8 ms·

“Use of open source software has been declining rapidly in the private sector”

237 points by bcantrill 9y ago

pg_is_a_butt 9y ago
the use may be declining, but only because oracle software is eating up more resources, and the open source software is getting better and requires less use to get the same job done. you're all idiots.
jackpot51 9y ago
Welp, that was locked quickly. Not looking good for us, is it bcantrill?
samsgro 9y ago
Unsubstantiated, self-serving FUD from Oracle.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- tetromino_ 9y ago
  It's self-serving, but I wonder if it might true. Locally hosted applications are a varying mixture of open-source and closed-source, in different proportion in different places. But when they get replaced with SaaS, as is now the fashion, that replacement is almost always commercial closed-source.
  - rpedela 9y ago
    Maybe but most SaaS uses open source.
  - eikenberry 9y ago
    Though every SaaS is 99% Open Source software with 1% proprietary sprinkled on top to create the value add. So really these are much more open source than the old vendored solutions where they installed the proprietary software onsite.
  - pbarnes_1 9y ago
    It's not true in all instances of private enterprise I've been involved with. If anything, most people have wanted more OSS.
  - mbesto 9y ago
    The reality is there's simply no way to calculate this accurately.
danjoc 9y ago
From Oracle's vantage point, that's probably true. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrDnuvHfBr4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrDnuvHfBr4
wyldfire 9y ago
Background on the author (from [1]): > Ken Glueck, Senior VP for government affairs, Oracle > Bio: Based in Washington, Glueck has run Oracle’s Washington office for about 20 years, having built a career as a tech lobbyist before there was a phrase for it and running field operations for Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman. [1] https://www.recode.net/2015/8/18/11617800/meet-silicon-valleys-political-power-brokers https://www.recode.net/2015/8/18/11617800/meet-silicon-valle...
- notirish 9y ago
  thanks, so this is basically native advertising for Oracle
- karmapolic 9y ago
  oracle and open source? do i smell something here.
  - 201709User 9y ago
    If it's a stench it's just Java.
- happy-go-lucky 9y ago
  So, all he intends to say must be: “Use of closed source software has been increasing rapidly in the private sector” Edit: AFAIK, open source and closed source teams are working hand in glove with each other. This quote comes to mind: "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"
  - colordrops 9y ago
    "if all you have is a hammer, sell it to the government for $3000"
    - imron 9y ago
      Why sell hammers to the government for such a discount?
wyldfire 9y ago
> The actions of 18F and USDS plainly promote open source solutions and then propagate those mandates across government with the implicit endorsement of the White House. The USG’s enthusiasm for open source software is wholly inconsistent with the use of OSS in the private sector. I think we can objectively say that the current administration places a priority on undoing the legacy of the previous administration. Since IIRC 18F/USDS were spawned by the previous administration, I worry about their longevity. They're really in danger if they're called out by business leaders like Oracle. It's very easy for people who haven't worked in software to hear "socialist" when told about "Open Source Software". This message from Oracle seems to try and evoke that sentiment.
- emmab 9y ago
  > It's very easy for people who haven't worked in software to hear "socialist" when told about "Open Source Software". This message from Oracle seems to try and evoke that sentiment. I think FOSS is more socialist. Isn't that a good thing?
  - nindalf 9y ago
    Not in America, where it's traditionally been used as an epithet.
  - saimiam 9y ago
    FOSS is a philosophy of making source code available to people to do as they please in the confines of their homes. It's far more rugged individualism than collectivist, standardized one-size-ism. The EFF should read up the NRA playbook - "only defense against bad OSS is good OSS".
    - schoen 9y ago
      I think you mean FSF. (Source: I'm an FSF member and an EFF employee.)
      - ams6110 9y ago
jcstryker 9y ago
This is concerning if true, would like to see more data. This modernization initiative is an opportunity to set a standard of OSS software in the USG. It would be disappointing to see this pass, securing another round of lock-in.
NeutronBoy 9y ago
I know a few years ago when I was working on a government procurement project for some software, the (very good) lawyers were very weary of any OSS included in the proprietary product we were buying. Their reasoning was, we were buying the product from the vendor. If the vendor had incorporated the OSS code into their product and it was found that they'd breached the license conditions, then we essentially lost the license to run the software - otherwise we'd be in breach as well. Not what you want when you're spending hundreds of millions on a project.
- AnthonyMouse 9y ago
  Then you shouldn't buy software from anyone but a natural person who is the original author of 100% of the code, because the same logic applies to any license regardless of the terms. It's just as easy for proprietary software to be a derivative of some other proprietary software which the seller screwed up and didn't acquire the appropriate license for.
- thyrsus 9y ago
  Totally false. A lot of open source software is MIT style, which effectively means there are no consequences to infringement. If the infringing code is GPL, then as customer you've won the lottery, because now you've got an irrevocable free license to everything tightly coupled to that code, and the vendor is limited to charging you for ongoing labor or for adjunct products. You have no responsibilities as customer except to refrain from preventing others access; if you choose to (re-)distribute the code, then you cannot constrain the recipients of the code. The vendor, on the other hand, is now required to charge no more than copying fees for infringing code, and must do so for any customer. They can charge for development labor and support fees (see: Red Hat), but derived code is available to you in perpetuity.
  - taktoa 9y ago
    Since when does the GPL stipulate anything about how much you can charge for GPLed software (wrt your statement about "copying fees")?
syshum 9y ago
One can safely assume that the opposite stance to Oracle on any given policy is what is best for Humanity, one can also safely assume that taking a polar opposite position to Oracle on any subject will be the Ethical and moral position.
- yahna 9y ago
  No, this is unfair. THe oracle stance is based on what's best for Oracle, always. This is not immoral or evil, it is completely amoral. They might occasionally be on the right side. It's just coincidence though.
  - syshum 9y ago
    For most companies you are correct, they are simply amoral profit seekers. Oracle however is a different breed that cross from simply being amoral to something decidedly different Even a cursory look at how they treat employees, customers, vendors, or anyone really will show this in clear detail that they operate differently then other amoral companies. Oracle is a special kind of evil IMO >>>They might occasionally be on the right side. Name one time they have been on the "right side" I can not. You are correct that a traditional amoral company will sometimes be on the "right side" and sometimes not. Oracle has a perfect record on being on the "wrong side" proving my point above
    - plag 9y ago
      >>> Oracle has a perfect record on being on the "wrong side" proving my point above This might just be a huge list of coincidences :D
    - yahna 9y ago
