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I was a Product Manager at Oracle when we decided to integrate Java. It seemed like an odd decision to those outside Oracle, but at the highest levels in Oracle

by MrTonyD 11y ago

I was a Product Manager at Oracle when we decided to integrate Java. It seemed like an odd decision to those outside Oracle, but at the highest levels in Oracle we were circulating a Microsoft internal presentation about how Microsoft was going to use the dominance of Visual Studio to defeat competitors across the application space. So Oracle had no choice except to support Java as the alternative to Visual Studio. So Java and all Open Source support were really done only to the extent which self-interest demanded. We had floors of kernel engineers fixing Linux to make it work (it was barely functional back then.) And we coordinated with HP, IBM, Sun, Red Hat, and others so that they would encourage and pay their engineers to support Open Source. The idea that Open Source is somehow separate from business and market forces ignores its history. And the idea that Open Source is always positive is equally absurd. I've been working in open source for decades now, and the big winners are often the same rich companies which are extracting the wealth of our society - as they get software for free while the engineers provide work without getting the true "fruits of their labor". Does it make sense for multi-billionaires to get this software for free? Really, the Open Source idea is very messed up in an economy with distinct winners and losers.

static_noise 11y ago
Yes, Oracle benefited from Open Source, but it also invested into Open Source and others benefited, too. That's the real key: Most people get out more than they put in by using Open Source instead of supporting proprietary software from few proprietary vendors for programs many people need.
oldmanjay 11y ago
In the same paragraph you indicate that Oracle and other companies paid for people to work on open source projects, then bemoan that companies get the work for free. The signal is a little mixed, care to clarify your stance on this?
- chii 11y ago
  Some engineers got paid by oracle to work on open source software. But there are still contributions from others who weren't paid by oracle, and yet oracle is extracting a lot of profit from said software (more than what they paid, because of the 'free' contributions from the unpaid engineers).
  - marcosdumay 11y ago
    And everybody is wealthier as a consequence. Oracle's clients pay less for a solution than they would otherwise, Oracle can compete on this area, some engineers get paid by Oracle to improve a commons, and everybody else gets a more functional system for free. Ok, maybe somebody worked there against their best interest, but that somebody wasn't coordinated by any big corporation, and should look onto fixing himself only. The ecosystem as a whole is healthy.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      >And everybody is wealthier as a consequence. Well, except for those using Java. Because Oracle screwed it up.
      - pron 11y ago
        > Because Oracle screwed it up. I am quite involved in the Java community and I don't see it. How did Oracle screw it up?
        pjmlp 11y ago
        Support for mobile OSes. You could have had JIT/AOT for Windows Phone and AOT compiler for iOS, but they never cared. Now C++ and C# reign as the languages to go for portable mobile native apps.
        pron 11y ago
        This may well have been a mistake, but it is being addressed now, though probably not aggressively enough. Also, depending on how Google integrates OpenJDK into Android, we may soon have Java (real Java, that is) on the world's leading mobile platform.
- MrTonyD 11y ago
  If you list the Fortune 50 you will find that they all get huge benefit from Open Source. I've worked with Wall Street Banks, Monsanto, NSA, Big Ag, Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, and other companies which are extracting incredible profits from our society - often at a great cost to our society. Does it make sense to give free help to those who harm?
  - RodericDay 11y ago
    You've worked for all those bad companies, making money while providing them services, and you want to pin the blame on Open Source Software?
  - pron 11y ago
    I'm still having a hard time understanding what you're saying with regards to Oracle. Oracle does indeed contribute a lot to OSS (mostly due to their acquisition of Sun), but it is also one of those "rich companies" and owned by multi-billionaires who extract most value from OSS. So what exactly are you saying?
