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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

#241

Post by djfergus »

mattzito wrote: post #235
sb8244 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abo…

Great comment, thanks for the details on the specific tech - this is rarely captured in the regular "just replace Oracle with PGSQL" threads on HN.

I think you can add to this the fact that Oracle has been hardening the platform and building/fixing edge cases for 30 years. This goes a long way to preventing procurement departments from moving away from the "no-one got fired for buying " model.

I heard a crazy stat that 99% of Oracle's business ($36B revenue, $9B profit) comes from the top 0.01% of customers (basically the US Govt and the Fortune 10). The average OSS start up is not going to materially affect this.

The real problem (solvable with tech? maybe?) is changing the culture in which big orgs evaluate and procure IT. Otherwise Oracle will just be an attractive exit for startups rather than competition that can be threatened...

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

#242

Post by wcarron »

metachris wrote: post #206
bdcravens wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their primary product (the Oracle DB engine) is being displaced by the NoSQL and things like Postgres. Worth noting they own MySQL (via Sun acquisition)

The developers moved to MariaDB, which is what everyone uses nowadays anyway rather than MySQL.

Patently false. I barely hear any talk about MariaDB whereas I still consistently hear about MySQL. Please define "Everybody" in this context, because it sounds like you've conflated it with "I".

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

#243

Post by WallWextra »

coolgeek wrote: post #237
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 the…

They don't have to be right, they just have to exist in sufficient numbers.

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

#244

Post by bogomipz »

empath75 wrote: post #78
bogomipz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually not true. Their cloud offering is doing really well. There's some impressive figures here: http://realmoney.thestreet.com/articles/09/15/2016/oracles-c...

Growth rate is a nonsense metric. If you're starting from nothing and invest a shitload of money in sales you'll have an amazing growth rate. IBM and Oracle are both way behind azure, google and aws.

>"The figures come even though--as mentioned in the earnings report headline--Oracle's SaaS/PaaS revenue rose 77% in dollars and 79% in CC, totaling $798 million "

$800 million from their cloud offering in a single quarter is nonsense?

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

#245

Post by bane »

mastazi wrote: post #201
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked government contracting they had broad goals handed down which they must work toward without it being an explicit requirement. One of these goals? Get on top of an open source only stack for security, cost and future interoperability between other groups. I worked on several projects where they were originally using Oracle or MarkLogic and we transitioned them to Postgres or various other, open source te…

If you are allowed to and comfortable with it, could you share which country was that? Over the years I have looked at government projects in Western Europe, SE Asia and Australia, Europeans seem to be the ones that care the most about open source, while at the other end of the spectrum SE Asian governments are interested in it just as much as it lets them save money (much less because of "free as in freedom"). Austr…

I can say from experience that in the U.S., the procurement people are definitely incentivized to look for solutions built on open standards and open source because of the ability for the government to have the option to not ever have to upgrade again, but to continue servicing this specific procurement (and this specific version) forever and ever and not be beholden to a specific vender or solution provider.

I've even seen cases where one company will sell a solution into the government and lose the maintenance contract the next year to some entirely different company who underbid the original provider -- and there's minimal slowdown in technical execution because the entire stack is open to some degree.

The government is starting to develop an allergy to vendor lock-in because of this.

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

#246

Post by euyyn »

Spivak wrote: post #62
ak4g wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't it be fair use? What exactly is your understanding of what the criteria are?

* Purpose of the use -- Gogole's use wasn't transformative, in fact it was explicitly the opposite. * Nature of the use -- Google could try to argue that their use was for the public benefit, but since the Android platform exists for business interests it probably shouldn't qualify. * Amount and Substantiality -- Google basically took it all. There's no case here. They took not just the signatures but their semantic…

> At least that's what their lawyer claims.

Of course he would, that's his job. How does Android "directly hurt" Oracle?

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

#247

Post by vosper »

metachris wrote: post #206
bdcravens wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their primary product (the Oracle DB engine) is being displaced by the NoSQL and things like Postgres. Worth noting they own MySQL (via Sun acquisition)

The developers moved to MariaDB, which is what everyone uses nowadays anyway rather than MySQL.

Facebook, YouTube and Google are still massive users of MySQL. And MySQL development is moving along (admittedly after not much for a few years). I doubt MariaDB really figures compared to MySQL in industry use, or new installs.

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

#248

Post by rifung »

Teever wrote: post #199
apathy wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google wasn't evil, at least not before the IPO (which is when I worked there). People took the slogan seriously and based decisions on it. I don't know what happened.

The people that intended to do evil merely waited until those who didn't intend to do so finished implementing the things they were implementing. Then they used that sound infrastructure to do evil with, as they had intended to do all along. Those people that took the slogan seriously were used.

Those are very damning accusations. Care to give some examples?

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

#249

Post by bitmapbrother »

revelation wrote: post #90
bogomipz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually not true. Their cloud offering is doing really well. There's some impressive figures here: http://realmoney.thestreet.com/articles/09/15/2016/oracles-c...

Just like IBM is the leader in cloud solutions, did you hear? It's smoke and mirrors to make sure that when the next quarter rolls around, they have some growth to show in what the market believes is "the next big thing".

IBM is such a leader in cloud computing that they have their employees use Box instead of SoftLayer. Any company that can't even eat their own dog food are incompetent and should be avoided.

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

#250

Post by [deleted] »

parthdesai wrote: post #202
empath75 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growth rate is a nonsense metric. If you're starting from nothing and invest a shitload of money in sales you'll have an amazing growth rate. IBM and Oracle are both way behind azure, google and aws.

I have a friend who works at IBM he tells me that IBM uses Google cloud for some of their stuff. The irony when you are a cloud provider but use another service.

[deleted]
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