      My point was that you're anthropomorphizing the lawnmower when you say that oracle is evil.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  I downvoted this not because I like Oracle, but because this is a terrible way to think. If you're not qualified to determine the value of a statement based on it's contents, either ask someone else more qualified, or start learning. Evaluating a company to equal good or evil and then judging all statements from them based on that rule leads to a lot of faulty thinking. There are people who have for the last two decades automatically assumed everything Google says is good (false), and everything Microsoft says is bad (also false). It leads people to fail to recognize that corporations act in self-interest as a whole, as they have one real mission: Profit. It leads people to fail to recognize that corporations are made up of people, who, while influenced by their compensation and bias and culture, do have their own views and opinions. And most importantly, it leads people to fail to recognize that corporations change over time, as their people, culture, and priorities shift.
existencebox 9y ago
Private sector dev checking in: (Very grumpily checking in, after reading some of TFA) This really couldn't be more untrue, and I say this both as an eng in my day to day, and as a washed up data scientist who was once tasked with investigating this exact question. Open source continues to be an extremely compelling option (and oftentimes THE idiomatic option) for large swaths of common tasks. I could really only believe his assertions if his data is so twisted out of the realm of a kind interpretation. I tried to read through but at every paragraph I was met by a wall of handwaving which aligns far more strongly with Oracle's incentive to sell support packages than any reasonable interpretation of reality. Some snippets: - "Government should attempt to emulate the fast-paced innovation of Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is comprised of IT vendors most of which fail. " Do they fail because of their tech choices or their strategic choices? - "Instead, the Government should attempt to emulate the best-practices of large private-sector Fortune 50 customers, which have competed, evaluated, procured and secured commercial technology successfully." In my experience, the most technologically savvy F100's are all VERY familiar with utilizing in-house dev, and as recent releases from AWS/Azure might suggest (SQL Server on linux, Aurora support for postgres/mysql, etc) OSS is a key part of this as well. - "Significant IT development expertise is not. Substantial custom software development efforts were the norm at large commercial enterprises, until it became obvious that the cost and complexity of developing technology was prohibitive, with the end-products inherently insecure and too costly to maintain long-term. " Exactly, so we started moving to _OPEN SOURCE_, but not in exclusion to the in-house expertise. (HN has seen lots of the murmurs about when this transition went south and believed that too much outsourcing at the cost of domain expertise and stability was the path to success) He later goes on to cite equifax's failure as an example of this, which I find especially entertaining because that suggests a privately developed piece of software would somehow have more eyes on it or guarantees of safety than a product as widely used as most things Apache. - "The most important skill set of CIO’s today is to critically compete and evaluate commercial alternatives to capture the benefits of innovation conducted at scale, and then to manage the implementation of those technologies efficiently." Translation: "We don't like the alternatives CIO's have been finding, because they aren't Oracle". I'm getting a bit snippy here as one might tell, so I'm going to stop reading before I start screaming at my monitor.
- deleted 9y ago
asah 9y ago
There's some good points, but of course neglects the true comparison with closed source, which has a terrible track record in all of the stated claims. "Tail costs" are hilarious coming from an Oracle executive. Notably, given identical budgets, I'd be shocked if FOSS couldn't delivery faster, more feature-rich and more secure solutions. Is the success of healthcare.gov an example? I, for one, would love to see a mix of the two methods across 100+ projects, then a GAO post mortem.
archildress 9y ago
Don't underestimate the impact of the SaaS model causing this to shift. Most on-prem, whether FOSS or commercial, has large startup cost associated with it. Conversely, more are choosing the (mostly commercial) SaaS alternatives to avoid those startup costs. Source: corporate finance and work with IT purchasing.
sheeshkebab 9y ago
The irony - most of oracles propriatary software has large chunks of open source (not theirs) code. If they ever looked at all the jar files of their “fusion middleware” and similar things they’d know. A bunch nonsense from oracles sales drones.
- horusthecat 9y ago
  Absolutely, truly hilarious to point to the Equifax breach when the same Struts vuln is present in Oracle products.
phkahler 9y ago
Had me up until this: >> There is no such principle that technology developed or procured by the USG should be available free for all citizens, in fact that would present a significant dis-incentive to conducting business with the USG. Conflating software developed with software procured. And this is a section where he pointed out a tendency to conflate some other things. I wonder if that was a subconscious confession ;-)
- 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
  That conflation is particularly slimy because works produced by the US government are explicitly, statutorily ineligible for copyright (17 USC 105). In other words, not only is there such a principle with regard to USG-produced works, it's been actively expressed in US law for decades.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
kovacs 9y ago
Paying someone to offload things you shouldn't be doing is a sound strategy when applied correctly. Unfortunately this message can't come from someone like Oracle whose entire business depends upon companies choosing to buy instead of build. I used to work for Oracle in the field as an SE working on the largest enterprise customers they sell in to. What's left out of the rebuttal is how Oracle (or really any vendor), often sells solutions to problems that customers don't have. And even the solutions that do solve the customers problem on paper are often complicated, don't quite work right because of implementation problems, and lower quality because they're more general purpose. So you end up with a situation where it's dubious that you're any better off at the mercy of a vendor whose interests aren't well enough aligned. The real trick is figuring out where the line should be drawn in buy vs. build for any given initiative and the underlying technology required to satisfy those requirements. Can a homegrown software org. handle the entire lifecycle of building and maintaining the products they build? The ideal place for these teams is at the margins and leveraging highly used products where there's as little custom code ownership as possible. Open source or otherwise. There's certainly a tipping point beyond which an open source project has better quality but it's not clear where that lies. And if you're getting into bed with any software vendor without transparent pricing and good vendor management you risk subjecting yourself to renewal conversations that answer the question of "How much?" with "How much you got?"
- CrossWired 9y ago
  >> What's left out of the rebuttal is how Oracle (or really any vendor), often sells solutions to problems that customers don't have. I interviewed at Microsoft for a field position and the Director I interviewed with basically said this in response to an answer I gave "We don't ask them what they need, we tell them what they need." It just feels dirty coming from the guy they called to help with their technical problem. I'm there as Technical Consultant to solve your problem, not upsell you a different set of problems.
