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Oracle refuses to accept pro-Google “fair use” verdict in API battle

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Re: Oracle refuses to accept pro-Google “fair use” verdict in API battle

#231

Post by icebraining »

sam_goody wrote: post #182
nine_k wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He failed to make half the world use his company's products, among other things. BTW I'd appreciate if you gave an example of a highly successful and ethically impeccable company.

Google was ethical under Brin, and it showed when they pulled out of China. None of their units shared data, they had a solid privacy policy. And their main business was search and ads vs. profiling. When Page took over they completely changed course.

Brin wasn't the CEO, that was Eric Schmidt.

Re: Oracle refuses to accept pro-Google “fair use” verdict in API battle

#233

Post by saurik »

magicalist wrote: post #213
saurik wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right: and if you remember, the entire concept of a "platform-specific Java API" is what was at stake when Microsoft lost this very similar lawsuit when Sun sued them over J++. Either what Google is doing is horrible or what Microsoft did shouldn't have been a problem :/.

> Either what Google is doing is horrible or what Microsoft did shouldn't have been a problem Maybe go reread about the case? It was basically breach of contract and thus quite different. The basis of Sun's lawsuit was that Microsoft had a license to implement Java™ and part of that license was the requirement that their version would be compatible as defined by the compatibility test suite. In their attempt to "kill…

Huh! So, there were multiple rounds of lawsuits, and I will admit I missed this (very important) detail of the part that Microsoft actually lost. I think it is still important to note, however, that the main reason any of these companies actually ended up in contracts with Sun was due to Sun's claims to ownership over the language standard itself, and there is some really great phrasing about Sun's feelings on this in this contemporary article from the Wall Street Journal. But again: you are absolutely right about what is different, and I am sorry for not noticing this before :(.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB876241941809073500

Re: Oracle refuses to accept pro-Google “fair use” verdict in API battle

#234

Post by bbanyc »

diebir wrote: post #100

Oracle is set to repeat the trajectory of SCO. Their primary product (the Oracle DB engine) is being displaced by the NoSQL and things like Postgres. The "next generation" of developers equals SQL engines with "old and bad", and when forced, it ends up with Postgres anyway. Oracle used to survive in significant part by the support of the "database administrators" class. This layer of support is also becoming thinner…

I wouldn't count Oracle out just yet. They're still much bigger than SCO or its predecessors ever were. They're also under the same management that built the company up from nothing, whereas SCO was a new management team that took over Caldera and was trying to pivot them to the product they'd just bought from the former Santa Cruz Operation, had no idea what they were doing, and eventually settled on litigation as a business model.

(SCO, amazingly, is still continuing its litigation, despite having no products, employees, or assets remaining. Oral arguments on probably-the-last-appeal are March 22 in Denver.)

Re: Oracle refuses to accept pro-Google “fair use” verdict in API battle

#235

Post by mattzito »

sb8244 wrote: post #227
tlogan wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the following: problems that Oracle products are solving are very hard. On other hand, our SV startup culture is all about making some quick websites and get rich schemes. So the conclusion is: Oracle is here to stay.

What hard problems are they solving that can't be solved with OSS today (tech problems)? I've heard things about their business apps division (business problems) and I can't say I particularly believe in their future there versus smaller focused companies.

So - I'm definitely not willing to go as far as the GP was with their statement, but Oracle's database technology is pretty amazing. I love postgres, Spark, NoSQL, etc. and think the progress they have made is amazing, but Oracle's database from a raw featureset is incredible.

- Shared-something database clustering - true scale-out database clustering without writing sharding logic into your application, worrying about hot spots, or sacrificing significant performance due to overhead

- query offload to storage for bulk reads

- Flashback - someone wrote a bad update that might have messed with some data? You can tell the database to set your view of the database back to before that update to verify, and then decide if you want to move the whole database back, or just extract the records that were changed by that query

- fine-grained permissioning - have a table with credit card numbers in it? Give everyone access to it, but the credit card numbers are all obfuscated

- replication - block-level? statement-level? real-time? real-time with delay? Whatever you want. In fact, you can say "Hey, replicate this database to another datacenter, don't make it synchronous, but don't let it get more than 10 minutes out of sync"

- also, btw, when you need to failover that database, if you're feeling really brave, oracle can do the whole thing for you automatically, because their database client will notify a watcher that a majority of them have lost the necessary access to the database, but can talk to the standby, and the watcher handles the failover

I could go on and on. There's just so much intelligence in the Oracle database platform. Would I ever pay for it? No, it's better to build applications that don't need that level of sophistication. But if you're a big company who doesn't want to write software to be smart about data storage and recovery, Oracle does an amazing job at just guaranteeing your data won't go away.

