Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Story of O(racle)

tbray.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 64 posts

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#31

Post by ciupicri »

jrockway wrote: post #18
maukdaddy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^ More hackers need to understand this. When you go pubic with an IPO, the shareholders are in charge. The Board and CEO are elected on behalf of those shareholders. The Board and CEO's function is to maximize shareholder value. If a CEO doesn't consider an extremely generous bid then he is breaking his fiduciary duty to those shareholders, and will be out of a job.

How did Oracle maximize their value by buying Sun? Sun has Solaris, Java, and VirtualBox. All are free. When Oracle took over, everyone that worked for Sun quit. So Oracle paid a lot of money for a bunch of free stuff. Why?

But they still own the brands and for business people it matters. They can also develop various proprietary extensions.

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#32

Post by ora600 »

Maybe I don't understand the concept of "developer mindshare" well enough but it seems to me that Oracle does engage with the user community and not just the business community.

They do this through user conferences such as Collaborate and ODTUG (which is developer specific) - those conferences are much more technical in nature than the marketing oriented OpenWorld.

Oracle also have the OTN and its ACE program for engaging with the technology people, including forums, beta programs, code sharing site, etc.

And of course, Oracle supports the local user groups which are also technology oriented - many of those user groups are highly critical of many Oracle decisions (and you should have heard the noise when Oracle Support site switched to flash) - but Oracle still supports them because they know that an active user community is essential.

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#33

Post by ora600 »

euroclydon wrote: post #26
jrockway wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true. The higher-ups can say which database to use and hire a bunch of people to set it up. But if the developers ignore them, they have no way of actually determining this. (Which is what's so great about mandates from Higher Up.)

I worked at a place that had a huge Oracle RAC license. We ran non-mission-critical data collection apps on it, but the app which dispensed drugs in real-time, all over the world, not only ran Postgres, but 90% of the business logic was in DB functions.

I would love to hear why you made this decision.

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#34

Post by ora600 »

gvb wrote: post #22
jrockway wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did Oracle maximize their value by buying Sun? Sun has Solaris, Java, and VirtualBox. All are free. When Oracle took over, everyone that worked for Sun quit. So Oracle paid a lot of money for a bunch of free stuff. Why?

Recent history suggests for Sun's patents, not their software. Oracle has claimed they bought Sun for their hardware (e.g. so they could do vertical integration selling like IBM), but that remains to be seen if it is true or not.

Oracle used Sun's hardware to build the Exadata - which they very aggressively sell as a data warehouse solution. Competing with Netezza, Teradata, Greenplum and the likes.

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#35

Post by 10ren »

Sun was a phenomenally successful business - but not at selling software. Software was their way to sell hardware.

A few years back, I wanted to buy stock in a software company, because I was in the software business, knew something about it, and owning stock would result in me learning more, which would benefit me doubly. Out of Sun and Adobe, and choose Sun (still love java); but after I placed the order, I realized that Sun wasn't a software company. It didn't draw significant revenue from software. I tried to change the order to Adobe, but it was too late.

I sold it years later, for half. I don't regret the loss (it's the stockmarket after all), but I do regret mistaking Sun for a software company.

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#36

Post by groaner »

TrevorBramble wrote: post #3

Some might miss the significance of the post title: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_O

Interesting - I first thought of The Wonderful O [1], a children's novel. A wholly different kind of evil there -- the villain would certainly also hate Open sOurce sOftware!

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Wonderful-O-James-Thurber/dp/155611189...

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#37

Post by [deleted] »

sandGorgon wrote: post #30
euroclydon wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a place that had a huge Oracle RAC license. We ran non-mission-critical data collection apps on it, but the app which dispensed drugs in real-time, all over the world, not only ran Postgres, but 90% of the business logic was in DB functions.

I sometimes think that the lack of books for Postgres is because someone is paying to keep them off the market. Every few days on pgsql.general mailing lists, there is someone asking for a good Postgresql book (the "High Performance MySQL" kind) Less books = one more tick mark for Oracle.

[deleted]

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#38

Post by j_baker »

ora600 wrote: post #32

Maybe I don't understand the concept of "developer mindshare" well enough but it seems to me that Oracle does engage with the user community and not just the business community. They do this through user conferences such as Collaborate and ODTUG (which is developer specific) - those conferences are much more technical in nature than the marketing oriented OpenWorld. Oracle also have the OTN and its ACE program for en…

Well of course. I don't doubt that Oracle is aware of their developers' existence and gives them some form of support. But how much of Oracle's time and money goes to developer support compared to companies like Microsoft? Much as I dislike Microsoft, I have to give them credit for engaging their developer community.

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#39

Post by j_baker »

jrockway wrote: post #18
maukdaddy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^ More hackers need to understand this. When you go pubic with an IPO, the shareholders are in charge. The Board and CEO are elected on behalf of those shareholders. The Board and CEO's function is to maximize shareholder value. If a CEO doesn't consider an extremely generous bid then he is breaking his fiduciary duty to those shareholders, and will be out of a job.

How did Oracle maximize their value by buying Sun? Sun has Solaris, Java, and VirtualBox. All are free. When Oracle took over, everyone that worked for Sun quit. So Oracle paid a lot of money for a bunch of free stuff. Why?

Oracle uses a decent amount of Java. It was probably worth it just to control the language's standards and runtime.

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#40

Post by jrockway »

sandGorgon wrote: post #30
euroclydon wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a place that had a huge Oracle RAC license. We ran non-mission-critical data collection apps on it, but the app which dispensed drugs in real-time, all over the world, not only ran Postgres, but 90% of the business logic was in DB functions.

I sometimes think that the lack of books for Postgres is because someone is paying to keep them off the market. Every few days on pgsql.general mailing lists, there is someone asking for a good Postgresql book (the "High Performance MySQL" kind) Less books = one more tick mark for Oracle.

More books = you writing one.

If you won't do it, why should anyone else?

Post reply on HN