Ask HN: Is Oracle that much more evil than other big companies?

[klecansky]

Every time I see that Oracle release a new product, even open source comments are full of hate for Oracle. But I don't see similar reactions to other big companies, such as Microsoft. So is Oracle really that much worse than the other big companies, or do the other companies just have better marketing targeting the developer?

[dijit]

Oracle is “most evil” because they maximise the harm they can do legally and have mastered the art of lock-in and rent seeking.

Often they will even acquire companies to expand the rent seeking empire.

Their flagship product has strict legal requirements that you are never allowed to publish benchmarks of comparable systems and believe me they have the legal force on staff to pursue you indefinitely.

They very much deserve the reputation they have.

Google, Microsoft et al. throw the community a bone with loss leaders and generate good will by not being especially litigious.

Netflix is basically not evil in any definable way.

Apple is divisive; their biggest issue is that they are awful to work for and have mastered the art of audience segmentation which is why they can charge $400 for 8G of RAM. Which to many feels evil.

Oracle is easily the worst of these.

[friend_and_foe]

I'd say Netflix propagandizes heavily, and they're trying to move to an ad model, and Apple does the vendor lock in thing extremely effectively.

[WillDaSilva]

Netflix is a major force behind the development and uptake of web DRM, which I'd consider pretty evil.

[bcantrill]

Unsurprisingly -- and as happens almost reflexively on any HN post involving Oracle -- my talk from LISA 2011[0] has already been cited here. I expanded on that in my OSCON 2015 talk[1], to which I would add this: thinking about Oracle as "evil" is really the wrong way of thinking about them; to think of them as diabolical is to infuse the place with a kind of humanity (if crooked) that it doesn't necessarily contain. Oracle is soulless, which may or may not be worse than other companies, but it is decidedly different: however deluded they might be, Meta thinks that they are making the world a better place; Oracle not only doesn't harbor any such delusions, they are further genuinely confused why anyone would care about a higher purpose or calling.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc#t=33m2s

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpnncakrelk#t=14m32s

[pixl97]

They aren't exactly evil... They are what happens when you maximize capitalism, and some people do consider that evil.

[danielodievich]

Few years ago I was having a "let's get to know each other" lunch with an account executive . He was very successful in sales in the company we both worked at the time and quite clearly prior to it. So I asked him about his career history. [It is important for this story to note here that this guy is extremely handsome, and knows it] He describing starting as a shoe salesman in women's shoes in Bellevue Nordstrom, as he put it "flirting with all the mothers coming to buy shoes". Checks out. He progresses and a decade and a half later he's an Oracle rep. Eventually, he said, the money was good but he "got tired of being the most hated man in the room".

[sshine]

Did he get hated for being handsome, or for being an Oracle salesman?

[tux3]

If you're an IC at an Oracle customer and you have to interact with their products, you may have a very valid reason to hate them.

The people who make purchasing decisions love them. As long as you pay the ransom, Oracle loves you back. The lawyers can be very friendly if you know to stay on their good side.

[scarface_74]

This is definitely not true. A long time ago I was working for a smallish company and we were choosing between MSSQL and Oracle.

Microsoft pricing was up front. Oracle is “call us and talk”. This immediately made Oracle a non starter.

When I was at AWS, we could create all of the AWS accounts we wanted and do basically anything we wanted in internal accounts as long as it was tangentially work related or just to experiment with a few sensible guardrails like no publicly accessible S3 buckets without permission and no permissions to any accounts that were not also internal employee AWS accounts

The one thing we couldn’t do without a lot of approvals was start up an Oracle RDS instance without approval and justification.

There is a reason Amazon Redshift is called Redshift - it was built to let Amazon shift away from the Red company (Oracle).

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvenEvilHasStand...

[tux3]

Oh, that makes sense to me. If you're a smallish company, you're not the target market. Not just Oracle, but any big cloud vendor won't lift a finger for smaller contracts.

If you're a big company, your C suite will be inundated with slick advertising from Oracle, in airports, on MSNBC, in person via networking.

If you're a big company, their sales people will call you, and then they'll find some problems from the top down that Oracle can Supercharge for you.