  - kovacs 9y ago
    To be fair the director in charge of my group said to me at the start "You should help the customer. If it's not an Oracle solution that's fine. We'll eventually sell them something, we're too big with too many products not to." So at least he had the right intention. I did see the friction surface with reps though because they don't have the same agenda :-)
thomastjeffery 9y ago
The only thing that makes proprietary software popular is the fact that proprietary software depends on more proprietary software. If you use closed-source software, and you want a new feature, you must create entirely new software that is compatible with it, and usually that means hiring the same companies (who can read the original code) or hiring new "professionals" that have made themselves comfortable with the ecosystem. Free software, on the other hand, allows the application of less software for the same amount of work. You can add features, and those who work with free software don't waste everyone's time with proprietary software if they can avoid it. The US government is incredibly inefficient, especially in IT, and its solution thus far has been "throw more money at the problem". This is clearly a detrimental non-solution. Those of us with clear heads should be adamant that proprietary software does not belong in our government.
- noncoml 9y ago
  Customer support is what makes proprietary software popular.
  - thomastjeffery 9y ago
    While ironically being the most proven business model for free software.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - syshum 9y ago
    Really? Because the largest Proprietary Software vendors have the very very worst reputation for their support, and often sky high prices to even get that support above and beyond the cost of the license to use the software So no I do not believe Customer support is what makes it popular.
  - thomastjeffery 9y ago
    I would venture to say that it is not "customer support", but compatibility that makes proprietary software popular. Specifically, compatibility with other proprietary software.
wmf 9y ago
"Use of open source software has been declining..." is a clickbait headline that is a pretty minor part of the document. It should be no surprise that Oracle doesn't like open source and I don't think there's much benefit to getting into the mud on that topic.
dahart 9y ago
The commentary doesn't specify, but what private sector use of OSS might be declining rapidly? Does this claim have any merit? It seems like almost all web stacks rely heavily on OSS, but coming from Oracle, I assume they could be talking about databases specifically. Would it be true to suggest use of OSS databases, e.g., MySQL, is declining? Oracle positioning themselves against OSS is interesting, and might be telling. I would assume that a message to the govt that OSS is bad means that OSS is actually winning, and Oracle is more scared of open source than it is of other for-profit competition. This is also in line with the government defining OSS as "commercial" software. From the government's perspective, the line isn't whether they paid money, it's more like whether the software comes with a license. http://dodcio.defense.gov/Open-Source-Software-FAQ/#Q:_Is_open_source_software_commercial_software.3F_Is_it_COTS.3F http://dodcio.defense.gov/Open-Source-Software-FAQ/#Q:_Is_op... I feel like that's where Oracle's commentary trips up a bit, because they're painting a picture of the fears of bad things that can happen when using OSS, without realizing the government already figured out that most of the implications and liabilities of any software come from the licensing, and not the dollar costs.
- kristopolous 9y ago
  You could say "make sure customers don't consider alternatives" is his job description.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- syshum 9y ago
  >>>The commentary doesn't specify, but what private sector use of OSS might be declining rapidly? Does this claim have any merit? It seems like almost all web stacks rely heavily on OSS The trend for Open Source has been for a long time to Open Source Tools, Libraries, and other code that is used to create propriety closed source software for companies and individuals to consum This is why you see a massive decline in GPL and other copy left licenses and a Huge increase in Apache, BSD and MIT licensed code as there are no legal issues with including Apache, BSD or MIT code into your Proprietary end user application SaaS, and PaaS (aka Cloud) are also leading the downward use of Open Source as most of these applications are at best Freemium where the supported version of the Software is closed source paid for and they might have a "community edition" that is open (if you are lucky)
gibrown 9y ago
Even a cursory look at some stats says that is completely untrue: - 6 of top 10 "DB-engines" are open source: https://db-engines.com/en/ranking https://db-engines.com/en/ranking - web servers are 83% nginx+apache: https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/web_server/all https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/web_server/all - all top content management software is open source: https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management...
- tedmiston 9y ago
  It’s weird that the DB Engine list conflates OLTP and OLAP databases into one category when they are used completely differently. Would be nice if they had subcategories or filters for something like this.
  - lukaslalinsky 9y ago
    The line between OLTP and OLAP is getting more and more blurred. There are new databases that sit in between, so I think letting those categories go away is a good idea.
asveikau 9y ago
> The USG can never develop, support or secure products economically or at scale. I guess we should stop using the [government developed] internet then.
nickbauman 9y ago
Filed under "Claims made with no citation or data to back it up from a lobbyist."
anonacct37 9y ago
> Substantial custom software development efforts were the norm at large commercial enterprises, until it became obvious that the cost and complexity of developing technology was prohibitive Pardon me but this is one of the most bullshit things I've read in a long time. I work for the fortune one. The idea that open source is in any way decreasing is a dangerous lie. I can think of one closed source app that's any good right now. Splunk. Everything else I interact with is garbage that slows our business down. I am shocked that in the same document Oracle is pushing back on technical competence in the government. I shouldn't be but I am. Closed source is the Cobol of a fortune 50. It exists, it's going to be a while before we get off it, and basically nobody is happy to be running Cobol, Oracle, or Tibco.
- ams6110 9y ago
  COBOL is just a programming language. Many companies used it to develop good sofware for internal use. Of course a lot of pretty bad software was developed with it also, mostly by big consultancies. But the goodness or badness of software doesn't have much to do with what language was used.
  - AnthonyMouse 9y ago
    > But the goodness or badness of software doesn't have much to do with what language was used. To a certain extent it does. COBOL is in the same category as Visual Basic in the sense that they make it easy for novices to quickly create programs that half work, but getting the other half right then takes far more effort than would have been required when using a better language to begin with. The result is that people using those languages tend to give up at that point and subject the users to their half broken programs.
    - WorldMaker 9y ago
