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Comment by quesera | Hacker News Reader

Wow. Someone's been hitting the Kool-Aid pretty hard.

I've seen this institutional hubris first-hand. The unshakable belief (typically by nontechnical management) that all of the smartest people in the world are employed here, working for me.

It always ends badly.

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Yup. It's not like those customers that are busy reverse engineering Oracle's code are doing it for the kicks. They have their own jobs to do. Much more likely, they are getting weird results out of Oracle's software that they don't understand, so they reverse engineer the code to see why the system is crashing / giving unexpected results so that they can find a workaround without having to wait for the vendor to fix their bug.

Then, if it turns out that it's a security issue, of course they are going to notify Oracle of the fact, both as a moral duty, and because it makes it more likely that Oracle will get a patch out faster.

Oracle whinging about people finding bugs in their code would be better off trying to improve their processes so that there are less bugs to find, rather than complaining that they've been found out for shipping buggy code.

I actually understand how it gets to be this way though.

I literally can't touch a Government project without an Oracle license. When I talk to a salesman, the attitude is "I know you can't do this without me", contrary to salesmen for any other product in any other industry.

When I talk to a project manager, they don't ask how it will be hosted, or what the platform will be, or anything else obvious. The first question, often before a project is fined, is "how many Oracle licenses can I buy?".

Interesting. In what industries is Oracle so dominant? You say government is one, but where else?

In industry, all I've ever seen is Sybase, SQL Server, and MySQL (ok, technically Oracle). (My background is finance and technology.)

Oil/Gas exploration. In my former job, pretty much every major piece of software that we sold to customers had at least an embedded Oracle DB as part of the install.

Oracle is very popular for mission-critical databases in banks. I've seen Sybase used in banks too but it's definitely less popular now than it used to be.

Indeed, it does tend to end badly, and the best example is a company that ended up being bought by Oracle. The arrogant tone of this post reminds me very much of the flurry of blog posts that came out when ZFS and DTrace were first introduced. Remember "The Last Word in File Systems"? That kind of arrogance, complacency, and impatience with interlocutors is mildly annoying to developers elsewhere. It's more than annoying to customers, and to sales people who feel unsafe pushing products whose developers continually undermine them. That's why Sun is no more. Oracle might want to consider that before they start relying on this kind of astroturf to convince anyone of anything.

I don't think the particular kind of arrogance that Oracle has goes away except by being killed. Heck even once the former sales guys are homeless under a bridge I doubt they would see the connection, they'd still be spinning yarns about when they worked for the greatest tech company ever.

Ditto for the engineers. The kind of engineer who contributes to a culture like that in the first place will also be constitutionally incapable of accepting that their own behavior contributed in any way to the demise.

The same file system that the Linux developers have tried (and failed) to clone for almost 10 years now? Yeah, must be totally unremarkable.

I didn't say it was unremarkable, Mr. Strawman. However, it wasn't the "last word" either. If it had been, there wouldn't have been so many generations of major change to it since then. It's possible for people to be good at what they do but still nowhere near as good as they think, and that pretty accurately described a lot of Sun engineers at that time. The answer to all criticism, including that which history has shown to be completely accurate, was never anything but a sneer. It was the most anti-collegial attitude ever, and the industry is worse off for it.

That's ridiculous. If it had not laid the foundation for all those generations of major changes to be possible at all (without substantial re-architecting), why would they have called it that?

By the way, since you're apparently a subject matter expert, what kernel would you recommend for arrogance-averse users? Certainly not Linux or OpenBSD?

Remember the classic Can't Break It, Can't Break In campaign several years ago. It yielded a bunch of new bunch and exploits in Oracle SW in a few days. They seem not to have learned.

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