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> The entire principle of Free Markets is underpinned by consumers having accurate information about the goods they are purchasing. Having licensing agreements

> The entire principle of Free Markets is underpinned by consumers having accurate information about the goods they are purchasing. Having licensing agreements that are expressly designed to prevent the dissemination of product-information, goes against everything that Capitalism and Free-Markets stand for. I agree with where you are going but I entirely disagree with your description of Free Markets and Capitalism. free market - an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses There's nothing in there about consumers having accurate information. If anything, caveat emptor. Moreover, if you are a free market entrepreneur then the absolute last thing you want is fairness to your competition or fairness to your consumer. Those are costs of doing business, to be avoided if possible. Naturally, Larry is only trying to avoid them. That's why we have regulation. That's why civilization has evolved to have government. That's why Libertaristan isn't on any maps. That's why The Fountainhead is such a misguided fantasy where entrepreneurs can do anything and it's always better and governments can do nothing and it's always worse. Free Markets and Capitalism don't stand for anything. That's not even a criticism of them either. Civilization might stand for something although that something is a provisional something at best but then that provisional something is better than nothing. The requirement for consumers having accurate information is a government regulation. In the United States, it's enforced by the Consumer Protection Agency. It isn't a free market requirement.

akira2501 9y ago
> There's nothing in there about consumers having accurate information. Yes, but practice has taught us that it is an important part of any functioning market. > the absolute last thing you want is fairness to your competition or fairness to your consumer. I completely disagree with your assertion here. I want an advantage over my competition, sure.. but I still want it to be fair. An unfair market is a fickle and unreliable one. That's not good for anyone. Further, if my consumer walks away from the deal feeling that it was unfair then I've really done myself a disservice in the long term. It's a reason why "Goodwill and Brand Awareness" are line items in the world of corporate accounting. > Free Markets and Capitalism don't stand for anything. They stand for the implicit agreement that we are all created equal.
- CalChris 9y ago
  >> Free Markets and Capitalism don't stand for anything. > They stand for the implicit agreement that we are all created equal. All men are created equal is a quotation from a government document, Jefferson's phrase from the Declaration of Independence. It has nothing to do with free markets or capitalism. The colonies were royally chartered corporations and these men revolted from their owner. They kept slavery but that's another matter.
  - michaelmrose 9y ago
    Economically nobody is created equal and as important as it is to liberty its meaningless when applied to economics.
- badestrand 9y ago
  >> the absolute last thing you want is fairness to your competition or fairness to your consumer. > I completely disagree with your assertion here. I want an advantage over my competition, sure.. but I still want it to be fair. Thank you for that. I really dislike the common model of capitalism where the entrepreneur is viewed as a robot whose only goal is to maximize profit with the law being the only boundary. In my social bubble the landlords that I know care about their renters' wellbeing even if it costs them a bit. I only know a handful of entrepreneurs personally but for all of them fairness and dignity have greater value than profit. Also the millions of small shops in cities around the world that are content just selling enough every month to make a comfortable living with no goal of maximizing anything. Yes, huge cooperations are different than the guy selling Kebab at the corner. But still I would appreciate if people would see entrepreneurship and businesses not so statically as money-maximizers.
  - viraptor 9y ago
    > I really dislike the common model of capitalism where the entrepreneur is viewed as a robot whose only goal is to maximize profit with the law being the only boundary. It's something you can do if you want to. Nobody will stop you as long as it's legal, so there will be a non-trivial amount of companies doing just that. It doesn't matter that the guy on the cornerr is trying to be fair. At some point he'll be screwed by a kebab chain which pays the minimum wage and can use the economy of scale in deliveries. And that's even before we talk about companies that go for risk*penalty<gain situations where they can ignore the law.
whack 9y ago
I think you and I might agree on "how things should be", but have different definitions for the term Free-Market. I understand that there are many different ways of defining this term, and that there is no right or wrong answer here. When I referred earlier to the ideals of Free-Markets, I was referring to the economic ideal of one with Perfect Competition. This is an ideal that can never be realized of course, but I believe that the closer we come to this ideal, the better off we will be. Banning of price-fixing, false-advertising, and trust-busting, are all examples of public policy that betray Libertarian principles in order to further Perfect Competition, and that's something we need a lot more of today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition#Idealizing_conditions_of_perfect_competition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition#Idealizing... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_information
- CalChris 9y ago
  Yeah, I think we agree on how things should be. But Perfect Competition and Free Market are two very different things. I think a lot of free market nutjobs would think of perfect competition as socialist interference in free markets.