    - MrTonyD 11y ago
      I'm not really trying to say a lot with respect to Oracle. Except perhaps that their interest in Open Source is really not philosophical - it is strictly profit driven. That has real implications to those who adopt Open Source or view it from a philosophical perspective.
      - mystikal 11y ago
        The prevailing view that corporations benefit society the most simply by focusing on profits for shareholders is almost entirely philosophical (we cannot prove this, although many economists would probably like to).
  - the_af 11y ago
    How would closed, proprietary software make the situation any better? Free & Open Source software benefits everyone, which sadly includes bad actors and companies you (and maybe I!) don't like. But don't forget about the "everyone" part, which is the most important one!
pasbesoin 11y ago
Having watched -- from the inside, for a while -- another major corporation increasingly leach off of open source (taking much, giving little -- practically nothing), I'm just adding my voice to this perspective. I'm not inside nor advanced enough to have a... really well-informed, well-grounded opinion, perhaps. But, I've seen enough of corporate behavior, across multiple substantial corporations over extended periods of time, to speak to that. Even their "charitable giving." Even if is starts with or has components of genuine good will, by the time the suits, PR folks, and bureaucrats get done with it, it's pretty damned self-serving.
- MrTonyD 11y ago
  I was part of the team choosing charities. You might be surprised to hear that we evaluated all our giving for ROI (measured in columns of print or TV time and the equivalent cost of purchased time. We also considered audience - and overlap with purchase influencers.) In general, the decision was simple - are we making more money than we are spending on the charity.
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    I'm not surprised one little bit.
    - noir_lord 11y ago
      Me either but if the charities where good ones then it seems like a win-win to me. It's not that different than celebrities endorsing a charity for "free", they give up some time which gets positive PR and the charity gets the benefit of raising against their events.
      - chris_wot 11y ago
        It's definitely amoral. But it's also highly inefficient - it means that if everyone takes Oracle's approach then only charities with high levels of positive publicity get charity dollars. Those charities who cannot generate lots if positive press can't help fund important research. Ironically sometimes research that crosses into another field and benefits another bug if research bring done.
toyg 11y ago
As a fellow ex-Oracle (although a coalface support minion coming through an acquisition), and with all due respect, I downvoted your comment because it looks like a bit of an incoherent rant with no apparent link to the post. What Rhaman is saying is: the wide Java portfolio is dying because people are not making enough waves around the JCP to keep Oracle on the straight and narrow. Nothing to do with opensource, the JCP is a very different project from traditional opensource development. The JRE has never been a "real" open source project, but rather a proprietary system that opened up enough to develop a caring community. The problem is that, at the moment, the interests of Java's owner are not aligned with the interests of such community, and not enough people seem to care. This has nothing to do with Java being "open source" or not; in fact, a real OSS project would happily fork at this point (as it happened with OpenOffice), but the Java community cannot really do it. It seems pointless to debate the merits of OSS in a situation where there is no OSS; it's like saying "We supported Windows out of self-interest; but let's talk about the pros and cons of opensource...".
- pron 11y ago
  > The JRE has never been a "real" open source project What does that mean? Compare Java to other open source projects of similar magnitude (and there aren't many; maybe only Linux, which is actually bigger). Linux is even more exclusive than OpenJDK, and just like Linux, companies with appropriate resources often make changes to the software even if those changes aren't contributed back (or contributed but not merged). > and not enough people seem to care People will care once many start to actually feel it. Oracle's interests are probably not aligned with mine, and may or may not be a cause for concern for me, but so far Oracle's actions wrt OpenJDK don't harm me at all. The investment in the platform feels to have only grown in the past few years. > but the Java community cannot really do it Why not? I think it most certainly can, but at this point there's not enough motivation to do it.
