Having gone through an IRS audit (spoiler alert: I do not recommend.), I can't imagine anyone willingly signing any sort of contract with a private company that allows them to treat you the same way.
'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit
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Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit
#92As the old saying goes: oracle has no customers, only hostages.
Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
oracle products aren't really products you can ditch in most cases. generally what it takes to get rid of them is to go out of business and be replaced by a business that isn't an oracle customer. i had a very interesting thread about that dynamic on here with pamar three weeks ago, which will be very interesting reading for anyone who is wondering why people don't ditch oracle https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39…
Thanks for pointing that thread out!
I think the missing piece from that exchange is the reality that a lot of surviving, legacy, mission critical applications is that they are generally internal to large companies and have grown over decades to encapsulate business processes for entire industries. Consider an application that has been under active development for 30-40 years by 10-100 developers. The cost to rewrite is staggering, and the risk of failure is huge.
Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Far easier said than done. And that you mentioned MySQL/MariaDB as a possible replacement means that you have never worked with Oracle's SQL dialect.
Oracle even has its own proprietary, alternate JOIN syntax. The devil is always in the details.
Empty strings "" being NULL was a hidden issue I remember causing problems.
Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit
#95Got an email from oracle recently that said (paraphrased): "We saw downloads for virtual box from your IP address but no licenses for your organization. Please let us know when is a suitable time to meet to explain the benefits of being licensed correctly."
Going through this at my employer and it's not VirtualBox they are inquiring about. VirtualBox is open source but the VirtualBox Extensions pack that gives useful features (usb passthrough, pxe booting, VM encryption, etc) isn't open source and Oracle changed the licensing around it sometime around 2018 to require payment.
Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is there such a big disconnect between HN opinion on Oracle and business use? Is it maybe the least bad of all the bad options? Does it cover some edge cases which the obvious FOSS solutions don’t?
Tech people are those, who have to fix everything once SHTF. Business people are those, who get to go to nice trips and dinners for their "right" decision. Any other questions?
Greasy palms have no qualms!
Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit
#97Got an email from oracle recently that said (paraphrased): "We saw downloads for virtual box from your IP address but no licenses for your organization. Please let us know when is a suitable time to meet to explain the benefits of being licensed correctly."
Docker also does this too for their Desktop product.
If any dev downloads and installs it within your org expect an email from them to check up on your licensing.
Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
oracle products aren't really products you can ditch in most cases. generally what it takes to get rid of them is to go out of business and be replaced by a business that isn't an oracle customer. i had a very interesting thread about that dynamic on here with pamar three weeks ago, which will be very interesting reading for anyone who is wondering why people don't ditch oracle https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39…
A smaller company I worked for a few years ago was migrating its old ERP legacy system and brought in some people from Oracle, SAP and Epicor. They decided to go with SAP, but I remember my boss in several lunch meetings saying that they didn't get a sales pitch from the other vendors as much as a litany of horror stories about why they shouldn't go with Oracle. It worked since my manager said he asked around and did…
How does anyone in IT management not know that Oracle is poison?
That blows my mind. I encountered two Oracle audits within 7ish years in the industry, and heard about others. If anyone goes to MIS school, there should probably be a contracts day somewhere in that curriculum, and "don't use Oracle" should be the first bullet point.
Maybe in the 80s and 90s without the internet it might be more hush-hush. But this is now two decades of aggressive Oracle audits. Two decades is a LONG TIME for companies to get off of a vendor.
And now there's Postgres with, what, 30 years of engineering into it? Honestly if your database scale exceeds Postgres, you should be on Cassandra or other specialized database that will actually scale to really large sizes, not some weirdo hyper-hardware Oracle setup.
Virtually every large org has a very involved process for vendor selection. HOW DOES ORACLE SURVIVE THESE? How does any IT organization not have a standing policy of "generally don't use oracle unless you absolutely have to"?
Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a good thing there aren't numerous open source alternative databases that can be hosted by numerous other services then.
Amazon provide multiple database offerings in their cloud, it was still a multiple year effort to move off Oracle: Migration Complete – Amazon’s Consumer Business Just Turned off its Final Oracle Database Today I would like to tell you about an internal database migration effort of this type that just wrapped up after several years of work. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-...
I'm aware.
Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
A smaller company I worked for a few years ago was migrating its old ERP legacy system and brought in some people from Oracle, SAP and Epicor. They decided to go with SAP, but I remember my boss in several lunch meetings saying that they didn't get a sales pitch from the other vendors as much as a litany of horror stories about why they shouldn't go with Oracle. It worked since my manager said he asked around and did…
How does anyone in IT management not know that Oracle is poison? That blows my mind. I encountered two Oracle audits within 7ish years in the industry, and heard about others. If anyone goes to MIS school, there should probably be a contracts day somewhere in that curriculum, and "don't use Oracle" should be the first bullet point. Maybe in the 80s and 90s without the internet it might be more hush-hush. But this is…
postgres dates from 01974, it used to be called ingres, so it has 50 years of engineering, not 30. the 'post' is from when they added 'object-oriented' features to make it 'post-relational'
as i understand it, oracle mostly sells to executives above it management, but there are also lots of executives in it management who aren't as concerned about the survival of their company as they are their own careers. it's hard to point to cases where company failure can be specifically pinned on oracle licensing fees, but since a company running on oracle can never switch away, ultimately there's no reason for oracle to leave any profits for the company shareholders when they could simply extract them in licensing fees. unless the company has pre-existing licensing contracts in place, i guess, and successfully defends them — which it won't be able to do if it fails oracle's licensing audit, and obviously copyright infringement is ubiquitous in every company, so most will fail, and then oracle can alter the deal