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Oracle finally targets Java non-payers – six years after plucking Sun

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Oracle finally targets Java non-payers – six years after plucking Sun

#31

Post by Bombthecat »

xenadu02 wrote: post #21
krylon wrote: post #5

Bryan Cantrill has called Oracle the North Star of Rage - whenever you are confused or lost, you can realign your coordinate system relative to Oracle. I have never had to deal with Oracle, but every time I read something about them in the news, I think of of that nice quote and tend to agree a little more with Mr. Cantrill. On the other hand, I wonder why they do this? This can only hurt Java. I would imagine some c…

Let me tell you... my company got acquired by Oracle. We thought things would be OK. Nothing changed immediately. Slowly but surely they turned the screws. 5 year laptop replacement policy. You get the corporate standard laptop and you'll like it. Sales? Oh those guys can buy new Macs every two years, they get whatever they want. Then you understand where Software Engineers rank in the company hierarchy. Oracle took…

IBM is doing the same thing.axway too. And I bet a ton of others too.

Making money is no soooo easy: hire sales,drain the engeneers.

Re: Oracle finally targets Java non-payers – six years after plucking Sun

#32

Post by krylon »

smonff wrote: post #29
krylon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! I did not even know that existed!

Also, OpenJDKs packages exists for various GNU/Linux distributions.

That I did know. ;-)

But I work as a sysadmin at a Windows shop, and deploying the JRE on ~80 machines has been a real pain so far. With an MSI package, I can just use a GPO.

Re: Oracle finally targets Java non-payers – six years after plucking Sun

#33

Post by smoyer »

Bombthecat wrote: post #28
random3 wrote: post #10

Oracle will become the new SCO :) That said, the article is a bit fuzzy. For example, if you want to use Flight Recorder you have to explicitly enable commercial features UnlockCommercialFeatures. This is however free for non-production use. That is "designing, developing and testing" http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/terms/license/... > A. COMMERCIAL FEATURES. You may not use the Commercial Features for…

Oracle won't die anytime soon.the database from oracle is just too good for big data.

I don't find it better than PostgreSQL for most applications but their sales department is much stronger. In the enterprise, many applications are sold specifically to run with the Oracle system. Oracle's other products can be a mish-mash - Peoplesoft is a horrible mess (my favorite line during the sales process was "PeopleCode is a Javascript like language that compiles into COBOL - later we found that the COBOL compiler wasn't included in our quote).

I do need to say that there's a lot of humor available with Oracle - watching Ellison's keynote at Oracle OpenWorld made me think I was hearing about AWS. Every product he talked about was cloud-this and cloud-that. Who knew that every product Oracle ever made was part of the cloud? He also trotted out the idea that you could create applications without developers by demonstrating an application he made himself - I guess he's representative of a typical administrative assistant?

Re: Oracle finally targets Java non-payers – six years after plucking Sun

#34

Post by quantumhobbit »

donatj wrote: post #26
bitmapbrother wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java isn't going anywhere. C#, though, does seem to be dying.

I have literally no idea what would lead you to that conclusion. C# has been growing by leaps and bounds.

It depends where you are. My company switched to Java from C# because the right executives heard about open source. If you ask most managers around here C# might as well be COBOL and Java is a brand new language( certainly not something from the 90's originally intended for cable box menus).

So there are certainly bubbles where C# is dying if only for stupid reasons.

Re: Oracle finally targets Java non-payers – six years after plucking Sun

#35

Post by zzalpha »

paulstovell wrote: post #27
xenadu02 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me tell you... my company got acquired by Oracle. We thought things would be OK. Nothing changed immediately. Slowly but surely they turned the screws. 5 year laptop replacement policy. You get the corporate standard laptop and you'll like it. Sales? Oh those guys can buy new Macs every two years, they get whatever they want. Then you understand where Software Engineers rank in the company hierarchy. Oracle took…

> Oracle took the average price of our product from $100k to $5 million for the same size deals. Our sales went from $5-7m to more than $40m with no increasing in engineering headcount (team of 15) Not that I like the Oracle sales model, but that is impressive. Playing devils advocate, perhaps they are justified to treat sales so well.