  - toyg 11y ago
    Look at what Oracle is doing to Google for the sin of refusing the JCP process. Do you think they wouldn't do the same against any Java fork with a realistic chance of supplanting their implementation? The details are not important, they'll throw the book at you and find something that sticks. The current situation (OpenJDK open but not a realistic choice in most production deployments; Oracle JDK/JRE remaining as de-facto gold standard; a process that forces strict compatibility tests on any competitor) can be fine from a certain point of view, but in practice it means that Java is not a traditional community-led OSS program. Rather, it's a program where the OSS community helps a company improve their software. RedHat is not the only Linux build with significant marketshare, and I won't get sued if I write a different POSIX system. > at this point there's not enough motivation to do it. No there isn't, that's what Rhaman is saying. But what he's also implying is that the direction of travel has changed inside Oracle, and people outside do not seem to realize it. IMHO it's fairly obvious where things are going (you'll stop "installing Java", and only develop and deploy in the Oracle cloud or similar Oracle-sanctioned environments).
vmorgulis 11y ago
> ... We had floors of kernel engineers fixing Linux to make it work (it was barely functional back then.) ... It reminds me a story about evolution. It says that the wheat (or the corn) is a successful specie because it is grown by man at a wide scale. Those Oracle engineers are like bees collecting pollen from the Linux flowers :-) It's a two-way link.
lazaroclapp 11y ago
> the Open Source idea is very messed up in an economy with distinct winners and losers. Except Oracle getting rich on say, Linux, doesn't hurt me if I am running Ubuntu, Debian or Gentoo. In fact, if their patches are any good, due to the GPL, it helps me. Now, if I develop open source software, I might or might not be able to extract as much of the value generated as if I was making it a proprietary product. On the other hand, the total reach and value of the project might be magnified just because other people (and also for-profit-corporations) can take it and extend it and use it. I might see less of that value myself but: a) It might not be my primary goal to capture as much value as possible, just to get enough money out of it so that I can continue working on that project. b) The "size of the pie" that the same project is worth as open-source, specially for developer tools, is much much larger than if I kept it proprietary. So, in some cases, I might be able to capture more absolute value that way, even if I am helping some huge megacorp get filthy rich too (which is what would happen if I got a 'normal' software job, anyways). Making your software free to me is not quite an ethical imperative in most cases, but it is a personal decision that can make a lot of sense, even if the entity that will profit the most from your software in monetary terms might not be yourself. The flip side is that, all things being equal, a great open-source software is likely to have a higher impact (and bring you more fame), than a great proprietary program. Specially for infrastructure, libraries and the like vs user-facing software. If Tim Berners-Lee had been paid for the world-wide web what his contribution ended up being worth to the world, he would be the world's first trillionaire. On the other hand, if he had insisted that he get paid for all uses of the web, the web might have never come be to (or might have lost to a much more "corporate" system, under the control of one or a few companies).
- notalaser 11y ago
  > Except Oracle getting rich on say, Linux, doesn't hurt me if I am running Ubuntu, Debian or Gentoo. In fact, if their patches are any good, due to the GPL, it helps me. It does if they manage to get in a position where they "own" enough of what you're using so that they can force their choices on you. Red Hat has been in such a position for a long time now, and their world domination agenda has been steadily hurting non-enterprise Linux users in a higher and higher proportion.
