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Anti-Google research group in Washington is funded by Oracle
- goombastic 10y agoOracle should probably invest that money in doing actual R&D for itself. It hasn't been doing well of late in the ERP market. Have oracle's cloud moves failed?
- benley 10y agogosh, I'm just shocked. Shocked! Who ever would have guessed!
- sctb 10y agoPlease comment civilly and substantively or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- adrianratnapala 10y agoOk, I understand SV giants slinging IP lawsuits at each other. But do any of them really gain from slinging mud at each other? Put another way: is this a profit-maximising buisness move, or just Larry Ellison's personality shining through. The irony is that this sort of rough-and-tumble accountability is a good thing. So the only actual effect of this funding might be to make the world a better place, whether Larry likes it or not.
- johnnydoebk 10y ago>> Anti-Google research group in Washington is funded by Oracle Does it matter? Research is either legit or BS. That's all that matters, doesn't it?
- Oletros 10y agoAt least, a watchdog that talks about accountability and transparency should be accountable and transparent and it seems that they are not. That casts a doubt about the intention and the results
- hayksaakian 10y agowho decides what to publish and what to shut down? hint: it's the people funding the research
- gleenn 10y agoI think the obvious question is how much research is it and how much is it just Oracle trying to give Google a hard time. A lot of people and/or press probably have a hard time distinguishing.
- sigsergv 10y agoDepends what one calls BS. Quick look at GTP-generated news gives impression that all covered topics are quite legal, but presentation looks FUDish. Like: “Google employees have enjoyed revolving door during Obama administration” [1] [1]: http://watchdog.org/265844/google-obama-revolving-door/ http://watchdog.org/265844/google-obama-revolving-door/
- adrianratnapala 10y agoFUDish as it might be, it gave people -- including us here at HN -- an opportunity to discuss the pros and cons of such things. This is what democracy looks like.
- hkmurakami 10y agoAnything has a range of interpretations or "partial representation of the facts" that can be used to provide spin to a story. Narratives are powerful, and "independent research groups" can provide that (purposeful) narrative for their backers' gain.
- andybak 10y ago> Research is either legit or BS. That's all that matters, doesn't it? Yes but: 1. It's non-trivial to distinguish between the two 2. It's not a binary distinction. It could be 1%/99%, 99%/1% or anything inbetween. So - a useful heuristic for those of us who can't take a few months off to reproduce the study is to 'follow the money'.
- madaxe_again 10y agoA friend did a stint at oracle, before quitting in disgust. He'd been sold the position as working on innovation in their cloud division. It turned out to be more like industrial espionage, constantly changing tack to follow Google, never actually shipping anything, or pursuing any particular strategy other than "me too!". Under the hood their cloud is a broken pile of limping goshu that they barely understand themselves, as the guys who threw it together a few years back have also churned out. Their main cloud customer is.... Oracle! Unless they start running their own race and stop looking at what the guy in the other lane is doing, they're going zombie.
- totalcrepe 10y agoDestroying the sun grid group and bad mouthing cloud wasn't the smartest way to handle the buyout of Sun, in retrospect. Solaris engineers know quite a bit about their stack and what it can and cant do.. the trouble is trying to make a standard consortium by relying on garbage code that sort of works on Linux. Anything you do better than Linux will just be a problem for achieving ultimate bland.
- 56k 10y agoYour enemy's enemy is your friend
- lossolo 10y agoThey are doing this because people have very good opinion about Google and imagine Oracle as some evil corporation that want to attack their favorite sites (google, gmail, youtube etc). They would never win any lawsuit with jury because of that - this is their motivation, change people emotions towards Google.
- ocdtrekkie 10y agoIt's incredible to me how much people look the other way for Google. Talk about privacy invasive features in Microsoft's products, everyone loses their minds. Talk about privacy invasive features in Google products, people think you're being paranoid.
- dijit 10y agoNobody thinks you're being paranoid by thinking google is selling your data, that's known. But Microsoft previously did not do this, and you're paying for the operating system. To my knowledge you don't pay for google products. (excluding the business apps suites, which are still cheap for what they are).
- Oletros 10y agoNor Google nor Microsoft sell any data
- unfunco 10y agoOne is an advertising company and the other also has an advertising division, your data is used to target those advertisements, they're both absolutely selling your data.
- Oletros 10y agoNo, they are selling ad space. But if you're sure that they are selling the data to third parties, can you provide any source for that claim?
- current_call 10y agoEngineering manager at Google posts story where whistle blowers that target Google are called anti-Google researchers. The original article references another article that calls the group a shadowy project that's attacking Google. By the way, when's Google finishing the Wedding Crashers trilogy? I need to see how great moving to California is again.