  - wallace_f 9y ago
    Err sort of... perfect competition is an ideal that has reasonably close analogues in the real world--otherwise the idea wouldn't be very useful. For example, some agricultural products are this way without the kind of government interference you are suggesting. And your assertion about information asymmetry having nothing to do with free markets is actually addressed in the economic literature on perfect competition.
    - CalChris 9y ago
      Perfect competition is actually not a very useful concept in the real world. In Silicon Valley, we live and die with patents which are term limited monopolies. That's as far from perfect competition as you can get. The entire concept of intellectual property is anti-competitive.
Retric 9y ago
That's not the definition of free market. For one thing privately owned businesses are not required. "In economics, a free market is an idealized system in which the prices for goods and services are determined by the open market and consumers, in which the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government, price-setting monopoly, or other authority." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market The requirement is for individual trades to occurs without duress or manipulation outside of the trade. Also, prohibiting information exchange by government regulation is not allowed as that interferes with the market.
- CalChris 9y ago
  Oxford https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/free_market https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/free_market
  - Retric 9y ago
    That's a simplified version, the actual oxford dictionary is not free online and should look like this: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/52325 http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/52325 Between them you have : http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095834371 http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.201... 1 A market that is free from government interference, prices rising and falling in accordance with supply and demand. 2 A security that is widely traded on a stock exchange, there being sufficient stock on offer for the price to be uninfluenced by availability. 3 A foreign-exchange market that is free from influence on rates by governments, rates being free to rise and fall in accordance with supply and demand. So, I can see why that was used, but it's not definitive.
parasubvert 9y ago
“Free Markets and Capitalism don't stand for anything” Sort of. They do stand for something, even though we were meant to believe they’re the natural state of affairs. Saying free markets “stand for nothing” presumes that markets are the natural state of affairs among humans and that classical economists were merely specialized anthropologists observing behaviour in the wild. That’s not accurate though - Karl Polanyi and his great old book the Great Transformation really explores this (and the causes of WW1). The “free market” was deliberately imposed on western society in the 18th-19th century by politicians believing classical economists WERE these anthropological soothsayers rather than just crafting a social science, secular religion (“the invisible hand”), and belief system out of what once was a niche trading technique used between communities or in actual bazaars (market trade). It was better than mercantilism which was the previous prevailing theory among the powerful, but also societally unworkable. Reciprocity was the system most used through history, not free markets. It does stand for something, or at least lassez faire does: all societal power and behaviour should be organized and controlled by price and property. This is why libertarians have such a hard on for the free market, in their view, the market IS society, the market IS human behaviour, rather than one niche aspect of it. The fact we don’t have free markets is because humans tend not to want to subordinate every aspect of their life to a number (price, wealth, property). Sometimes market inefficiency is called for. Capitalism is different from the free market theory, as classical economics implies the markets shouldn’t actually tend towards profit, it should tend towards equilibrium. One can also have capitalism without a fully free market, as most of the world has never had a fully lassez faire market for very long. And China is seeing how far one can go down this path. Capitalism really has to do with the pattern of market disequilibrium, profit making/taking, investment and re-investment of these profits to enable growth rather than a static economy of a fixed set of commodities (the unrealistic assumption of underlying classical economics). One might consistently agree with the benefits of capitalism over say, state-controlled investments, while disagreeing with completely free markets. For that reason I think it’s a bit misleading to suggest that all businesspeople and entrepreneurs just want an unfair playing field, as the “free market” really doesn’t care. There are many perspectives out there as to the right set of constraints on the system. There never has been a “natural” set of constraints as they’ve all been human contrivances anyway. (Bitcoin fanatics railing against “fiat” also haven’t figured this one out yet). An entrepreneur might want fairer markets regulation. They might not. It’s in the eye of the beholder. This was pendantic, sorry. I agree, Ayn Rand is a fairy tale for people that haven’t figured out that they’re not the protagonist of the world’s story, they’re just another jackass, hopefully trying to solve more problems than they cause.
WalterBright 9y ago
> free market - an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses No. A free market is when people freely exchange goods and services. The prices are determined by free negotiation. Force and fraud are proscribed. Note that this does not require perfect information. But defrauding someone is not allowed. > if you are a free market entrepreneur then the absolute last thing you want is fairness to your competition or fairness to your consumer. The most successful companies, and most successful salesmen, are the ones that please their customers, because repeat business is necessary for long term success. > It isn't a free market requirement. Again, the free market does not allow defrauding customers.