Confusion 11y ago
What do you mean by 'integrating Java'? You are comparing Java to Visual Studio, which feels like comparing apples to orchards. AFAIK the vast majority of Java programmers use Eclipse, Netbeans or IntelliJ. Oracle has had JDeveloper since 1998. So what was Java being integrated into?
- MrTonyD 11y ago
  We started off with a series of strategy meetings prior to the release of JDeveloper. We hired a small team to integrate the JVM into Oracle with the idea that we might be able to replace PL/SQL with Java within the Database. We started by bundling JDeveloper from Borland, and it was awful, so we brought it in-house to continue developing it. From there, there was a continuously evolving strategy of how we could position Java to compete with Visual Studio. Microsoft had explicit plans (internally) to add more APIs to the APIs in order to capture developers, and "not fix" other existing APIs which they had mis-implemented in order to give the impression that our products were broken. And since every deployment began with a development project, it was very important that we kept a working set of APIs to our products in Java - so that Microsoft didn't take all our customers. We had seen Microsoft harm other competitors by using those same tricks (and claim that it wasn't intentional.)
ErikAugust 11y ago
I am reminded of Aaron Swartz wearing the "My Free Software Runs Your Company" shirt: http://assets.bwbx.io/images/icUNrxSKG6Pc/v1/-1x-1.jpg http://assets.bwbx.io/images/icUNrxSKG6Pc/v1/-1x-1.jpg
michaelmrose 11y ago
I cannot comprehend a situation wherein open source is negative. Clearly it might not be the most lucrative path but we are all net consumers of technology. What's the better alternative to billionaires getting their software for free? It's unlikely that companies will contribute manpower to software if they then have to pay for it too. If you have a better strategy I'd like to hear it.
- tonyedgecombe 11y ago
  > What's the better alternative to billionaires getting their software for free? Billionaires paying for their software?
  - klibertp 11y ago
    It would be very hard, not to mention almost impossible politically, to make only billionaires pay for free software. You'd probably end up making everyone pay, with billionaires paying a bit more than most. Would that be good for OSS and for the users, I wonder?
  - michaelmrose 11y ago
    So we need to implement user restrictions licensing codes software audits etc and ensure that there are no benefits to companies embracing free software ensuring their contributions dry up. Not precisely a winning strategy
frik 11y ago
> We had floors of kernel engineers fixing Linux to make it work (it was barely functional back then). When was "back then". Are you talking about the 1990s or the 2000s? You are not talking about RedHat Linux fork "Oracle Linux", right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Linux
cyphar 11y ago
> I was a Product Manager at Oracle when we decided to integrate Java. It seemed like an odd decision to those outside Oracle, but at the highest levels in Oracle we were circulating a Microsoft internal presentation about how Microsoft was going to use the dominance of Visual Studio to defeat competitors across the application space. So Oracle had no choice except to support Java as the alternative to Visual Studio. So Java and all Open Source support were really done only to the extent which self-interest demanded. We had floors of kernel engineers fixing Linux to make it work (it was barely functional back then.) And we coordinated with HP, IBM, Sun, Red Hat, and others so that they would encourage and pay their engineers to support Open Source. The idea that Open Source is somehow separate from business and market forces ignores its history. And the idea that Open Source is always positive is equally absurd. I've been working in open source for decades now, and the big winners are often the same rich companies which are extracting the wealth of our society - as they get software for free while the engineers provide work without getting the true "fruits of their labor". Does it make sense for multi-billionaires to get this software for free? Really, the Open Source idea is very messed up in an economy with distinct winners and losers. If you only use permissive licenses, free software can result in large corporate monopolies. Copyleft licenses help counter this. Linux, GNU, VLC, FFmpeg, etc are all good examples of this.