Think of it like restaurants that don't show prices. If you're very price sensitive, you're not the target market. You don't want them and they don't want to haggle with you. It's not worth spending a lot of sales effort over a small contract

(But I find the AWS story pretty telling! Seems they developped immunity the hard way from a past encounter)

[scarface_74]

Anyone can go onto AWS and see pricing for anything. I got my start with AWS at a 60 person startup with standard Business support. They go out of their way for any company and their live support is top notch. They once found an obscure issue that took them two days and a support person recreating the issue.

Amazon takes “customer obsession” to the extreme. I saw that from the inside and outside.

Now as far as how they treat their employees. Let’s just say never meet your heroes…

[tux3]

That's fair. We've historically used GCP at $WORKPLACE, so I'm used to a much lighter level of customer support

GCP support people are believed to exist based on available evidence, but further research is required

[scarface_74]

I mean Google has never been known for great customer support. As far as cloud vendors - Microsoft and Amazon are far ahead.

Anything dealing with customers, Google is behind Amazon, Apple and Microsoft

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Oracle is known for being very aggressive with litigation and legal threats, exceptionally so even vs the other tech giants.

On the other hand, I know an oracle dev that suffered a horrible accident and took two years to rehabilitate. Oracle kept him on paid leave that whole time despite it being unrelated to the workplace and past their usual policy.

So based on that my understanding of them now is that they're more than a bit hostile/malignant to those outside the mothership, but not necessarily evil to each other inside it.

[JohnFen]

> they're more than a bit hostile/malignant to those outside the mothership, but not necessarily evil to each other inside it.

Like the Mafia.

[zx8080]

> Oracle kept him on paid leave that whole time

This is almost exclusively about the manager of that person. It's very rarely such facts speak about the company as a whole.

[pram]

Probably a bit worse. Most everything they make is true garbage, and no one really cares. Letting their software into your business is definitely cancer-like.

However when I worked there it was extremely comfy, so as an employer I would rate it very highly. Very remote friendly too!

[krabizzwainch]

As an Oracle DBA, I just complain about Oracle wherever I can. Is it to subconsciously lead people away from the high paying DBA jobs and leave them for myself? The software is garbage for sure, but after a while everything is garbage and idk what to work with anymore. PeopleSoft can burn in hell for the rest of forever though. I would quit my job if they tried to move me to that.

[felixgallo]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=1980s is the canonical reference

[agency]

"Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' - lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle"

[panki27]

My 2 cents as a sysadmin who has worked with countless systems and databases: there has never been a more unintuitive database system than Oracle (atleast from the administrative side).

Anecdote: Back when I was just an apprentice, I was tasked to duplicate an Oracle database (the Oracle guy just left the company). It took me over 3 hours to figure that one out (exp vs expdp, FULL=Y and OWNER=FOO come to mind).

And don't even get me started on PDBs and usernames starting with "C##"!

[vb-8448]

Oracle? The law firm with an IT department?

[gnicholas]

The IT folks are kept very well-hidden from us lawyers. Took me a week to get my phone and laptop set up after I started there. I knew other lawyers who didn't know how to get their cell phones on the wifi, despite having worked there for a decade.

[jampekka]

Sad how Microsoft doesn't get the reactions it deserves anymore. Probably the single most harmful entity to computing.

[darajava]

Why do you think so? I did think this too until about 6 years ago but with them basically buying all of open source and AI, I kind of can’t help but use and love the products they now own. What damage to they currently do?

[Nextgrid]

His comment has merit. Microsoft controls something like 90% of desktop computer marketshare and turned them into malicious adware & spyware platforms overnight.

[outside1234]

Ok - but don't use that platform? I mean it is not like you can't switch to a Mac and avoid that whole ecosystem anymore.

[jampekka]

Tell that to all the IT deparments in the world. And all the people that keep sending Office files. And the friends and relatives that nag you to fix their Windows crap yet again. Apple is of course even worse in many regard.

For myself I don't need Microsoft stuff. But sadly there are all these other people around.

[krabizzwainch]

I love and hate this response. The vast majority of people don’t know or care, and I always question if the things that bother me even matter.

I just need to make windows work for video games, but it kills me that I can’t make a 1 laptop lifestyle work.

[jampekka]

I don't see buying all of open source and AI a good thing. What it did to OpenAI definitely isn't a good thing. For open source my prediction is good old EEE.

And even if those were positive, I'm still forced to use Outlook and Office and OneDrive and occasionally even Windows because they have so profoundly corrupted how computers are used.

[firebaze]

Could you post a few examples of what good they did to open source? Genuinely curious.

