7 ms·

I am happy Oracle is losing this battle (edit: or at least feeling the heat), one sort of personal reason is that they have killed/crippled many open source pro

by tmptmp 10y ago

I am happy Oracle is losing this battle (edit: or at least feeling the heat), one sort of personal reason is that they have killed/crippled many open source projects. Other reason, they are gaining money mainly because there are enough fools around running big corps, who can conveniently pass the buck if something goes wrong. Similar is true for MS too. But if you really want to see your money well spent, Oracle is not at all the way. The recent decision by Yandex to shift from Oracle to Postgres should be seen here. [1] [1] https://www.pgcon.org/2016/schedule/attachments/426_2016.05.19%20Yandex.Mail%20success%20story.pdf https://www.pgcon.org/2016/schedule/attachments/426_2016.05....

b2m9 10y ago
> Other reason, they are gaining money mainly because there are enough fools around running big corps, who can conveniently pass the buck if something goes wrong. Well, this can be said for any big business software company. It's the same story with SAP, IBM and friends. Business software is simply not about spending money well.
- strictnein 10y ago
  Business software is about regulatory compliance. That is the baked in value that these behemoths offer.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Big companies are often are complicated mess, and I can emphasize with desire to simplify and streamline operation. There's some benefit with setting your infrastructure in such a way that there's a known party you can pay to fix things quickly, and that you can sue if they can't.
  - AndyNemmity 10y ago
    Often they also like to stay understaffed in IT, so having consistent vendors, and similar systems allows them to keep just a few guys around that have any clue how it works, and supplement with consultants and vendor support.
- AndyNemmity 10y ago
  People say that a lot, but I work with customers all the time who are very happy with their solutions. I don't disagree that some people hate them, or hate this or that ui, but I can think to many companies/interactions with people that love the products. That's never really expressed places like here. It's just "not spending money well", when I think there are legitimate positives to a lot of business software.
  - b2m9 10y ago
    I don't claim that I know the ultimate truth, but I worked for many years for one of those big business software companies. But from my experience, only the people who don't have to interact with such products in any form like it. (Who are often also making the decision to purchase it) It happened only a few times that users of such products (analysts, admins, support, devs, ...) told me that they like this or that. And I still remember each one of those guys and girls. (Weren't that many) I know what those companies charge for their software and maintenance. I've been involved in the development of those products for a couple of years. And my very personal opinion is: they're not worth their money. No matter what a customer tells the press how much easier their business is after purchasing product X from company Y. As I said, it's my personal opinion on that matter.
treehau5 10y ago
> Other reason, they are gaining money mainly because there are enough fools around running big corps, who can conveniently pass the buck if something goes wrong. Similar is true for MS too. This is also the sole reason IBM still exists, at least in services. "Oh our system is an overengineered pile of garbage that takes two weeks to deploy an update to a static asset? It's (cue dramatic music) their fault!" CTO proceeds to get bonus IBM Consultants are brought in
- abakker 10y ago
  For many people in IT, generally not the Hacker News crowd, but the guys in the trenches of [insert corporation name here] with ops in many countries, The Money is NOT really the important thing. Risk mitigation by having a passthrough to the big IT vendors is what they are paying for specifically. I work in the IT consulting / business research space. In our surveys, "vendor viability" is a frequent concern, and the more critical the workload, the more weight is given to wondering whether the vendor will be around, unchanged, in the next 3 years. The risk mitigation factor from large vendors comes not from performance but from reliability. You can trust that old mainframe code will continue to be supported for many years. You can trust that your COBOL workload will be continue to run, and that the 20 years of updates, patches, and tweaks have made it reliable and predictable in a way that precludes rip and replace in all but the most extenuating circumstances. IT budgets tend to be governed by an 80/20 rule - maintenance vs innovation. Sometimes, its more of a 95/5 in practicality due to shrinking budgets. My experience says that the innovation side is drastically shifting away from these big vendors, but that the maintenance side has a lot more riding on it still.
  - oblio 10y ago
    Well, thing is, Open Source is changing that proposition. As long as you're prepared to be conservative in your choices, something like Debian + Apache + OSS programming language will likely be around 20-40 years from now. When is the last time an OSS programming language that took off actually died? For example, even though it's not as popular Perl 5 is still used professionally in many environments and as far as I know the ecosystem actually went through a sort of renaissance a few years back. And these days I think it's even easier for OSS ecosystems to achieve critical mass and sustain themselves for decades since communication is easier (a lot more broadband internet in the world) and there's a lot more programmers around. Python, Ruby, PHP & co will probably be around long after I'm dead.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
learningbot 10y ago
"Other reason, they are gaining money mainly because there are enough fools around running big corps, who can conveniently pass the buck if something goes wrong. Similar is true for MS too." - Is there any source to justify this comment ?
- AndyNemmity 10y ago
  No. It's not even really true. The reality when you work in these fields are that there are many different reasons why a given solution is selected, and often times people really like it. I almost don't want to post about this here because I know it's going to be disliked, and I'm not trying to start an argument. But you never get that perspective here.
  - x0x0 10y ago
    Not least of which is the time/expense/risk to replace even a suboptimal solution outweighs the benefits.
  - brazzledazzle 10y ago
    I agree in the general sense but it's important to understand that the reason you see so much disdain for these pieces of enterprise software are motivated by reasons that are just as valid as the reasons for choosing it in the first place. Is Oracle RAC a database with compelling features and a large pool of adequate DBAs? Sure. Is it a piece of shit that requires X Windows on the server? Sure. The reason it needs an X Windows server to install and manage is because it needs to have a GUI that those pool of cheap DBAs is capable of reasoning about. SharePoint is good for locking everything down, enabling complex workflows and intricate business processes. Because of that it's a total shit show from and employees perspective because it drains your life force every time you have to slog through it. Heck even something like JIRA is an example of this. Its infinite knobs and levers let managers and PMs layer on complexity until a nice out of the box experience turns a lot of HNers into JIRA haters for life.
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  Even though I think it's a lot more nuanced than that so I don't exactly agree asking for a source for every little thing, particularly things that are clearly understood through experience (or something you can Google yourself), is a redditism that I think HN would be much better off without. It's often an underhanded way to effectively kill a discussion with a cheap "checkmate". If you disagree or have a differing experience simply say so.
davidgerard 10y ago
I just spent today in meeting hell with networking vendor sales engineers. One thing everyone agreed on was what an absolute delight it was moving from Oracle to Postgres. Oracle is a top-class database - it saves your data, it gives it back really fast and reliably - but every other detail of dealing with them is awful. The biggest benefit of moving to PG is we never have to think about licenses again.