      Plus the companies still most highly invested in COBOL and VB are likely the same companies that live and die by the sunk cost fallacy. COBOL and VB had nearly as much good as bad in their time, but to some extent the companies with good COBOL or VB programs more often than not have moved on with the times to greener pasture. Meanwhile, it's harder and harder to argue that the companies still using COBOL or VB for core business processes care about investments into good code, and as the good programmers move on to other languages it's hard to argue that much good code is currently written in those languages (except at great expense to retain good programmers in bad situations).
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
makecheck 9y ago
In the past I’ve seen that free software licenses make companies nervous, and they will inject Legal in the middle of your project schedule. This creates at least weeks or months of nontechnical dependencies in order to obtain approvals for even the simplest things (and you have no control over the activities of the Legal departmentc at all so good luck with your promised timeline for completion). In addition, GPL can practically translate to an automatic “No” in some organizations. The wording of licenses also matters, which is why coming up with “cute license that is mostly well-known license but different” is a sure way to severely delay or prevent corporate adoption of your project. At this point, you should really just pick a well-known license. Given these thorns in the side of company code, it is not at all surprising when engineers consider just coming up with some code themselves.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  Yeah, but most new code (especially frontend javascript, desktop application libraries, mobile application libraries) is 2-clause BSD, ISC (which is formally equivalent to 2BSD), MIT, or Apache 2.0. I guess there are goons going around slapping WTFPL on things, but oh well, doesn't seem to be stopping anyone. GPL doesn't cause problems unless you're distributing. If you're just compiling and running it as part of your service, it's no biggie. I ran it by legal pretty quickly. I've worked on plenty of projects with GPL stuff in them.
  - flukus 9y ago
    > GPL doesn't cause problems unless you're distributing Or if you might want to distribute in future, what is good now might become impossible because a client wants an on premise install for instance. Or if the software department ever get's spun out to a separate legal entity. I'm a big fan of the GPL, even the AGPL, but I wouldn't use a GPL library in a non-GPL product.
microcolonel 9y ago
> Here there is an inexplicable conflation between “open data,” which has a long legacy in the USG and stems from decades old principles that the USG should not hold copyrights It is explicit that the United States Government can not hold U.S. copyrights on government works, that's not a "false narrative", that is the law[0]. [0]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/105 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/105
- fourthark 9y ago
  Wow, so open sourcing is the only way they can be sure to hold onto the software they pay to have made for them...
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  I wonder if the founders were establishing copyright today if they would intentionally make government works "copyleft" instead of just public domain.
microcolonel 9y ago
Bad faith dealing, blatant disregard for the truth, misrepresentation of the law. Sounds like Oracle to me.
RickJWag 9y ago
Hmmmm. Red Hat's marketshare (and stock price) have risen steadily forever. Microsoft just gave up and open sourced .NET. Open Source stacks run everything. Kubernetes is running rampant. I don't think OSS is declining rapidly. I'm pretty sure it's winning.
shmerl 9y ago
Oracle being Oracle. What's new? And they were especially annoyed with the idea that taxes supported software should be open source. I think it's a great idea, and Oracle should get lost for opposing it. Taxes surely should not be used to support someone who pushes copyrightability of APIs.
malchow 9y ago
I thought this was perceptive: "False Narrative: Government should attempt to emulate the fast-paced innovation of Silicon Valley. [...] The USG is not a technology vendor nor is it a start-up. Under no circumstance should the USG attempt to become a technology vendor. The USG can never develop, support or secure products economically or at scale. Government developed products are not subject to the extensive testing in the commercial market. Instead, the Government should attempt to emulate the best-practices of large private-sector Fortune 50 customers, which have competed, evaluated, procured and secured commercial technology successfully."
- sitkack 9y ago
  Bullshit. The USG has a the ability to leverage scale like no business ever could. The government consumes of tech are balkanized and sold billion dollar contracts over and over again when they could pay industry wages and still come out ahead.
  - malchow 9y ago
    I mean, I think reality intrudes on your fanciful theory. When GSA was hacked and life-threatening personal information on security-cleared government employees was leaked, the public reaction was: eh. Compare this to Equifax, where the intrusion was less successful than at GSA, but which may nevertheless cease to exist, and whose entire leadership will likely be replaced. I think the reality is: people have seen and therefore expect government tech systems to be awful and vulnerable. And people have seen and therefore expect private tech systems to be relatively better.
    - WorldMaker 9y ago
      I think this is more an anecdotal case of "I'm not a security-cleared government employee, so why should I care". I see as much or more of the opposite viewpoint from what you are espousing: the GSA is forced to be accountable with giant audits and meetings and red tape until the problems are found and root causes discovered and mitigations (even token mitigations) in place. Meanwhile, Equifax was hardly punished in the stock market, the one place that supposedly gets any sort of accountability out of publicly traded private corporations these days (since they only seem to care about quarterly profits rather than employees or customers or people in general). There was a lot of anecdotal resignation among my friends that no one is or can hold Equifax accountable and we'll never leave the status quo of Equifax making millions of dollars in profits warehousing data that they have no right to own.
gerdesj 9y ago
RLY? The OP is a GH issue report with a really long winded thread, with lots of long comments. I've scanned through the lot - what the blazes am I missing?
sitkack 9y ago
Thank you to the person that inlined the text to the PDF. Without this, Oracles FUD would have been tucked away as an attachment.
tomrod 9y ago
Yeah... at least at $LARGEBANK I work at, FLOSS has been massively adopted in my tenure there. I do my part to evangelize as well.
agentultra 9y ago
I don't necessarily agree with him but I do sympathize on the security front. I know we all do our best in the OSS world but governments collecting all that data and not paying engineers to do formal verification and security auditing seems pretty scary. Maybe this is a little backwards but there's something comforting about a massive beauracracy filled with paper forms and legions of administrators. It makes it quite difficult to run off with a billion records, doesn't it?
thanatropism 9y ago
One word: Heartbleed. It spread far and wide the idea that open source infrastructure was a temerary proposition.
- pritambaral 9y ago
  Does closed source not have security issues?
  - ygjb 9y ago
    The better question is how long did it take closed source solutions that consume openssl to update their products?
  - thanatropism 9y ago
    Hey, don't shoot the messenger.
    - pritambaral 9y ago
      That was a question. It's neither provocative nor aggressive, unlike its parent.
dannyrosen 9y ago
What's confusing is that Oracle just announced a partnership with Cloud Foundry [1] [1] - https://blogs.oracle.com/developers/cloud-foundry-arrives-on-oracle-cloud https://blogs.oracle.com/developers/cloud-foundry-arrives-on...