[darajava]

Typescript, vscode, npm, github and more

https://opensource.microsoft.com/projects/

They also added a “Sponsor” button to Github which while I have mixed feelings about it, does help open source projects thrive.

[Dudester230602]

TypeScript, NPM - doubling down on crappy language and rotten foundations. You could argue that at least they are helping to manage the damage to the industry.

VSCode - misspending money to prove JS can be used to build native apps? We did not say you "could not", we said you "should not".

GitHub - they just bought that, thanks for not ruining it I guess.

[jampekka]

Github, NPM have all the signs of EEE. For Github they already gave the misery of PAT and TOTP. Corporate hoops planned for NPM as well. Especially sad, as NPM is/was the best package/dependency management system ever created.

TypeScript and VScode are there of course to make all programming as horrible as it's on Windows.

[Cupprum]

They are also one of the most major contributors of CPython, which is the default implementation of Python. Especially in London they have a dedicated team, Faster CPython team, which (unsurprisingly) concentrates on improving performance of CPython. The team contains big name like the creator of Python, Guido van Rossum.

[wilsonnb3]

Not the person you were asking but they open sourced .NET and gave us the language server protocol

[blinding-streak]

Oracle has always had predatory pricing and treat their customers like indentured servants. However they don't generate the ink of the tech giants because they aren't one. By market cap they are medium sized at best.

Oracle doesn't have products the general public would use on the scale of a Microsoft, Amazon, or Google. So these larger companies are scrutinized far more.

[guhcampos]

More than other big tech companies: ye. Oracle's deception machine begins with the claim that it's a tech company. It is not. It's a litigation company, not dissimilar to what we now call "patent trolls". Their business model is to infiltrate themselves into a company by any means necessary, then hold it hostage using their law department tentacles.

Have you ever noticed how their products never - ever - improve over time? Thy don't have to innovate. If they fall too much behind on a segment, they just buy some new product. To me, that's their most evil aspect. I don't care if some corporation gets held hostage by some other corporation. Let the billionaires fight to death, I don't care. The sad externality of it is the death of innovation.

[DiggyJohnson]

My perception of the stereotype is not that Oracle is more evil, it’s that it’s lamer.

[rnd0]

I'm guessing it depends on who you are. If you're small potatoes (a desktop user) then you literally don't exist to them. At least, I haven't heard any stories about them raking old grandmas over the coal for using the vb extention pack in their knitting group or whatever.

You do see that reaction to Microsoft -and it's justified. Moreover Microsoft does tend to impact the end user but even that aside...it's a rare comment section that doesn't mention things like "Embrace, extend, extinquish" or the AARD code or the Halloween Documents when the story involves MS.

Now, if you're a part of the demographic that Oracle targets; that's a different story, and probably a worse one at that.

[mac3n]

as ex-Oracle, likely no more evil than the FAANG (or whatever they're calling themselves), but those who hate it, really hate it

[sfc32]

FAANG makes Oracle look like the good guys, although less competent at engineering.

[JohnFen]

I don't think that it's more "evil" than the other big "evil" companies (and there are a few companies that are at least an order of magnitude more evil), but that it became such well before most of the others. OG evil, so to speak.

Oracle has also spent decades picking fights with large parts of the dev community, and so has built up a lot more resentment than many other companies.

[saulrh]

My experience is that, at my first job out of college, I found out while learning SQL on the corp dev sandbox (specifically allocated for prototyping and learning SQL) that one of the functions I'd invoked had been part of some special function that we hadn't purchased. Not having purchased it didn't mean that the function was removed or deactivated or paywalled - instead, it meant that it would work and increment the "number of times this feature has been used" flag that the Oracle auditors could have used to charge my company millions and millions of extra dollars because we were using the feature.

[sys_64738]

It's a pretty good place to work for a time. Don't let folk who b!tch that they're the devil tell you that they are unless you experience the company yourself. Lots of folk leave disgruntled because Oracle doesn't give in to their financial demands.

[futureamish]

I think it only exists to launder some government contract money. It provides no other discernable service.

[dathinab]

probably was probably isn't anymore

today I would say Microsoft holds the crone again

partially because they got so good at tricking people temporary into believing they are not

through that is looking at the western world, if you look beyond but using wester values like privacy then the crone probably gets passed to ByteDance

[bananapub]

yes

[thebeardisred]

yup.