by tmptmp 10y ago

b2m9 10y ago

> Other reason, they are gaining money mainly because there are enough fools around running big corps, who can conveniently pass the buck if something goes wrong. Well, this can be said for any big business software company. It's the same story with SAP, IBM and friends. Business software is simply not about spending money well.

strictnein 10y ago
Business software is about regulatory compliance. That is the baked in value that these behemoths offer.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
Big companies are often are complicated mess, and I can emphasize with desire to simplify and streamline operation. There's some benefit with setting your infrastructure in such a way that there's a known party you can pay to fix things quickly, and that you can sue if they can't.
- AndyNemmity 10y ago
  Often they also like to stay understaffed in IT, so having consistent vendors, and similar systems allows them to keep just a few guys around that have any clue how it works, and supplement with consultants and vendor support.
AndyNemmity 10y ago
People say that a lot, but I work with customers all the time who are very happy with their solutions. I don't disagree that some people hate them, or hate this or that ui, but I can think to many companies/interactions with people that love the products. That's never really expressed places like here. It's just "not spending money well", when I think there are legitimate positives to a lot of business software.
- b2m9 10y ago
  I don't claim that I know the ultimate truth, but I worked for many years for one of those big business software companies. But from my experience, only the people who don't have to interact with such products in any form like it. (Who are often also making the decision to purchase it) It happened only a few times that users of such products (analysts, admins, support, devs, ...) told me that they like this or that. And I still remember each one of those guys and girls. (Weren't that many) I know what those companies charge for their software and maintenance. I've been involved in the development of those products for a couple of years. And my very personal opinion is: they're not worth their money. No matter what a customer tells the press how much easier their business is after purchasing product X from company Y. As I said, it's my personal opinion on that matter.