- srtjstjsj 9y ago
  Without perfect information, fraud is impossible to proscribe.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    Consider the perfect information case. Let's say you're at a dealer to buy a car. Is the dealer obliged to tell you that the car you want to buy is available cheaper across the street? Are you obliged to tell the dealer that he's offering the car for way less than the dealer across the street? Those would be perfect information. I don't see how this could be a reasonable requirement, and it certainly is not necessary for the free market to function. Consider the dealer selling you a car that disintegrates a week later. I'm not a lawyer, but there's a doctrine of reasonableness and fit for purpose going on here, and you're entitled to recompense if the dealer did not disclose this to you - i.e. it's fraud. If a grocery store sold you milk poisoned with lead, and did not disclose it, that's fraud as well as assault. Truth in labelling laws are merely a convenience for that, so instead of things being decided case by case in civil court, having a blanket standard on how food should be labeled, and sanctions when it is fraudulently labeled, is entirely reasonable and makes for efficient operation of the free market. It is not "perfect information", which is by its nature rather absurd, and I've never seen it listed as a requirement by any free market economists.
opo 9y ago
>...That's why Libertaristan isn't on any maps. I do wonder why people go out of their way to misrepresent libertarianism. This shouldn't have to be pointed out, but libertarianism != anarchism. To have any kind of working market, you need a functioning government that can protect property rights, provide for compensation if a contract is broken, etc, etc.
- _Tev 9y ago
  Because libertarians often misrepresent their intentions: I heard way too often from them how "government does everything inefficently" and "everything would be better off served by private for-profit entities" or even "taxes are theft", when in reality they just want a bit smaller taxes and a bit less regulation. Those might be extreme statements even for libertarians, but it's hard to recognize them as such when they infect almost every discussion about the topic.
  - tobbyb 9y ago
    The arguments are very basic, for instance government inefficiency. Every big organization is inefficient, be it government or a private entity.
    - opo 9y ago
      If you need an example of trying to offer practical solutions, go to reason.org and you can probably find hundreds of pages of commentary, practical solutions, reviews, etc. The top story on the site looks like it is on the details of the current state of the air traffic control system. You can read the digital version of their magazine for free and in fact every issue they have ever published for close to 40 years. I don't think it is far to say that groups like these don't add anything to the national debate.
    - ric2b 9y ago
      The difference is that inefficient private organizations have to compete and are replaced by more efficient ones, while governments don't.
  - 9y ago
simula67 9y ago
IMO, when discussion shifts to the squabbling over semantics, it has degenerated. The free market question is whether the market can force producers to provide consumers with good quality information > The requirement for consumers having accurate information is a government regulation. In the United States, it's enforced by the Consumer Protection Agency. It isn't a free market requirement Yet, when Oracle prohibits publishing benchmarks you can find benchmarks about MySQL, Mongodb etc on the web
- gaius 9y ago
  Yet, when Oracle prohibits publishing benchmarks you can find benchmarks about MySQL, Mongodb etc on the web You can find all the benchmarks you want here http://www.tpc.org/default.asp http://www.tpc.org/default.asp including Oracle. The thing is, a skilled DBA, given two databases and told which one should be the winner, can easily construct a benchmark that seems perfectly plausible, but favours one over the other. The MongoDB guys did it very blatantly e.g. by comparing Postgres writing to disk with them writing to memory, but that's because they don't know anything about databases and lacked the skill to do it subtly, e.g. by finding pathological edge cases in query optimizers. That's what the commercial vendors are most worried about.
  - diminish 9y ago
    I would never rely on TPC for any benchmarking. Just read their history, founders and membership structure carefully and you'll get an idea what type of `neutral` benchmarking they do ) http://www.tpc.org/information/who/whoweare.asp http://www.tpc.org/information/who/whoweare.asp http://www.tpc.org/information/about/abouttpc.asp http://www.tpc.org/information/about/abouttpc.asp
    - gaius 9y ago
      Just read their history, founders and membership structure carefully and you'll get an idea what type of `neutral` benchmarking they do How do you mean? Many of them are direct competitors, they all have a vested interest in not allowing any other to game the benchmark.
nroets 9y ago
> The requirement for consumers having accurate information is a government regulation. But there are many areas where self regulation works better than government regulation. Print media is a prime example. If one newspaper accepts a bribe for promoting a product, the bribe could come to light and destroy the trust the newspaper has (an intangible asset). To get back to the topic of databases: This is bad press for Oracle. Are they hiding some edge cases where the performance is unacceptable ? Mission critical systems should rather be built on open source databases, which have been properly scrutinized.

