inundated with slick advertising from Oracle, in airports, on MSNBC, in person via networking.
If you're a big company, their sales people will call you, and then they'll find some problems from the top down that Oracle can Supercharge for you.
Think of it like restaurants that don't show prices. If you're very price sensitive, you're not the target market. You don't want them and they don't want to haggle with you. It's not worth spending a lot of sales effort over a small contract
(But I find the AWS story pretty telling! Seems they developped immunity the hard way from a past encounter)