treehau5 10y ago

> Other reason, they are gaining money mainly because there are enough fools around running big corps, who can conveniently pass the buck if something goes wrong. Similar is true for MS too. This is also the sole reason IBM still exists, at least in services. "Oh our system is an overengineered pile of garbage that takes two weeks to deploy an update to a static asset? It's (cue dramatic music) their fault!" CTO proceeds to get bonus IBM Consultants are brought in

abakker 10y ago
For many people in IT, generally not the Hacker News crowd, but the guys in the trenches of [insert corporation name here] with ops in many countries, The Money is NOT really the important thing. Risk mitigation by having a passthrough to the big IT vendors is what they are paying for specifically. I work in the IT consulting / business research space. In our surveys, "vendor viability" is a frequent concern, and the more critical the workload, the more weight is given to wondering whether the vendor will be around, unchanged, in the next 3 years. The risk mitigation factor from large vendors comes not from performance but from reliability. You can trust that old mainframe code will continue to be supported for many years. You can trust that your COBOL workload will be continue to run, and that the 20 years of updates, patches, and tweaks have made it reliable and predictable in a way that precludes rip and replace in all but the most extenuating circumstances. IT budgets tend to be governed by an 80/20 rule - maintenance vs innovation. Sometimes, its more of a 95/5 in practicality due to shrinking budgets. My experience says that the innovation side is drastically shifting away from these big vendors, but that the maintenance side has a lot more riding on it still.
- oblio 10y ago
  Well, thing is, Open Source is changing that proposition. As long as you're prepared to be conservative in your choices, something like Debian + Apache + OSS programming language will likely be around 20-40 years from now. When is the last time an OSS programming language that took off actually died? For example, even though it's not as popular Perl 5 is still used professionally in many environments and as far as I know the ecosystem actually went through a sort of renaissance a few years back. And these days I think it's even easier for OSS ecosystems to achieve critical mass and sustain themselves for decades since communication is easier (a lot more broadband internet in the world) and there's a lot more programmers around. Python, Ruby, PHP & co will probably be around long after I'm dead.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

learningbot 10y ago

"Other reason, they are gaining money mainly because there are enough fools around running big corps, who can conveniently pass the buck if something goes wrong. Similar is true for MS too." - Is there any source to justify this comment ?

AndyNemmity 10y ago
No. It's not even really true. The reality when you work in these fields are that there are many different reasons why a given solution is selected, and often times people really like it. I almost don't want to post about this here because I know it's going to be disliked, and I'm not trying to start an argument. But you never get that perspective here.
- x0x0 10y ago
  Not least of which is the time/expense/risk to replace even a suboptimal solution outweighs the benefits.
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  I agree in the general sense but it's important to understand that the reason you see so much disdain for these pieces of enterprise software are motivated by reasons that are just as valid as the reasons for choosing it in the first place. Is Oracle RAC a database with compelling features and a large pool of adequate DBAs? Sure. Is it a piece of shit that requires X Windows on the server? Sure. The reason it needs an X Windows server to install and manage is because it needs to have a GUI that those pool of cheap DBAs is capable of reasoning about. SharePoint is good for locking everything down, enabling complex workflows and intricate business processes. Because of that it's a total shit show from and employees perspective because it drains your life force every time you have to slog through it. Heck even something like JIRA is an example of this. Its infinite knobs and levers let managers and PMs layer on complexity until a nice out of the box experience turns a lot of HNers into JIRA haters for life.
brazzledazzle 10y ago
Even though I think it's a lot more nuanced than that so I don't exactly agree asking for a source for every little thing, particularly things that are clearly understood through experience (or something you can Google yourself), is a redditism that I think HN would be much better off without. It's often an underhanded way to effectively kill a discussion with a cheap "checkmate". If you disagree or have a differing experience simply say so.

davidgerard 10y ago

I just spent today in meeting hell with networking vendor sales engineers. One thing everyone agreed on was what an absolute delight it was moving from Oracle to Postgres. Oracle is a top-class database - it saves your data, it gives it back really fast and reliably - but every other detail of dealing with them is awful. The biggest benefit of moving to PG is we never have to think about licenses again.