by MrTonyD 11y ago

static_noise 11y ago

Yes, Oracle benefited from Open Source, but it also invested into Open Source and others benefited, too. That's the real key: Most people get out more than they put in by using Open Source instead of supporting proprietary software from few proprietary vendors for programs many people need.

oldmanjay 11y ago

In the same paragraph you indicate that Oracle and other companies paid for people to work on open source projects, then bemoan that companies get the work for free. The signal is a little mixed, care to clarify your stance on this?

chii 11y ago
Some engineers got paid by oracle to work on open source software. But there are still contributions from others who weren't paid by oracle, and yet oracle is extracting a lot of profit from said software (more than what they paid, because of the 'free' contributions from the unpaid engineers).
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  And everybody is wealthier as a consequence. Oracle's clients pay less for a solution than they would otherwise, Oracle can compete on this area, some engineers get paid by Oracle to improve a commons, and everybody else gets a more functional system for free. Ok, maybe somebody worked there against their best interest, but that somebody wasn't coordinated by any big corporation, and should look onto fixing himself only. The ecosystem as a whole is healthy.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >And everybody is wealthier as a consequence. Well, except for those using Java. Because Oracle screwed it up.
    - pron 11y ago
      > Because Oracle screwed it up. I am quite involved in the Java community and I don't see it. How did Oracle screw it up?
      - pjmlp 11y ago
        Support for mobile OSes. You could have had JIT/AOT for Windows Phone and AOT compiler for iOS, but they never cared. Now C++ and C# reign as the languages to go for portable mobile native apps.
        pron 11y ago
        This may well have been a mistake, but it is being addressed now, though probably not aggressively enough. Also, depending on how Google integrates OpenJDK into Android, we may soon have Java (real Java, that is) on the world's leading mobile platform.
MrTonyD 11y ago
If you list the Fortune 50 you will find that they all get huge benefit from Open Source. I've worked with Wall Street Banks, Monsanto, NSA, Big Ag, Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, and other companies which are extracting incredible profits from our society - often at a great cost to our society. Does it make sense to give free help to those who harm?
- RodericDay 11y ago
  You've worked for all those bad companies, making money while providing them services, and you want to pin the blame on Open Source Software?
- pron 11y ago
  I'm still having a hard time understanding what you're saying with regards to Oracle. Oracle does indeed contribute a lot to OSS (mostly due to their acquisition of Sun), but it is also one of those "rich companies" and owned by multi-billionaires who extract most value from OSS. So what exactly are you saying?
  - MrTonyD 11y ago
    I'm not really trying to say a lot with respect to Oracle. Except perhaps that their interest in Open Source is really not philosophical - it is strictly profit driven. That has real implications to those who adopt Open Source or view it from a philosophical perspective.
    - mystikal 11y ago
      The prevailing view that corporations benefit society the most simply by focusing on profits for shareholders is almost entirely philosophical (we cannot prove this, although many economists would probably like to).
- the_af 11y ago
  How would closed, proprietary software make the situation any better? Free & Open Source software benefits everyone, which sadly includes bad actors and companies you (and maybe I!) don't like. But don't forget about the "everyone" part, which is the most important one!

pasbesoin 11y ago

Having watched -- from the inside, for a while -- another major corporation increasingly leach off of open source (taking much, giving little -- practically nothing), I'm just adding my voice to this perspective. I'm not inside nor advanced enough to have a... really well-informed, well-grounded opinion, perhaps. But, I've seen enough of corporate behavior, across multiple substantial corporations over extended periods of time, to speak to that. Even their "charitable giving." Even if is starts with or has components of genuine good will, by the time the suits, PR folks, and bureaucrats get done with it, it's pretty damned self-serving.

MrTonyD 11y ago
I was part of the team choosing charities. You might be surprised to hear that we evaluated all our giving for ROI (measured in columns of print or TV time and the equivalent cost of purchased time. We also considered audience - and overlap with purchase influencers.) In general, the decision was simple - are we making more money than we are spending on the charity.
- chris_wot 11y ago
  I'm not surprised one little bit.
  - noir_lord 11y ago
    Me either but if the charities where good ones then it seems like a win-win to me. It's not that different than celebrities endorsing a charity for "free", they give up some time which gets positive PR and the charity gets the benefit of raising against their events.
    - chris_wot 11y ago
      It's definitely amoral. But it's also highly inefficient - it means that if everyone takes Oracle's approach then only charities with high levels of positive publicity get charity dollars. Those charities who cannot generate lots if positive press can't help fund important research. Ironically sometimes research that crosses into another field and benefits another bug if research bring done.

toyg 11y ago

As a fellow ex-Oracle (although a coalface support minion coming through an acquisition), and with all due respect, I downvoted your comment because it looks like a bit of an incoherent rant with no apparent link to the post. What Rhaman is saying is: the wide Java portfolio is dying because people are not making enough waves around the JCP to keep Oracle on the straight and narrow. Nothing to do with opensource, the JCP is a very different project from traditional opensource development. The JRE has never been a "real" open source project, but rather a proprietary system that opened up enough to develop a caring community. The problem is that, at the moment, the interests of Java's owner are not aligned with the interests of such community, and not enough people seem to care. This has nothing to do with Java being "open source" or not; in fact, a real OSS project would happily fork at this point (as it happened with OpenOffice), but the Java community cannot really do it. It seems pointless to debate the merits of OSS in a situation where there is no OSS; it's like saying "We supported Windows out of self-interest; but let's talk about the pros and cons of opensource...".

