[StressedDev]

OK, what products have gotten worse under Oracle? How do they compare to their competitors? Why don't people leave Oracle if it is so bad? Remember, people can and do move platforms all of the time. A good example is how the cloud took off despite the huge amount of work it takes to move things to the cloud.

My main point is saying one of the largest software companies in the world is "bad" or "makes things worse" says nothing. You need to give specific examples. Also, it's hard to believe that Oracle never gets anything right. Really? Everyone of their thousands of employees does bad work? All of their products are "bad" and have no good points? That does not pass the laugh test.

[protimewaster]

I think most people feel like the Sun Microsystems products all got worse after the Oracle purchase. E.g., Solaris, Java.

It's prolly gonna be hard to find any specific metrics to show that, though. But I remember everyone thinking that all of the Sun offerings had gotten worse after the acquisition. And OpenSolaris got axed altogether, of course. And Java had a series of security embarrassments.

[LinuxBender]

Just anecdotally prior to the acquisition I could upload a core dump to Sun and within minutes be on the phone with a kernel developer, have a patch within 30 minutes and the fix would be incorporated into their updates.

After the acquisition I could not reach kernel developers the ones that remained and package management fell into the bog of eternal stench. Generic examples would be moving binaries into /tmp and moving an Oracle specific fix into place because they knew not how to do package management. Eventually it became impossible to do package verification. By this point we had moved most customers off Solaris, HP-UX and AIX over to Linux out of cost optimizations and making everything cookie-cutter but I was happy to depart from maintaining Oracle Sun systems.

At another company I worked for we replaced everything acquired by Oracle to forked alternatives. This was less to do with technical reasons and more to do with legal liability risk as Oracle could at any moment force licensing, change license terms, drop free support, etc... So as an example we moved from MySQL to Percona MySQL. We also quickly moved away from Dyn DNS due to concerns from the federal government and our lawyers as Dyn (Oracle, also being a competitor) could monitor DNS traffic and profile our customers.

[gruturo]

> I think most people feel like the Sun Microsystems products all got worse after the Oracle purchase. E.g., Solaris, Java.

Licenses apart - Java actually improved, but Oracle's name is so tainted that a lot of people ran for the hills the moment they acquired Sun. Solaris support on a lot of platforms used by my employer simply vanished within 36 months (in enterprise terms, that's instantaneous) because every customer started working on a migration/exit strategy as soon as they learned of the acquisition. Once a critical mass of customers was headed out, it got dropped as a platform by a lot of developers, and eventually Oracle itself put it on life support.

So yes, Oracle's name is THAT powerful it can kill you by association. Lawnmower story etc.

[hyperman1]

I've seen weblogic deteriorate after Oracle bought it. If you wrote e.g. a bad descriptor, pre oracle weblogic gave an error message inluding what you wrote, why it was wrong, and a reference to the spec. Post oracle code just crashed with an NPE, or had an unstable container with weird crashy behaviour in unrelated parts of your code.

Before that, OC4J used to be the first to implement a new EJB version etc. The project basically froze in time when oracle bought it, receiving minimal bugfuxes only.

[StressedDev]

Thank you for the examples. It was interesting and I learned something.

[cyberax]

> OK, what products have gotten worse under Oracle?

Java.

[mardifoufs]

In what way? I'm actually curious.