akira2501 9y ago

> There's nothing in there about consumers having accurate information. Yes, but practice has taught us that it is an important part of any functioning market. > the absolute last thing you want is fairness to your competition or fairness to your consumer. I completely disagree with your assertion here. I want an advantage over my competition, sure.. but I still want it to be fair. An unfair market is a fickle and unreliable one. That's not good for anyone. Further, if my consumer walks away from the deal feeling that it was unfair then I've really done myself a disservice in the long term. It's a reason why "Goodwill and Brand Awareness" are line items in the world of corporate accounting. > Free Markets and Capitalism don't stand for anything. They stand for the implicit agreement that we are all created equal.

CalChris 9y ago
>> Free Markets and Capitalism don't stand for anything. > They stand for the implicit agreement that we are all created equal. All men are created equal is a quotation from a government document, Jefferson's phrase from the Declaration of Independence. It has nothing to do with free markets or capitalism. The colonies were royally chartered corporations and these men revolted from their owner. They kept slavery but that's another matter.
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  Economically nobody is created equal and as important as it is to liberty its meaningless when applied to economics.
badestrand 9y ago
>> the absolute last thing you want is fairness to your competition or fairness to your consumer. > I completely disagree with your assertion here. I want an advantage over my competition, sure.. but I still want it to be fair. Thank you for that. I really dislike the common model of capitalism where the entrepreneur is viewed as a robot whose only goal is to maximize profit with the law being the only boundary. In my social bubble the landlords that I know care about their renters' wellbeing even if it costs them a bit. I only know a handful of entrepreneurs personally but for all of them fairness and dignity have greater value than profit. Also the millions of small shops in cities around the world that are content just selling enough every month to make a comfortable living with no goal of maximizing anything. Yes, huge cooperations are different than the guy selling Kebab at the corner. But still I would appreciate if people would see entrepreneurship and businesses not so statically as money-maximizers.
- viraptor 9y ago
  > I really dislike the common model of capitalism where the entrepreneur is viewed as a robot whose only goal is to maximize profit with the law being the only boundary. It's something you can do if you want to. Nobody will stop you as long as it's legal, so there will be a non-trivial amount of companies doing just that. It doesn't matter that the guy on the cornerr is trying to be fair. At some point he'll be screwed by a kebab chain which pays the minimum wage and can use the economy of scale in deliveries. And that's even before we talk about companies that go for risk*penalty<gain situations where they can ignore the law.

whack 9y ago

I think you and I might agree on "how things should be", but have different definitions for the term Free-Market. I understand that there are many different ways of defining this term, and that there is no right or wrong answer here. When I referred earlier to the ideals of Free-Markets, I was referring to the economic ideal of one with Perfect Competition. This is an ideal that can never be realized of course, but I believe that the closer we come to this ideal, the better off we will be. Banning of price-fixing, false-advertising, and trust-busting, are all examples of public policy that betray Libertarian principles in order to further Perfect Competition, and that's something we need a lot more of today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition#Idealizing_conditions_of_perfect_competition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition#Idealizing... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_information

CalChris 9y ago
Yeah, I think we agree on how things should be. But Perfect Competition and Free Market are two very different things. I think a lot of free market nutjobs would think of perfect competition as socialist interference in free markets.
- wallace_f 9y ago
  Err sort of... perfect competition is an ideal that has reasonably close analogues in the real world--otherwise the idea wouldn't be very useful. For example, some agricultural products are this way without the kind of government interference you are suggesting. And your assertion about information asymmetry having nothing to do with free markets is actually addressed in the economic literature on perfect competition.
  - CalChris 9y ago
    Perfect competition is actually not a very useful concept in the real world. In Silicon Valley, we live and die with patents which are term limited monopolies. That's as far from perfect competition as you can get. The entire concept of intellectual property is anti-competitive.