On the business apps side of things, I think their software is mostly terrible, but I also think that they do focus on problems that OSS typically has not. If you are a manufacturer of satellites, there is probably not an OSS ERP solution that will work for you. If you need to store 300,000 personnel records, there's probably not an OSS HCM solution for you.

None of this means that they're not eventually doomed nor that they're not shitty, but it is very fair to say that their software deals with hard problems that OSS has not typically focused on.

Re: Oracle refuses to accept pro-Google “fair use” verdict in API battle

#236

Post by geodel »

CydeWeys wrote: post #45
faragon wrote: post #40

Oracle should stop that, in my opinion. That attitude could kill Java in the long term.

One wonders how much the taint of Java factored into the decision to invent Go.

There is nothing on GUI side in Go and it does not seem to be priority of core team.

Re: Oracle refuses to accept pro-Google “fair use” verdict in API battle

#237

Post by coolgeek »

diebir wrote: post #100

Oracle is set to repeat the trajectory of SCO. Their primary product (the Oracle DB engine) is being displaced by the NoSQL and things like Postgres. The "next generation" of developers equals SQL engines with "old and bad", and when forced, it ends up with Postgres anyway. Oracle used to survive in significant part by the support of the "database administrators" class. This layer of support is also becoming thinner…

> The "next generation" of developers equals SQL engines with "old and bad"

I think that what you mean is:

  - they don't understand the relational model
  - they don't understand the tradeoffs of ACID vs BASE
  - they never bothered to actually learn SQL
  - they *think* that they have "big data"
Don't get me wrong - there are compelling use cases for, and decent products for, every class of non-relational database.

But there's nothing out there that can handle the general use case like an RDBMS.

Anybody who doesn't understand that isn't qualified to be making organization-wide decisions.

Re: Oracle refuses to accept pro-Google “fair use” verdict in API battle

#238

Post by X86BSD »

pjmlp wrote: post #162
diebir wrote: post #100

Oracle is set to repeat the trajectory of SCO. Their primary product (the Oracle DB engine) is being displaced by the NoSQL and things like Postgres. The "next generation" of developers equals SQL engines with "old and bad", and when forced, it ends up with Postgres anyway. Oracle used to survive in significant part by the support of the "database administrators" class. This layer of support is also becoming thinner…

Maybe for startups, on the enterprise space I am yet to see any customer move away from Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 and similar.

Search YouTube, for "Yandex oracle to PostgreSQL". You would be shocked at how the enterprise space is just sick to death of oracle and once they actually TRY moving off it to PG how much insanely easier, cheaper, and better performance it is for most workloads that people thought they HAD to have oracle for.

Re: Oracle refuses to accept pro-Google “fair use” verdict in API battle

#239

Post by ledgerdev »

ghuntley wrote: post #83
throwaway30121 wrote: post #68

Oracle is such a shit company. There are still some great hackers there but Larry Ellison is an asshole, and I don't envy anyone who has to work for him even indirectly. "Left Oracle's Java business in tatters" eh? Where was their mobile OS? Their Dalvik? The wounds to Java have all been self-inflicted. If they succeed in copyrighting the API then where does this leave OpenJDK? Operating at the mercy of Larry fucking…

fsharp |> welcomes all alienated Java veterans and newbies with open arms!

Any good walk throughs for fsharp on coreclr with vscode?

Re: Oracle refuses to accept pro-Google “fair use” verdict in API battle

#240

Post by jolux »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #175
jolux wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if you could point me to an unbiased source trying to argue the other side of this question, then sure. I really want to know both sides of this issue and it's nearly impossible to find someone separating the quintessential geek love for Google and geek hatred for Oracle from the facts of the case other than Mueller. Honestly I'm all for liberalizing copyrights and fair use but it makes me mad to see Google goin…

> The fair use defense is not meant for multi-billion dollar multinational corporations that tried to shirk licensing by violating copyrights. Just because a giant company wants to be paid, and another giant company could afford to pay them, doesn't mean the bill was justified. Huge companies get access to fair use too. It's the flip side of the fact that noncommercial uses are capable of infringing.

>Just because a giant company wants to be paid, and another giant company could afford to pay them, doesn't mean the bill was justified.

That's not at all what I was saying. All I was saying is that their usage is very clearly not fair use. That is all.

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