237 points by bcantrill 9y ago

the use may be declining, but only because oracle software is eating up more resources, and the open source software is getting better and requires less use to get the same job done. you're all idiots.

jackpot51 9y ago

Welp, that was locked quickly. Not looking good for us, is it bcantrill?

samsgro 9y ago

Unsubstantiated, self-serving FUD from Oracle.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tetromino_ 9y ago
It's self-serving, but I wonder if it might true. Locally hosted applications are a varying mixture of open-source and closed-source, in different proportion in different places. But when they get replaced with SaaS, as is now the fashion, that replacement is almost always commercial closed-source.
- rpedela 9y ago
  Maybe but most SaaS uses open source.
- eikenberry 9y ago
  Though every SaaS is 99% Open Source software with 1% proprietary sprinkled on top to create the value add. So really these are much more open source than the old vendored solutions where they installed the proprietary software onsite.
- pbarnes_1 9y ago
  It's not true in all instances of private enterprise I've been involved with. If anything, most people have wanted more OSS.
- mbesto 9y ago
  The reality is there's simply no way to calculate this accurately.

danjoc 9y ago

From Oracle's vantage point, that's probably true. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrDnuvHfBr4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrDnuvHfBr4

wyldfire 9y ago

Background on the author (from [1]): > Ken Glueck, Senior VP for government affairs, Oracle > Bio: Based in Washington, Glueck has run Oracle’s Washington office for about 20 years, having built a career as a tech lobbyist before there was a phrase for it and running field operations for Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman. [1] https://www.recode.net/2015/8/18/11617800/meet-silicon-valleys-political-power-brokers https://www.recode.net/2015/8/18/11617800/meet-silicon-valle...

notirish 9y ago
thanks, so this is basically native advertising for Oracle
karmapolic 9y ago
oracle and open source? do i smell something here.
- 201709User 9y ago
  If it's a stench it's just Java.
happy-go-lucky 9y ago
So, all he intends to say must be: “Use of closed source software has been increasing rapidly in the private sector” Edit: AFAIK, open source and closed source teams are working hand in glove with each other. This quote comes to mind: "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"
- colordrops 9y ago
  "if all you have is a hammer, sell it to the government for $3000"
  - imron 9y ago
    Why sell hammers to the government for such a discount?

wyldfire 9y ago

> The actions of 18F and USDS plainly promote open source solutions and then propagate those mandates across government with the implicit endorsement of the White House. The USG’s enthusiasm for open source software is wholly inconsistent with the use of OSS in the private sector. I think we can objectively say that the current administration places a priority on undoing the legacy of the previous administration. Since IIRC 18F/USDS were spawned by the previous administration, I worry about their longevity. They're really in danger if they're called out by business leaders like Oracle. It's very easy for people who haven't worked in software to hear "socialist" when told about "Open Source Software". This message from Oracle seems to try and evoke that sentiment.

emmab 9y ago
> It's very easy for people who haven't worked in software to hear "socialist" when told about "Open Source Software". This message from Oracle seems to try and evoke that sentiment. I think FOSS is more socialist. Isn't that a good thing?
- nindalf 9y ago
  Not in America, where it's traditionally been used as an epithet.
- saimiam 9y ago
  FOSS is a philosophy of making source code available to people to do as they please in the confines of their homes. It's far more rugged individualism than collectivist, standardized one-size-ism. The EFF should read up the NRA playbook - "only defense against bad OSS is good OSS".
  - schoen 9y ago
    I think you mean FSF. (Source: I'm an FSF member and an EFF employee.)
    - ams6110 9y ago

jcstryker 9y ago

This is concerning if true, would like to see more data. This modernization initiative is an opportunity to set a standard of OSS software in the USG. It would be disappointing to see this pass, securing another round of lock-in.

NeutronBoy 9y ago

I know a few years ago when I was working on a government procurement project for some software, the (very good) lawyers were very weary of any OSS included in the proprietary product we were buying. Their reasoning was, we were buying the product from the vendor. If the vendor had incorporated the OSS code into their product and it was found that they'd breached the license conditions, then we essentially lost the license to run the software - otherwise we'd be in breach as well. Not what you want when you're spending hundreds of millions on a project.

AnthonyMouse 9y ago
Then you shouldn't buy software from anyone but a natural person who is the original author of 100% of the code, because the same logic applies to any license regardless of the terms. It's just as easy for proprietary software to be a derivative of some other proprietary software which the seller screwed up and didn't acquire the appropriate license for.
thyrsus 9y ago
Totally false. A lot of open source software is MIT style, which effectively means there are no consequences to infringement. If the infringing code is GPL, then as customer you've won the lottery, because now you've got an irrevocable free license to everything tightly coupled to that code, and the vendor is limited to charging you for ongoing labor or for adjunct products. You have no responsibilities as customer except to refrain from preventing others access; if you choose to (re-)distribute the code, then you cannot constrain the recipients of the code. The vendor, on the other hand, is now required to charge no more than copying fees for infringing code, and must do so for any customer. They can charge for development labor and support fees (see: Red Hat), but derived code is available to you in perpetuity.
- taktoa 9y ago
  Since when does the GPL stipulate anything about how much you can charge for GPLed software (wrt your statement about "copying fees")?

syshum 9y ago

One can safely assume that the opposite stance to Oracle on any given policy is what is best for Humanity, one can also safely assume that taking a polar opposite position to Oracle on any subject will be the Ethical and moral position.

