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Comment by rabuse | Hacker News Reader

Ahh, the new Oracle.

No, not everything negative is the new Oracle. AWS has very little in common with how Oracle has operated historically.

Oracle didn't build their company in the style of AWS Redis, that cloning maneuver. Oracle's database was a pioneer. Oracle didn't get where they are by cloning open source and claiming it as their own. Despite the numerous bad things that can be said about Oracle's culture, that's not one of the key negatives about Oracle.

Agreed. Not an Oracle fan boy but they didn't deserve to be brought up in the context.

They killed and re-proprietarized OpenSolaris.

Had OpenSolaris developed a sufficient community outside of Sun/Oracle, this would have been much less of an issue. Which is why community is a big deal. A large company can always decide that some project is no longer interesting and, if they're the only ones supporting it, it's going to die. They certainly have no obligation to support it.

At this point in AWS' life, enterprise sales is king. Not surprising that there's shades of Oracle / Microsoft in them. May be, Google hired Oracle #2, Thomas Kurian, to head GCP for similar reasons. Like it or not, Oracle-sized shadow looms large over BigCloud.

It surprises me when people lump Oracle (or AWS for that matter) in with the likes of Microsoft.

The process to make MS-OOXML an ISO standard was a dirty one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open... and 2008 wasn't that long ago

Ballmer era Microsoft is a very different beast to Nadella era Microsoft

I don't see Microsoft jumping to fix all the interop issues their software has with ODF.

Why? They're all enterprise software companies. They participate in open source to greater or lesser degrees. They seem absolutely part of the same category. This isn't either positive or negative commentary but just observation of what they do as businesses.

In that Microsoft is way worse or way better? I’m not clear, because they’re all pretty scummy.

You are right Microsoft could be a more difficult entity to deal with.

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