Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by breve 348 days ago
> They have an opportunity to create some goodwill here

According to Bryan Cantrill, you don't need to be open minded about Oracle. It's a waste of the openness of your mind. He says what you think of Oracle is even truer than you think it is. He believes there has been no entity in human history with less complexity and nuance to it than Oracle.

Bryan warns, "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' -- the lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, the lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=1981s

7 comments

This is so true. And in my experience Oracle's main business seems to be getting companies to sign complicated contracts, waiting a year or two, and then suing them for some infraction so that they can extort another contract from them. I haven't met an Oracle product yet that can't be done better by either free software or a less litigious company.
I personally have come to the conclusion that behind every major open-source or free software success story, there is a completely dysfunctional market. Without this, it would be impossible to find enough people willing to say, “Fuck that shit, we're going to recode this ourselves.”

The fact that there are so many people motivated to code alternatives to Oracle products says a lot about Oracle's business practices.

The only good SQL tooling I am aware of, really good with compilers, debuggers, IDEs, is MS SQL Server.

Then stuff like distributed transactions, raw disk access for databases, among other niceties that people reaching to Postgres or MySQL probably never heard of, but many Fortune 500 enjoy, even if one for checking bullet points on RFPs.

Postgres comes second, after getting all puzzle pieces together, some of them also commercial.

Broadcom has entered the chat.

It's wild that cease and desists and audit notices are becoming common ways to punish someone for just... not renewing your contract.

Former Twitter has been suing its customers if they don’t spend enough money on ads on the platform.

Tech companies and oligarchs are incredibly entitled.

We moved from mssql on Azure to Oracle. What should do instead, if Azure is a hard constraint?
Postgres, for example, or MySQL.
Our use cases are primarily analytical. We already use Postgres for other workloads.
Maybe DuckDB then?
This is hyperbole to the extreme. I have nothing what so ever to do with oracle
There is nothing I take more glee in than listening to bcantrill talk negatively of Oracle. Whenever Oracle comes up in one of his talks or a podcast, I know I'm in for a treat.
GP is saying from a purely mechanical, non-human standpoint Oracle's actions don't make sense.
Oracle defends their properties whether it makes sense or not. That is what the machine does.
It doesn't "make sense" for a lawnmower to cut hands either, it isn't a meat grinder after all. However it is a blade attached to a motor and from a purely mechanical, non-human perspective it will cut whatever comes within reach.
They do, if the lawnmower believes "more trademarks good" (and which corporation doesn't?), and trademarks must be actively used and defended to be kept.
Like all machines in the real world, the Oracle machine intelligence is limited - it can't process every single thing to infinite detail. "More trademarks good" and "trademarks must be actively used and defended to be kept" are heuristics and explain this well if you tack on an "on average" to the former.
This is one of my all-time favorite talks! So good. Thank you Bryan Cantrill!
Apparently not everybody got the Lawnmower Memo, so thanks for posting that again, as a reminder to people like sprash who think I should have "sincerely asked if you are allowed to publish the [NeWS source] code". As if sincerity would help, and as if I haven't been sincerely asking since 1986.

I'll also sincerely ask: Does anybody at Oracle know how I can get in touch with their HR department to find out what ever happened to my Sun 401k plan? Because nobody will answer my calls, and it's a lot of money of mine plus 33 years of interest they owe me that they're holding on to, which they inherited from Sun and then disappeared from all known records (except for a record that says it once existed and Oracle has it, but no other info), and they won't pick up the phone or return my email, no matter how "sincerely" I ask or how long I wait on hold.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44370636

sprash 4 days ago | parent | context | flag | favorite | on: Ancient X11 scaling technology

> 1994

Apparently you have to be criticizing X11 for more than three decades now. Since you seem to know your stuff, could you please post a link to your git repository containing your personal display server that solves all the problems?

DonHopkins 4 days ago | prev | next [–]

Since they bought Sun Microsystems, Oracle now owns the rights to the NeWS source code, so unfortunately I'm not legally allowed to post the NeWS server source code on my Github page, although I spent many years unsuccessfully fighting to make NeWS free and evangelizing it to anyone who would listen, like RMS and my colleagues and customers at Sun:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/rms.news.txt

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/news-ooo-review...

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/questionaire.tx...

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/grasshopper.msg...

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/sevans.txt

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/Explanation.txt

[...]

sprash 4 days ago | parent | next [–]

> Oracle owns the rights to the NeWS source code so I'm not allowed to post it on my Github page.

They are certainly not making any money with it right now. All patents should be expired by now. Have you ever sincerely asked if you are allowed to publish the code? [...]

DonHopkins 4 days ago | root | parent | prev | next [–]

[...] Ha ha! Good luck, kiddo. Have you ever tried asking a lawnmower for favors? Do you really think "sincerity" would help?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728

https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s

[...]

Hahahahaha