yahna 9y ago
No, this is unfair. THe oracle stance is based on what's best for Oracle, always. This is not immoral or evil, it is completely amoral. They might occasionally be on the right side. It's just coincidence though.
- syshum 9y ago
  For most companies you are correct, they are simply amoral profit seekers. Oracle however is a different breed that cross from simply being amoral to something decidedly different Even a cursory look at how they treat employees, customers, vendors, or anyone really will show this in clear detail that they operate differently then other amoral companies. Oracle is a special kind of evil IMO >>>They might occasionally be on the right side. Name one time they have been on the "right side" I can not. You are correct that a traditional amoral company will sometimes be on the "right side" and sometimes not. Oracle has a perfect record on being on the "wrong side" proving my point above
  - plag 9y ago
    >>> Oracle has a perfect record on being on the "wrong side" proving my point above This might just be a huge list of coincidences :D
  - yahna 9y ago
    My point was that you're anthropomorphizing the lawnmower when you say that oracle is evil.
ocdtrekkie 9y ago
I downvoted this not because I like Oracle, but because this is a terrible way to think. If you're not qualified to determine the value of a statement based on it's contents, either ask someone else more qualified, or start learning. Evaluating a company to equal good or evil and then judging all statements from them based on that rule leads to a lot of faulty thinking. There are people who have for the last two decades automatically assumed everything Google says is good (false), and everything Microsoft says is bad (also false). It leads people to fail to recognize that corporations act in self-interest as a whole, as they have one real mission: Profit. It leads people to fail to recognize that corporations are made up of people, who, while influenced by their compensation and bias and culture, do have their own views and opinions. And most importantly, it leads people to fail to recognize that corporations change over time, as their people, culture, and priorities shift.

existencebox 9y ago

Private sector dev checking in: (Very grumpily checking in, after reading some of TFA) This really couldn't be more untrue, and I say this both as an eng in my day to day, and as a washed up data scientist who was once tasked with investigating this exact question. Open source continues to be an extremely compelling option (and oftentimes THE idiomatic option) for large swaths of common tasks. I could really only believe his assertions if his data is so twisted out of the realm of a kind interpretation. I tried to read through but at every paragraph I was met by a wall of handwaving which aligns far more strongly with Oracle's incentive to sell support packages than any reasonable interpretation of reality. Some snippets: - "Government should attempt to emulate the fast-paced innovation of Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is comprised of IT vendors most of which fail. " Do they fail because of their tech choices or their strategic choices? - "Instead, the Government should attempt to emulate the best-practices of large private-sector Fortune 50 customers, which have competed, evaluated, procured and secured commercial technology successfully." In my experience, the most technologically savvy F100's are all VERY familiar with utilizing in-house dev, and as recent releases from AWS/Azure might suggest (SQL Server on linux, Aurora support for postgres/mysql, etc) OSS is a key part of this as well. - "Significant IT development expertise is not. Substantial custom software development efforts were the norm at large commercial enterprises, until it became obvious that the cost and complexity of developing technology was prohibitive, with the end-products inherently insecure and too costly to maintain long-term. " Exactly, so we started moving to _OPEN SOURCE_, but not in exclusion to the in-house expertise. (HN has seen lots of the murmurs about when this transition went south and believed that too much outsourcing at the cost of domain expertise and stability was the path to success) He later goes on to cite equifax's failure as an example of this, which I find especially entertaining because that suggests a privately developed piece of software would somehow have more eyes on it or guarantees of safety than a product as widely used as most things Apache. - "The most important skill set of CIO’s today is to critically compete and evaluate commercial alternatives to capture the benefits of innovation conducted at scale, and then to manage the implementation of those technologies efficiently." Translation: "We don't like the alternatives CIO's have been finding, because they aren't Oracle". I'm getting a bit snippy here as one might tell, so I'm going to stop reading before I start screaming at my monitor.

deleted 9y ago

asah 9y ago

There's some good points, but of course neglects the true comparison with closed source, which has a terrible track record in all of the stated claims. "Tail costs" are hilarious coming from an Oracle executive. Notably, given identical budgets, I'd be shocked if FOSS couldn't delivery faster, more feature-rich and more secure solutions. Is the success of healthcare.gov an example? I, for one, would love to see a mix of the two methods across 100+ projects, then a GAO post mortem.

archildress 9y ago

Don't underestimate the impact of the SaaS model causing this to shift. Most on-prem, whether FOSS or commercial, has large startup cost associated with it. Conversely, more are choosing the (mostly commercial) SaaS alternatives to avoid those startup costs. Source: corporate finance and work with IT purchasing.

sheeshkebab 9y ago

The irony - most of oracles propriatary software has large chunks of open source (not theirs) code. If they ever looked at all the jar files of their “fusion middleware” and similar things they’d know. A bunch nonsense from oracles sales drones.

horusthecat 9y ago
Absolutely, truly hilarious to point to the Equifax breach when the same Struts vuln is present in Oracle products.

phkahler 9y ago

Had me up until this: >> There is no such principle that technology developed or procured by the USG should be available free for all citizens, in fact that would present a significant dis-incentive to conducting business with the USG. Conflating software developed with software procured. And this is a section where he pointed out a tendency to conflate some other things. I wonder if that was a subconscious confession ;-)

0xcde4c3db 9y ago
That conflation is particularly slimy because works produced by the US government are explicitly, statutorily ineligible for copyright (17 USC 105). In other words, not only is there such a principle with regard to USG-produced works, it's been actively expressed in US law for decades.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

kovacs 9y ago

Paying someone to offload things you shouldn't be doing is a sound strategy when applied correctly. Unfortunately this message can't come from someone like Oracle whose entire business depends upon companies choosing to buy instead of build. I used to work for Oracle in the field as an SE working on the largest enterprise customers they sell in to. What's left out of the rebuttal is how Oracle (or really any vendor), often sells solutions to problems that customers don't have. And even the solutions that do solve the customers problem on paper are often complicated, don't quite work right because of implementation problems, and lower quality because they're more general purpose. So you end up with a situation where it's dubious that you're any better off at the mercy of a vendor whose interests aren't well enough aligned. The real trick is figuring out where the line should be drawn in buy vs. build for any given initiative and the underlying technology required to satisfy those requirements. Can a homegrown software org. handle the entire lifecycle of building and maintaining the products they build? The ideal place for these teams is at the margins and leveraging highly used products where there's as little custom code ownership as possible. Open source or otherwise. There's certainly a tipping point beyond which an open source project has better quality but it's not clear where that lies. And if you're getting into bed with any software vendor without transparent pricing and good vendor management you risk subjecting yourself to renewal conversations that answer the question of "How much?" with "How much you got?"

