For an opinion on the Sun to Oracle transition, there is "Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos" by Bryan M. Cantrill, Joyent. His Larry Ellison rant makes me smile:
https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m00s
Oh god yes. And from the Manta talk, to paraphrase:
I believe that if you talk about Oracle without going into Nazi allegory, than some understanding has been left on the table. In fact, I firmly believe that if you were talking to someone who hadn't heard of WWII but was an Oracle customer, that you would explain the Nazis to them in Oracle allegory:
Wow. Really?
Yes, it's true: Larry Ellison owned a whole country
Oh god! The humanity! Just imagine the licences on that thing
I know, it was terrible dude, just ask Poland
Also, for another excellent talk by Bernhardt, this time about the differences in philosophy between Python and Ruby, which gives a very fair critique of them both: https://vimeo.com/9471538.
I worked for Oracle Social as a software engineer for some Facebook Pages WYSIWYG application, and this is their business model - as explained to me - when I asked, "Who is going to be buying our product?"
My manager: "Oh, so we have all of these enterprise customers that purchase software from us. Basically, they are presented with a list of all of our various enterprise applications [FYI, there's a TON of them] with check boxes next to each one. Our application licenses are sold using a subscription model. Most companies don't bother reading the list and just pay for everything, which will include ours."
WTF? I wrote some of the Ruby on Rails code for the application my team was working on. Also, this was in 2012; Facebook Pages had just been released, and no one even understood why a "Page" was the name given to a concept in which businesses could establish Facebook accounts in order to promote their brand and products, but a "Page" contained multiple "web pages" of content within the larger "Page" object.
In short, our product sucked at every level and even I, a member of the development team, didn't know how to use it. But because it was on the almighty "Product List", it added millions of dollars to Oracle's net income, despite the fact that I'm guessing hardly any customer knew what it was, let alone knew how to use it.
I resigned shortly after the first release, so I have no idea what happened to the product or how long it remained an official Oracle enterprise software application, appearing on the "Product List".
While it was nice being 26 years old and making a $70,000 salary, receiving a nearly-guaranteed $10,000 annual bonus, having a 401k package with company-matched contributions, getting full healthcare benefits which included a FSA, and being able to order all of the free snacks and beverages that one could think of simply by telling the secretary to add them to the supply list . . .
I just couldn't work at a place where innovation didn't matter, the customer didn't matter, and even the product didn't matter. Not to mention that, after having worked there, with 100 other people, for 3 months, maybe 10 people knew my name (and my product team consisted of 8 people - I'm only including 5 of them in the 10). I happened to discover one day that I was the youngest employee there, and I'm pretty sure that people didn't like me based on that fact alone.
Oh well, I applied for a similar job at a digital marketing agency down the street the next week, and soon thereafter, began working again, now earning a salary which was $10,000 greater than what I made at Oracle (and which included all of the same benefits).
As a univerity senior, thank you for this. Oracle was already low on my list of companies to apply to for a full-time job, and this put the nail in that coffin.
If you're in the Seattle area, you still might want to consider Oracle Cloud (I don't work there). They've poached a shit-ton of senior AWS engineering talent, and from what I hear they're developing a kickass product.
/s/Oracle/Intel as a software green badge and this sounds spookily identical to my life right around then too, right down to the salary and people not liking me because I was the youngest employee.
As people usually point out when he comes up, just about any Bryan Cantrill talk is at least entertaining, and usually contains a good amount of technical, historical and personal information in various amounts.
Bryan Cantrill is funny, but I take some of that talk with a dose of salt. See Danese Cooper's youtube comment "I know its fun to re-write history to suit your current politics."
I believe that if you talk about Oracle without going into Nazi allegory, than some understanding has been left on the table. In fact, I firmly believe that if you were talking to someone who hadn't heard of WWII but was an Oracle customer, that you would explain the Nazis to them in Oracle allegory:
Wow. Really?
Yes, it's true: Larry Ellison owned a whole country
Oh god! The humanity! Just imagine the licences on that thing
I know, it was terrible dude, just ask Poland
Also, for another excellent talk by Bernhardt, this time about the differences in philosophy between Python and Ruby, which gives a very fair critique of them both: https://vimeo.com/9471538.