[jiggawatts]

Have you noticed the curious absence of independent commercial database or cloud platform benchmarks? If you publicly post benchmarks of most commercial database products or public cloud services, you'll get a scary letter from some expensive lawyers threatening to end your career, bankrupt you, and ruin your life.

They're not secret police because they're not secret, and they're not police. But in the same way, even if you broke no laws, they will punish you all the same. Small people punishing other small people for angering their "betters".

Explain to me how this is better.

[conradfr]

In the audio world people release plugins named "American Amp" or "Famous British Console".

I wonder if you could post benchmarks of a "Big American Database" and get away with it.

[rank0]

This can’t be true. Where are you getting this info?

[pepperberg]

Have a look at Google Cloud Platform's ToS:

"Benchmarking. Customer may conduct benchmark tests of the Services (each a "Test"). Customer may only publicly disclose the results of such Tests if it (a) obtains Google's prior written consent, (b) provides Google all necessary information to replicate the Tests, and (c) allows Google to conduct benchmark tests of Customer's publicly available products or services and publicly disclose the results of such tests."

https://cloud.google.com/terms/service-terms

[wayneftw]

I thought that people regularly ignored things like EULAs without running into legal problems. Who even reads them?

I guess you'd get in trouble when you go to publish the results, but we probably would have heard about that by now if it ever happened with Google.

[jiggawatts]

https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2018/05/the-dewitt-clause-...

https://dwheeler.com/essays/dewitt-clause.html

[tomrod]

It would seem this should be easy to work around. Simply assign the worst possible benchmark value since test cannot be conducted and make annotation as to why. Infinite time to run a query since benchmarking requires sneakernet approval from commercial provider, or some such.

Put open source in the best possible light and highlight the DeWitt clause at the same time.

[schmorptron]

I've also heard this exact same thing from my Databases professor about Oracle and their products.

[t8sr]

Are you suggesting that if you post a performance benchmark about a commercial database that you’ll get threatened with legal action? Do you have anything to back that up? It sounds far fetched, and a cursory search finds many such benchmarks on random people’s blogs.

[spijdar]

It's present in the EULA for many databases, etc in http://download.microsoft.com/documents/useterms/SQL%20Serve...

"e.Benchmark Testing. You may not disclose the results of any benchmark test of either the Server Software or Client Software to any third party without Microsoft’s prior written approval."

Hasty addition: I doubt random benchmarks would be threatened with legal action -- but the key is you are technically breaking your license agreement by posting a benchmark. I'm sure the likelihood of whatever DB company pursuing action depends on both the company, who you are, and in what avenue you posted your benchmark.

If you're well known, have a large audience, and publish a bad benchmark of Oracle DB, I would be very surprised if Oracle didn't contact you directly and demand some action.

[Semaphor]

They’d be hard-pressed to make that case in Germany (or the EU actually, as they took our laws in that regard), the EULA has to follow the pretty strict regulations for AGBs which also can’t contain surprising clauses.

This is only for B2C though.

[BiteCode_dev]

Doesn't matter if that doesn't hold in court. The whole problem is that loosing in court has no cost for them, but just going to court is a net loss for you.

[gsnedders]

That depends on the country; losing in court could have the cost of your legal fees for them in some countries.

[BiteCode_dev]

Again, doesn't matter. Ruling takes years. If you take $40k from me to give them back to me 7 years later, I'm still screwed. Not to mention time, energy, stress, uncertainty, and the lost of opportunity.

It's all cost for me, none for them, just to make them behave decently in the first place.

[tzs]

I believe that most of that clauses are there for tit for tat reasons. Someone (Oracle?) was the first to do one--and then they published comparative benchmarks showing that their product was better than the competitors.

The competitors could not respond with counter comparisons due to the first company's license, and so instead they added their own prohibitions to stop the first company.

Some of them just adopted the same blanket prohibition, but some were more subtle, going for reciprocity rather than prohibition--you could not publish benchmarks comparing their product to others unless you could grant or obtain for them permission to also publish benchmarks doing the same comparison. Some also required that you publish complete details of your testing so that it could be reproduced.

I don't know if anyone still uses the reciprocity approach. I'd expect that there would be plenty of loopholes that someone (Oracle?) could use to get around it that any big player using it would have given up and went for a straight prohibition.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

> I believe that most of that clauses are there for tit for tat reasons. Someone (Oracle?) was the first to do one--and then they published comparative benchmarks showing that their product was better than the competitors.

Actually there is a good story behind it. See: "Larry Ellison allegedly tried to have a professor fired for benchmarking Oracle" [0] and the related HN discussion. [1]

[0] https://danluu.com/anon-benchmark/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886333

[simonh]

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12115397/is-it-against-l...

Speeding is illegal but people do it all the time. Small time blogs posting a few numbers might not rise to the attention of the big dogs, but their license terms are clear and Oracle for sure has threatened action in the past.