CrossWired 9y ago
>> What's left out of the rebuttal is how Oracle (or really any vendor), often sells solutions to problems that customers don't have. I interviewed at Microsoft for a field position and the Director I interviewed with basically said this in response to an answer I gave "We don't ask them what they need, we tell them what they need." It just feels dirty coming from the guy they called to help with their technical problem. I'm there as Technical Consultant to solve your problem, not upsell you a different set of problems.
- kovacs 9y ago
  To be fair the director in charge of my group said to me at the start "You should help the customer. If it's not an Oracle solution that's fine. We'll eventually sell them something, we're too big with too many products not to." So at least he had the right intention. I did see the friction surface with reps though because they don't have the same agenda :-)

thomastjeffery 9y ago

The only thing that makes proprietary software popular is the fact that proprietary software depends on more proprietary software. If you use closed-source software, and you want a new feature, you must create entirely new software that is compatible with it, and usually that means hiring the same companies (who can read the original code) or hiring new "professionals" that have made themselves comfortable with the ecosystem. Free software, on the other hand, allows the application of less software for the same amount of work. You can add features, and those who work with free software don't waste everyone's time with proprietary software if they can avoid it. The US government is incredibly inefficient, especially in IT, and its solution thus far has been "throw more money at the problem". This is clearly a detrimental non-solution. Those of us with clear heads should be adamant that proprietary software does not belong in our government.

noncoml 9y ago
Customer support is what makes proprietary software popular.
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  While ironically being the most proven business model for free software.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- syshum 9y ago
  Really? Because the largest Proprietary Software vendors have the very very worst reputation for their support, and often sky high prices to even get that support above and beyond the cost of the license to use the software So no I do not believe Customer support is what makes it popular.
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  I would venture to say that it is not "customer support", but compatibility that makes proprietary software popular. Specifically, compatibility with other proprietary software.

wmf 9y ago

"Use of open source software has been declining..." is a clickbait headline that is a pretty minor part of the document. It should be no surprise that Oracle doesn't like open source and I don't think there's much benefit to getting into the mud on that topic.

dahart 9y ago

The commentary doesn't specify, but what private sector use of OSS might be declining rapidly? Does this claim have any merit? It seems like almost all web stacks rely heavily on OSS, but coming from Oracle, I assume they could be talking about databases specifically. Would it be true to suggest use of OSS databases, e.g., MySQL, is declining? Oracle positioning themselves against OSS is interesting, and might be telling. I would assume that a message to the govt that OSS is bad means that OSS is actually winning, and Oracle is more scared of open source than it is of other for-profit competition. This is also in line with the government defining OSS as "commercial" software. From the government's perspective, the line isn't whether they paid money, it's more like whether the software comes with a license. http://dodcio.defense.gov/Open-Source-Software-FAQ/#Q:_Is_open_source_software_commercial_software.3F_Is_it_COTS.3F http://dodcio.defense.gov/Open-Source-Software-FAQ/#Q:_Is_op... I feel like that's where Oracle's commentary trips up a bit, because they're painting a picture of the fears of bad things that can happen when using OSS, without realizing the government already figured out that most of the implications and liabilities of any software come from the licensing, and not the dollar costs.

kristopolous 9y ago
You could say "make sure customers don't consider alternatives" is his job description.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
syshum 9y ago
>>>The commentary doesn't specify, but what private sector use of OSS might be declining rapidly? Does this claim have any merit? It seems like almost all web stacks rely heavily on OSS The trend for Open Source has been for a long time to Open Source Tools, Libraries, and other code that is used to create propriety closed source software for companies and individuals to consum This is why you see a massive decline in GPL and other copy left licenses and a Huge increase in Apache, BSD and MIT licensed code as there are no legal issues with including Apache, BSD or MIT code into your Proprietary end user application SaaS, and PaaS (aka Cloud) are also leading the downward use of Open Source as most of these applications are at best Freemium where the supported version of the Software is closed source paid for and they might have a "community edition" that is open (if you are lucky)

gibrown 9y ago

Even a cursory look at some stats says that is completely untrue: - 6 of top 10 "DB-engines" are open source: https://db-engines.com/en/ranking https://db-engines.com/en/ranking - web servers are 83% nginx+apache: https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/web_server/all https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/web_server/all - all top content management software is open source: https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management...

tedmiston 9y ago
It’s weird that the DB Engine list conflates OLTP and OLAP databases into one category when they are used completely differently. Would be nice if they had subcategories or filters for something like this.
- lukaslalinsky 9y ago
  The line between OLTP and OLAP is getting more and more blurred. There are new databases that sit in between, so I think letting those categories go away is a good idea.

asveikau 9y ago

> The USG can never develop, support or secure products economically or at scale. I guess we should stop using the [government developed] internet then.

nickbauman 9y ago

Filed under "Claims made with no citation or data to back it up from a lobbyist."

anonacct37 9y ago

> Substantial custom software development efforts were the norm at large commercial enterprises, until it became obvious that the cost and complexity of developing technology was prohibitive Pardon me but this is one of the most bullshit things I've read in a long time. I work for the fortune one. The idea that open source is in any way decreasing is a dangerous lie. I can think of one closed source app that's any good right now. Splunk. Everything else I interact with is garbage that slows our business down. I am shocked that in the same document Oracle is pushing back on technical competence in the government. I shouldn't be but I am. Closed source is the Cobol of a fortune 50. It exists, it's going to be a while before we get off it, and basically nobody is happy to be running Cobol, Oracle, or Tibco.

ams6110 9y ago
COBOL is just a programming language. Many companies used it to develop good sofware for internal use. Of course a lot of pretty bad software was developed with it also, mostly by big consultancies. But the goodness or badness of software doesn't have much to do with what language was used.
- AnthonyMouse 9y ago
  > But the goodness or badness of software doesn't have much to do with what language was used. To a certain extent it does. COBOL is in the same category as Visual Basic in the sense that they make it easy for novices to quickly create programs that half work, but getting the other half right then takes far more effort than would have been required when using a better language to begin with. The result is that people using those languages tend to give up at that point and subject the users to their half broken programs.
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    Plus the companies still most highly invested in COBOL and VB are likely the same companies that live and die by the sunk cost fallacy. COBOL and VB had nearly as much good as bad in their time, but to some extent the companies with good COBOL or VB programs more often than not have moved on with the times to greener pasture. Meanwhile, it's harder and harder to argue that the companies still using COBOL or VB for core business processes care about investments into good code, and as the good programmers move on to other languages it's hard to argue that much good code is currently written in those languages (except at great expense to retain good programmers in bad situations).

