[acdha]

That wasn't the only reason why I left one job but their Oracle buy-in was a big factor. Things like paying 7 figures a year for support, and then having the Oracle support manager ask if they could redistribute the hot-patch I made to other customers.

[Spooky23]

Big enterprise vendors are always like that.

My first boss wrote the TCP stack for a long defunct mainframe, which was distributed via a “shared source” program that his employer paid for and eventually was licensed to his employer at significant expense.

[acdha]

Indeed. The primary reason I was so annoyed by that is that this was when (IIRC) IE8 was released, and day one we noticed that their sloppy JavaScript caused an exception which broke the entire UI. That happens but when I contacted enterprise support, I got a surprisingly snotty “we don't beta test Microsoft's software for them” message closing the ticket. They re-opened it when I pointed out that it was the release version and rolling out enterprise-wide to our Windows desktops for security reasons but I was not expecting a fix for a while based on the blow-off (this proved accurate), much less the call from a support manager a couple days later who'd seen in the case notes that I'd mentioned having patched it on our cluster (this was literally one line of code — trivial for any decent web developer).

[_joel]

Early form of PaaS, Plagarism as a Service?

[_joel]

I completely understand, in the same situation myself atm after several years of lean and agile work, somehow ended up having to manage this EBS crap on a new contract (it was only part of the spec). It's a nightmare.