pron 11y ago
> The JRE has never been a "real" open source project What does that mean? Compare Java to other open source projects of similar magnitude (and there aren't many; maybe only Linux, which is actually bigger). Linux is even more exclusive than OpenJDK, and just like Linux, companies with appropriate resources often make changes to the software even if those changes aren't contributed back (or contributed but not merged). > and not enough people seem to care People will care once many start to actually feel it. Oracle's interests are probably not aligned with mine, and may or may not be a cause for concern for me, but so far Oracle's actions wrt OpenJDK don't harm me at all. The investment in the platform feels to have only grown in the past few years. > but the Java community cannot really do it Why not? I think it most certainly can, but at this point there's not enough motivation to do it.
- toyg 11y ago
  Look at what Oracle is doing to Google for the sin of refusing the JCP process. Do you think they wouldn't do the same against any Java fork with a realistic chance of supplanting their implementation? The details are not important, they'll throw the book at you and find something that sticks. The current situation (OpenJDK open but not a realistic choice in most production deployments; Oracle JDK/JRE remaining as de-facto gold standard; a process that forces strict compatibility tests on any competitor) can be fine from a certain point of view, but in practice it means that Java is not a traditional community-led OSS program. Rather, it's a program where the OSS community helps a company improve their software. RedHat is not the only Linux build with significant marketshare, and I won't get sued if I write a different POSIX system. > at this point there's not enough motivation to do it. No there isn't, that's what Rhaman is saying. But what he's also implying is that the direction of travel has changed inside Oracle, and people outside do not seem to realize it. IMHO it's fairly obvious where things are going (you'll stop "installing Java", and only develop and deploy in the Oracle cloud or similar Oracle-sanctioned environments).

vmorgulis 11y ago

> ... We had floors of kernel engineers fixing Linux to make it work (it was barely functional back then.) ... It reminds me a story about evolution. It says that the wheat (or the corn) is a successful specie because it is grown by man at a wide scale. Those Oracle engineers are like bees collecting pollen from the Linux flowers :-) It's a two-way link.

lazaroclapp 11y ago

> the Open Source idea is very messed up in an economy with distinct winners and losers. Except Oracle getting rich on say, Linux, doesn't hurt me if I am running Ubuntu, Debian or Gentoo. In fact, if their patches are any good, due to the GPL, it helps me. Now, if I develop open source software, I might or might not be able to extract as much of the value generated as if I was making it a proprietary product. On the other hand, the total reach and value of the project might be magnified just because other people (and also for-profit-corporations) can take it and extend it and use it. I might see less of that value myself but: a) It might not be my primary goal to capture as much value as possible, just to get enough money out of it so that I can continue working on that project. b) The "size of the pie" that the same project is worth as open-source, specially for developer tools, is much much larger than if I kept it proprietary. So, in some cases, I might be able to capture more absolute value that way, even if I am helping some huge megacorp get filthy rich too (which is what would happen if I got a 'normal' software job, anyways). Making your software free to me is not quite an ethical imperative in most cases, but it is a personal decision that can make a lot of sense, even if the entity that will profit the most from your software in monetary terms might not be yourself. The flip side is that, all things being equal, a great open-source software is likely to have a higher impact (and bring you more fame), than a great proprietary program. Specially for infrastructure, libraries and the like vs user-facing software. If Tim Berners-Lee had been paid for the world-wide web what his contribution ended up being worth to the world, he would be the world's first trillionaire. On the other hand, if he had insisted that he get paid for all uses of the web, the web might have never come be to (or might have lost to a much more "corporate" system, under the control of one or a few companies).

notalaser 11y ago
> Except Oracle getting rich on say, Linux, doesn't hurt me if I am running Ubuntu, Debian or Gentoo. In fact, if their patches are any good, due to the GPL, it helps me. It does if they manage to get in a position where they "own" enough of what you're using so that they can force their choices on you. Red Hat has been in such a position for a long time now, and their world domination agenda has been steadily hurting non-enterprise Linux users in a higher and higher proportion.