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

makecheck 9y ago

In the past I’ve seen that free software licenses make companies nervous, and they will inject Legal in the middle of your project schedule. This creates at least weeks or months of nontechnical dependencies in order to obtain approvals for even the simplest things (and you have no control over the activities of the Legal departmentc at all so good luck with your promised timeline for completion). In addition, GPL can practically translate to an automatic “No” in some organizations. The wording of licenses also matters, which is why coming up with “cute license that is mostly well-known license but different” is a sure way to severely delay or prevent corporate adoption of your project. At this point, you should really just pick a well-known license. Given these thorns in the side of company code, it is not at all surprising when engineers consider just coming up with some code themselves.

microcolonel 9y ago
Yeah, but most new code (especially frontend javascript, desktop application libraries, mobile application libraries) is 2-clause BSD, ISC (which is formally equivalent to 2BSD), MIT, or Apache 2.0. I guess there are goons going around slapping WTFPL on things, but oh well, doesn't seem to be stopping anyone. GPL doesn't cause problems unless you're distributing. If you're just compiling and running it as part of your service, it's no biggie. I ran it by legal pretty quickly. I've worked on plenty of projects with GPL stuff in them.
- flukus 9y ago
  > GPL doesn't cause problems unless you're distributing Or if you might want to distribute in future, what is good now might become impossible because a client wants an on premise install for instance. Or if the software department ever get's spun out to a separate legal entity. I'm a big fan of the GPL, even the AGPL, but I wouldn't use a GPL library in a non-GPL product.

microcolonel 9y ago

> Here there is an inexplicable conflation between “open data,” which has a long legacy in the USG and stems from decades old principles that the USG should not hold copyrights It is explicit that the United States Government can not hold U.S. copyrights on government works, that's not a "false narrative", that is the law[0]. [0]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/105 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/105

fourthark 9y ago
Wow, so open sourcing is the only way they can be sure to hold onto the software they pay to have made for them...
WorldMaker 9y ago
I wonder if the founders were establishing copyright today if they would intentionally make government works "copyleft" instead of just public domain.

microcolonel 9y ago

Bad faith dealing, blatant disregard for the truth, misrepresentation of the law. Sounds like Oracle to me.

RickJWag 9y ago

Hmmmm. Red Hat's marketshare (and stock price) have risen steadily forever. Microsoft just gave up and open sourced .NET. Open Source stacks run everything. Kubernetes is running rampant. I don't think OSS is declining rapidly. I'm pretty sure it's winning.

shmerl 9y ago

Oracle being Oracle. What's new? And they were especially annoyed with the idea that taxes supported software should be open source. I think it's a great idea, and Oracle should get lost for opposing it. Taxes surely should not be used to support someone who pushes copyrightability of APIs.

malchow 9y ago

I thought this was perceptive: "False Narrative: Government should attempt to emulate the fast-paced innovation of Silicon Valley. [...] The USG is not a technology vendor nor is it a start-up. Under no circumstance should the USG attempt to become a technology vendor. The USG can never develop, support or secure products economically or at scale. Government developed products are not subject to the extensive testing in the commercial market. Instead, the Government should attempt to emulate the best-practices of large private-sector Fortune 50 customers, which have competed, evaluated, procured and secured commercial technology successfully."

sitkack 9y ago
Bullshit. The USG has a the ability to leverage scale like no business ever could. The government consumes of tech are balkanized and sold billion dollar contracts over and over again when they could pay industry wages and still come out ahead.
- malchow 9y ago
  I mean, I think reality intrudes on your fanciful theory. When GSA was hacked and life-threatening personal information on security-cleared government employees was leaked, the public reaction was: eh. Compare this to Equifax, where the intrusion was less successful than at GSA, but which may nevertheless cease to exist, and whose entire leadership will likely be replaced. I think the reality is: people have seen and therefore expect government tech systems to be awful and vulnerable. And people have seen and therefore expect private tech systems to be relatively better.
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    I think this is more an anecdotal case of "I'm not a security-cleared government employee, so why should I care". I see as much or more of the opposite viewpoint from what you are espousing: the GSA is forced to be accountable with giant audits and meetings and red tape until the problems are found and root causes discovered and mitigations (even token mitigations) in place. Meanwhile, Equifax was hardly punished in the stock market, the one place that supposedly gets any sort of accountability out of publicly traded private corporations these days (since they only seem to care about quarterly profits rather than employees or customers or people in general). There was a lot of anecdotal resignation among my friends that no one is or can hold Equifax accountable and we'll never leave the status quo of Equifax making millions of dollars in profits warehousing data that they have no right to own.

gerdesj 9y ago

RLY? The OP is a GH issue report with a really long winded thread, with lots of long comments. I've scanned through the lot - what the blazes am I missing?

sitkack 9y ago

Thank you to the person that inlined the text to the PDF. Without this, Oracles FUD would have been tucked away as an attachment.

tomrod 9y ago

Yeah... at least at $LARGEBANK I work at, FLOSS has been massively adopted in my tenure there. I do my part to evangelize as well.

agentultra 9y ago

I don't necessarily agree with him but I do sympathize on the security front. I know we all do our best in the OSS world but governments collecting all that data and not paying engineers to do formal verification and security auditing seems pretty scary. Maybe this is a little backwards but there's something comforting about a massive beauracracy filled with paper forms and legions of administrators. It makes it quite difficult to run off with a billion records, doesn't it?

thanatropism 9y ago

One word: Heartbleed. It spread far and wide the idea that open source infrastructure was a temerary proposition.

pritambaral 9y ago
Does closed source not have security issues?
- ygjb 9y ago
  The better question is how long did it take closed source solutions that consume openssl to update their products?
- thanatropism 9y ago
  Hey, don't shoot the messenger.
  - pritambaral 9y ago
    That was a question. It's neither provocative nor aggressive, unlike its parent.

dannyrosen 9y ago

What's confusing is that Oracle just announced a partnership with Cloud Foundry [1] [1] - https://blogs.oracle.com/developers/cloud-foundry-arrives-on-oracle-cloud https://blogs.oracle.com/developers/cloud-foundry-arrives-on...