Retric 9y ago

That's not the definition of free market. For one thing privately owned businesses are not required. "In economics, a free market is an idealized system in which the prices for goods and services are determined by the open market and consumers, in which the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government, price-setting monopoly, or other authority." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market The requirement is for individual trades to occurs without duress or manipulation outside of the trade. Also, prohibiting information exchange by government regulation is not allowed as that interferes with the market.

CalChris 9y ago
Oxford https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/free_market https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/free_market
- Retric 9y ago
  That's a simplified version, the actual oxford dictionary is not free online and should look like this: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/52325 http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/52325 Between them you have : http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095834371 http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.201... 1 A market that is free from government interference, prices rising and falling in accordance with supply and demand. 2 A security that is widely traded on a stock exchange, there being sufficient stock on offer for the price to be uninfluenced by availability. 3 A foreign-exchange market that is free from influence on rates by governments, rates being free to rise and fall in accordance with supply and demand. So, I can see why that was used, but it's not definitive.

parasubvert 9y ago

“Free Markets and Capitalism don't stand for anything” Sort of. They do stand for something, even though we were meant to believe they’re the natural state of affairs. Saying free markets “stand for nothing” presumes that markets are the natural state of affairs among humans and that classical economists were merely specialized anthropologists observing behaviour in the wild. That’s not accurate though - Karl Polanyi and his great old book the Great Transformation really explores this (and the causes of WW1). The “free market” was deliberately imposed on western society in the 18th-19th century by politicians believing classical economists WERE these anthropological soothsayers rather than just crafting a social science, secular religion (“the invisible hand”), and belief system out of what once was a niche trading technique used between communities or in actual bazaars (market trade). It was better than mercantilism which was the previous prevailing theory among the powerful, but also societally unworkable. Reciprocity was the system most used through history, not free markets. It does stand for something, or at least lassez faire does: all societal power and behaviour should be organized and controlled by price and property. This is why libertarians have such a hard on for the free market, in their view, the market IS society, the market IS human behaviour, rather than one niche aspect of it. The fact we don’t have free markets is because humans tend not to want to subordinate every aspect of their life to a number (price, wealth, property). Sometimes market inefficiency is called for. Capitalism is different from the free market theory, as classical economics implies the markets shouldn’t actually tend towards profit, it should tend towards equilibrium. One can also have capitalism without a fully free market, as most of the world has never had a fully lassez faire market for very long. And China is seeing how far one can go down this path. Capitalism really has to do with the pattern of market disequilibrium, profit making/taking, investment and re-investment of these profits to enable growth rather than a static economy of a fixed set of commodities (the unrealistic assumption of underlying classical economics). One might consistently agree with the benefits of capitalism over say, state-controlled investments, while disagreeing with completely free markets. For that reason I think it’s a bit misleading to suggest that all businesspeople and entrepreneurs just want an unfair playing field, as the “free market” really doesn’t care. There are many perspectives out there as to the right set of constraints on the system. There never has been a “natural” set of constraints as they’ve all been human contrivances anyway. (Bitcoin fanatics railing against “fiat” also haven’t figured this one out yet). An entrepreneur might want fairer markets regulation. They might not. It’s in the eye of the beholder. This was pendantic, sorry. I agree, Ayn Rand is a fairy tale for people that haven’t figured out that they’re not the protagonist of the world’s story, they’re just another jackass, hopefully trying to solve more problems than they cause.