Yeah, I was a bit baffled that was cited as a failure of some kind.

This just tells me pre-acquistion they weren't charging what the market would bear for their product, by a factor of 50.

Which is probably one of the reasons Oracle bought the company in this first place.

Re: Oracle finally targets Java non-payers – six years after plucking Sun

#36

Post by BoorishBears »

quantumhobbit wrote: post #34
donatj wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have literally no idea what would lead you to that conclusion. C# has been growing by leaps and bounds.

It depends where you are. My company switched to Java from C# because the right executives heard about open source. If you ask most managers around here C# might as well be COBOL and Java is a brand new language( certainly not something from the 90's originally intended for cable box menus). So there are certainly bubbles where C# is dying if only for stupid reasons.

What a strange time to switch to java, with MS acquiring Xamarin and dotnet core

Re: Oracle finally targets Java non-payers – six years after plucking Sun

#37

Post by satysin »

BoorishBears wrote: post #36
quantumhobbit wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends where you are. My company switched to Java from C# because the right executives heard about open source. If you ask most managers around here C# might as well be COBOL and Java is a brand new language( certainly not something from the 90's originally intended for cable box menus). So there are certainly bubbles where C# is dying if only for stupid reasons.

What a strange time to switch to java, with MS acquiring Xamarin and dotnet core

AFAIK .NET Core offers nothing of any value for cross-platform GUI though. There is Xamarin.Forms but last I looked at things it was pretty shit compared to Java's offerings.

Re: Oracle finally targets Java non-payers – six years after plucking Sun

#38

Post by BoorishBears »

satysin wrote: post #37
BoorishBears wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a strange time to switch to java, with MS acquiring Xamarin and dotnet core

AFAIK .NET Core offers nothing of any value for cross-platform GUI though. There is Xamarin.Forms but last I looked at things it was pretty shit compared to Java's offerings.

Xamarin.Forms isn't really equivalent to any (commonly used) Java options. Something like GTK# or WinForms+Monk would. There's also Eto and Avalon "in the pipeline" so to speak.

To me neither Java nor C# does well at WORA UIs but they are at parity imo. JavaFx isn't bad, but it doesn't do anything the C# offerings can't do fairly easily.

I'm actually a fan of Qt for true cross-platform apps these days myself

Re: Oracle finally targets Java non-payers – six years after plucking Sun

#39

Post by satysin »

BoorishBears wrote: post #38
satysin wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK .NET Core offers nothing of any value for cross-platform GUI though. There is Xamarin.Forms but last I looked at things it was pretty shit compared to Java's offerings.

Xamarin.Forms isn't really equivalent to any (commonly used) Java options. Something like GTK# or WinForms+Monk would. There's also Eto and Avalon "in the pipeline" so to speak. To me neither Java nor C# does well at WORA UIs but they are at parity imo. JavaFx isn't bad, but it doesn't do anything the C# offerings can't do fairly easily. I'm actually a fan of Qt for true cross-platform apps these days myself

Agreed on Qt.

Re: Oracle finally targets Java non-payers – six years after plucking Sun

#40

Post by coleca »

zzalpha wrote: post #35
paulstovell wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oracle took the average price of our product from $100k to $5 million for the same size deals. Our sales went from $5-7m to more than $40m with no increasing in engineering headcount (team of 15) Not that I like the Oracle sales model, but that is impressive. Playing devils advocate, perhaps they are justified to treat sales so well.

Yeah, I was a bit baffled that was cited as a failure of some kind. This just tells me pre-acquistion they weren't charging what the market would bear for their product, by a factor of 50. Which is probably one of the reasons Oracle bought the company in this first place.

It also could be that Oracle realized the customers had some degree of perceived lock-in, so they jacked the price up to milk the customers dry on license renewal time. The customers paid once because they had little alternative, but started their transition to something new as soon as they could. The well will run dry quickly. They do the same thing with Oracle DB license audits, and burned CIOs pay the penalty and instruct their teams to start removing as much Oracle as they can as fast as they can so it doesn't happen again.
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