Comment by nvrspyx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nvrspyx | Hacker News Reader

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I know absolutely nothing about Oracle, GraalVM, OpenJDK, or Java development in general. I haven't used Java since a CS intro class during my undergrad like 10 years ago. Despite this, I've internally adopted the general consensus that Oracle is a terrible, greedy company.

Can someone play devil's advocate to explain how this news may actually favor this negative view of Oracle? The sentiment in this thread is praising Oracle's decision here, so I'm just curious if there's an alternative viewpoint that's skeptical or wary of this decision and Oracle's motivation to make it.

With that said, I'm not looking for reason to diminish the positives. I'm just curious. Good moves that benefit the community should absolutely be acknowledged and encouraged.

EDIT: It looks like another person commented how this may not be benevolent in the context of WebAssembly while I was slowly typing this comment up on mobile. I'd still be interested in this discussion though.

I'm java developer for the last 15 years or something like that and I can't really say much bad about Oracle Java. IMO Oracle got a good team working on Java. Java is completely open source. There are many builds of Java from different companies, I like liberica one, for example (be aware of Russian roots, though).

I have no idea about this graal thing and I think it's rather niche application. I played with it but concluded that it's not ready for me yet.

Is there any “good companies”? I’m fairly sure they all become paperclip optimizers after a certain size and any seemingly good behavior is simply the better option from a profit-maximizing point of view.

Do you honestly think that all those libraries care about Pride or Black Lives Matters? Nope, they just had some calculations and as user-facing companies, marketing has a huge role on their profits. A logistic company won’t have done any such thing as they are likely not even known by the general public.

Oracle is not really an end-user facing company like Facebook or Google is, so they simply don’t care all that much about that (hence the lawnmower analogy). But.. that’s a good thing as well — you can use the lawnmower for its job, you’ll never be surprised. Graal and OpenJDK and other tech at the bottom of the tech stack are long term investments. Looking at the linux kernel, it is not developed primarily by some hacker in a basement, but by employees paid by Intel, Red Hat, Google, pretty much everyone.

There isn't any way to spin it negatively.

The generalized dislike of Oracle you have seen really comes from a couple of different aspects, neither of which are relevant to this specific announcement:

1. License audits suck.

2. The Google lawsuit (about matters resolved long ago and which don't apply to anyone except Google, really).

A lot of ill will comes from people whose companies have been audited. The process is by all accounts very painful. However, what's rarely mentioned in such discussions is the alternatives and why Oracle does this. It's because their software is totally DRM free. It makes sense; you can't have a major airport or bank shutting down suddenly because a license key or credit card expired, can you? Oracle DB is mission critical stuff, it must be always available. That's why they use an audit model - it's "trust but verify". They make their stuff available for free download and you promise not to pirate it.

Every so often Oracle turn up and check to see if you're paying for what you're using. At this point there are usually two problems that crop up:

1. The company doesn't actually know if it's correctly paying for Oracle's stuff. It requires a lot of work to find out, maybe the right controls weren't in place and naughty developers just installed more copies because it was convenient etc. Then they discover they've unknowingly been pirating the DB.

2. And/or they discover they didn't understand the licensing model, which historically had some very sharp edges around virtualization (maybe still does).

Because the downloads are open and unrestricted by any form of DRM, it's easy to make these mistakes in a company that doesn't have good processes in place. At this point the users have a problem because it's just plain old copyright violation. Oracle prefers not to sue its own users for obvious reasons so at this point a third issue crops up - their sales guys like to cut deals. Buy more of our software and you'll have some useful stuff plus we'll forget about your non-compliance issues. Win/win, right? Not always for the people who aren't at the top of the firm of course, who may now be told to adopt some new product that they wouldn't otherwise have chosen and may not even be told why (it's embarrassing for the executives to admit they ended up in that situation!).

It's worth observing that with the cloud these problems go away. Use Oracle DB only in the cloud (or MS SQL etc) and the cloud provider will track your usage and ensure you're paying for it. In turn that means no need for audits.

It's very easy to criticize Oracle for the above outcomes. It's harder to come up with alternative approaches beyond really down in the weeds stuff like the exact ways virtualized cores are licensed, etc. The moment you have a commercial product there needs to be some way to ensure users are paying for it (because a lot simply won't if there's nothing in place to make them), but if you accept that outages cannot be caused by DRM or licensing errors, then you are almost forced to go with either the cloud or the audit+true-up approach. Many modern DB firms go hosted-only which brings its own problems (see the recent Azure leak). Plus Oracle DB predates the cloud, so ...

Thank you for the very detailed response. I recognize that my impression of Oracle was certainly unfair due to my lack of knowledge and experience with them. I also recognize that it was both selfish and ignorant of me to ask for someone to spin this negatively. My comment was in good faith, but I see now that my intention doesn't really change that it was encouraging an unjust characterization of this announcement and was unfairly asking someone else to do the leg work for me.