Confusion 11y ago

What do you mean by 'integrating Java'? You are comparing Java to Visual Studio, which feels like comparing apples to orchards. AFAIK the vast majority of Java programmers use Eclipse, Netbeans or IntelliJ. Oracle has had JDeveloper since 1998. So what was Java being integrated into?

MrTonyD 11y ago
We started off with a series of strategy meetings prior to the release of JDeveloper. We hired a small team to integrate the JVM into Oracle with the idea that we might be able to replace PL/SQL with Java within the Database. We started by bundling JDeveloper from Borland, and it was awful, so we brought it in-house to continue developing it. From there, there was a continuously evolving strategy of how we could position Java to compete with Visual Studio. Microsoft had explicit plans (internally) to add more APIs to the APIs in order to capture developers, and "not fix" other existing APIs which they had mis-implemented in order to give the impression that our products were broken. And since every deployment began with a development project, it was very important that we kept a working set of APIs to our products in Java - so that Microsoft didn't take all our customers. We had seen Microsoft harm other competitors by using those same tricks (and claim that it wasn't intentional.)

ErikAugust 11y ago

I am reminded of Aaron Swartz wearing the "My Free Software Runs Your Company" shirt: http://assets.bwbx.io/images/icUNrxSKG6Pc/v1/-1x-1.jpg http://assets.bwbx.io/images/icUNrxSKG6Pc/v1/-1x-1.jpg

michaelmrose 11y ago

I cannot comprehend a situation wherein open source is negative. Clearly it might not be the most lucrative path but we are all net consumers of technology. What's the better alternative to billionaires getting their software for free? It's unlikely that companies will contribute manpower to software if they then have to pay for it too. If you have a better strategy I'd like to hear it.

tonyedgecombe 11y ago
> What's the better alternative to billionaires getting their software for free? Billionaires paying for their software?
- klibertp 11y ago
  It would be very hard, not to mention almost impossible politically, to make only billionaires pay for free software. You'd probably end up making everyone pay, with billionaires paying a bit more than most. Would that be good for OSS and for the users, I wonder?
- michaelmrose 11y ago
  So we need to implement user restrictions licensing codes software audits etc and ensure that there are no benefits to companies embracing free software ensuring their contributions dry up. Not precisely a winning strategy

frik 11y ago

> We had floors of kernel engineers fixing Linux to make it work (it was barely functional back then). When was "back then". Are you talking about the 1990s or the 2000s? You are not talking about RedHat Linux fork "Oracle Linux", right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Linux

cyphar 11y ago

> I was a Product Manager at Oracle when we decided to integrate Java. It seemed like an odd decision to those outside Oracle, but at the highest levels in Oracle we were circulating a Microsoft internal presentation about how Microsoft was going to use the dominance of Visual Studio to defeat competitors across the application space. So Oracle had no choice except to support Java as the alternative to Visual Studio. So Java and all Open Source support were really done only to the extent which self-interest demanded. We had floors of kernel engineers fixing Linux to make it work (it was barely functional back then.) And we coordinated with HP, IBM, Sun, Red Hat, and others so that they would encourage and pay their engineers to support Open Source. The idea that Open Source is somehow separate from business and market forces ignores its history. And the idea that Open Source is always positive is equally absurd. I've been working in open source for decades now, and the big winners are often the same rich companies which are extracting the wealth of our society - as they get software for free while the engineers provide work without getting the true "fruits of their labor". Does it make sense for multi-billionaires to get this software for free? Really, the Open Source idea is very messed up in an economy with distinct winners and losers. If you only use permissive licenses, free software can result in large corporate monopolies. Copyleft licenses help counter this. Linux, GNU, VLC, FFmpeg, etc are all good examples of this.