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Comment by hotpotamus | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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