I guess my default (and flawed) heuristic is to assume that a big corporation has an ulterior motive with goodwill or community-focused announcements. I'll take this as a learning opportunity to not blindly adopt what I perceive as the general sentiment, to stop relying on such a heuristic, and to do my own research and evaluation. In addition to the detailed response, thank you for also indirectly kicking my butt into reevaluating how I approach the unknown both logically and emotionally.

You're welcome and I don't think you should feel bad, your post seemed OK to me.

This particular announcement isn't even meant to generate goodwill really, although I can see why it's interpreted that way. It's not like there's a new open source release coming. It's just resolving some duplication issues in the way these already open source projects are being developed by Oracle "donating" from one arm to the other :) The goodwill should instead come from the decade+ funding of this very advanced and large research project, which is teaching the world a lot about fundamental computer science (complete with large set of academic papers), and for which almost all the core cleverness is given away under liberal licenses.

Be aware that they do have a commercial offering built on top of Graal, the enterprise edition. It makes programs go faster, and has a few other useful features. But there's nothing nefarious about that of course.

I'm not worried about or bothered by audits. We put a lot of effort into license compliance and performing regular true ups with our vendors is the norm.

A large part of Oracle's bad reputation comes from a history of entering markets, gaining a captive customer base, and then engaging in blatant rent-seeking that squeezes every last penny that they can out of their customers.

As a direct example, I'm in the healthcare space and specifically work in a Cerner shop. Our quotes from Cerner for routine integration projects have gone up literally 5-10x since Oracle acquired them. An EHR migration costs well into eight figures, so Oracle is fully aware that customers aren't easily going to be able to move away from them because things that were $15-30K (and still are with other vendors) are now running into the six figures, but it certainly doesn't leave a positive taste in the mouth.

And we knew this was coming as soon as the Oracle acquisition was announced. Because Oracle has built a reputation for doing exactly this across multiple markets over multiple decades.

I don't think licensing is the only reason people hate Oracle. They have at the very best a mixed record when it comes to open source they've acquired. While they've done pretty well by Java and virtualbox after some initial missteps, other software such as Open office, MySQL, Solaris, ZFS, KSplice, etc has not faired nearly so well...

I feel like this is a bit too generous to Oracle. The DRM-free thing is indeed a feature, but they know full well that it will encourage more and more unlicensed usage which they can then "extort" additional fees out of a company once it's in place and critical, which they would probably never have gotten if beforehand a trade-off check would've been done for operational expenses or the right gates would've been needed to have gotten over.

My point is this: what alternative would you prefer? Oracle can't implement trade-off checks or process gates inside other companies.

Alternative : open source it and charge for support.

Red Hat is the poster child for that approach and they charge for support based on per-core usage with audits / legal teams to back it up, no different to Oracle.

Who is downloading oracle and using it on a whim? Surely postgres or mysql would be the path

It's more like your company already uses it, so people just copy the binaries from one server to another and start it up. Oracle DB has massively more features than postgres or mysql so there are good reasons to use it.

There's an epic rant on youtube from one of the old Sun guys that gets linked occasionally. I can't remember all of it, but basically it goes that Larry Ellison/Oracle is just as simple as a lawnmower - if you stick your hand in it; it'll shred it without emotion because it's just an unthinking machine that cuts whatever you put into in the same way that Oracle is a machine to make money.

I've been at this long enough to have had my own experiences and they are indeed as bad as everyone has warned me, but it does feel like something you have to experience yourself (or at least through a trusted party like in my case) to totally believe.

I think you're talking about Bryan Cantrill : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m

It seems irrational for anyone to feel unexpectedly angry at a lawnmower for shredding their hand though -- you should have known it was a lawnmower, that's not a recent change, and it never claimed to be anything but a lawnmower. You should just be the normal level of angry that lawnmowers are dangerous.

The parent apologist was extremely precise in how they described Oracle. Oracle isn't in the "Be warm and fuzzy to developers" business: they're in the "Provide mission critical software to large enterprises" business. Logic for servicing the latter well makes things look screwy or sinister to people used to the former.

Which isn't to say the Oracle salespeople aren't scummy. But most salespeople are scummy. That's what happens when you incentivize closing sales, which is how almost all sales orgs are set up. So audit model + scummy salespeople = bad experiences. But to parent's point: what's a better model for their customer persona?

Well, I had a colleague who worked with them directly. He was a product manager who formerly managed incident response, and this was at a company that at one time had incidents that affected significant chunks of the Internet (no longer - that mantle has passed to AWS). It's been a couple years now, so the details are a bit fuzzy, but I remember him saying that dealing with Oracle was about the worst experience he had on the job. Their representatives were outright rude and condescending, and seemingly difficult to no purpose. So that's my (2nd hand) experience with them.

I'm a bit young to have ever known much about Sun, but I get the impression that they were very respected for their products and commitment to open source, and Oracle's purchase seems to have really rankled the community. Interestingly, the only Oracle products I use are all from the Sun era - MySQL, Java, Virtualbox, and ZFS.

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