WalterBright 9y ago

> free market - an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses No. A free market is when people freely exchange goods and services. The prices are determined by free negotiation. Force and fraud are proscribed. Note that this does not require perfect information. But defrauding someone is not allowed. > if you are a free market entrepreneur then the absolute last thing you want is fairness to your competition or fairness to your consumer. The most successful companies, and most successful salesmen, are the ones that please their customers, because repeat business is necessary for long term success. > It isn't a free market requirement. Again, the free market does not allow defrauding customers.

srtjstjsj 9y ago
Without perfect information, fraud is impossible to proscribe.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  Consider the perfect information case. Let's say you're at a dealer to buy a car. Is the dealer obliged to tell you that the car you want to buy is available cheaper across the street? Are you obliged to tell the dealer that he's offering the car for way less than the dealer across the street? Those would be perfect information. I don't see how this could be a reasonable requirement, and it certainly is not necessary for the free market to function. Consider the dealer selling you a car that disintegrates a week later. I'm not a lawyer, but there's a doctrine of reasonableness and fit for purpose going on here, and you're entitled to recompense if the dealer did not disclose this to you - i.e. it's fraud. If a grocery store sold you milk poisoned with lead, and did not disclose it, that's fraud as well as assault. Truth in labelling laws are merely a convenience for that, so instead of things being decided case by case in civil court, having a blanket standard on how food should be labeled, and sanctions when it is fraudulently labeled, is entirely reasonable and makes for efficient operation of the free market. It is not "perfect information", which is by its nature rather absurd, and I've never seen it listed as a requirement by any free market economists.

opo 9y ago

>...That's why Libertaristan isn't on any maps. I do wonder why people go out of their way to misrepresent libertarianism. This shouldn't have to be pointed out, but libertarianism != anarchism. To have any kind of working market, you need a functioning government that can protect property rights, provide for compensation if a contract is broken, etc, etc.

_Tev 9y ago
Because libertarians often misrepresent their intentions: I heard way too often from them how "government does everything inefficently" and "everything would be better off served by private for-profit entities" or even "taxes are theft", when in reality they just want a bit smaller taxes and a bit less regulation. Those might be extreme statements even for libertarians, but it's hard to recognize them as such when they infect almost every discussion about the topic.
- tobbyb 9y ago
  The arguments are very basic, for instance government inefficiency. Every big organization is inefficient, be it government or a private entity.
  - opo 9y ago
    If you need an example of trying to offer practical solutions, go to reason.org and you can probably find hundreds of pages of commentary, practical solutions, reviews, etc. The top story on the site looks like it is on the details of the current state of the air traffic control system. You can read the digital version of their magazine for free and in fact every issue they have ever published for close to 40 years. I don't think it is far to say that groups like these don't add anything to the national debate.
  - ric2b 9y ago
    The difference is that inefficient private organizations have to compete and are replaced by more efficient ones, while governments don't.
- 9y ago

simula67 9y ago

IMO, when discussion shifts to the squabbling over semantics, it has degenerated. The free market question is whether the market can force producers to provide consumers with good quality information > The requirement for consumers having accurate information is a government regulation. In the United States, it's enforced by the Consumer Protection Agency. It isn't a free market requirement Yet, when Oracle prohibits publishing benchmarks you can find benchmarks about MySQL, Mongodb etc on the web

gaius 9y ago
Yet, when Oracle prohibits publishing benchmarks you can find benchmarks about MySQL, Mongodb etc on the web You can find all the benchmarks you want here http://www.tpc.org/default.asp http://www.tpc.org/default.asp including Oracle. The thing is, a skilled DBA, given two databases and told which one should be the winner, can easily construct a benchmark that seems perfectly plausible, but favours one over the other. The MongoDB guys did it very blatantly e.g. by comparing Postgres writing to disk with them writing to memory, but that's because they don't know anything about databases and lacked the skill to do it subtly, e.g. by finding pathological edge cases in query optimizers. That's what the commercial vendors are most worried about.
- diminish 9y ago
  I would never rely on TPC for any benchmarking. Just read their history, founders and membership structure carefully and you'll get an idea what type of `neutral` benchmarking they do ) http://www.tpc.org/information/who/whoweare.asp http://www.tpc.org/information/who/whoweare.asp http://www.tpc.org/information/about/abouttpc.asp http://www.tpc.org/information/about/abouttpc.asp
  - gaius 9y ago
    Just read their history, founders and membership structure carefully and you'll get an idea what type of `neutral` benchmarking they do How do you mean? Many of them are direct competitors, they all have a vested interest in not allowing any other to game the benchmark.

nroets 9y ago

> The requirement for consumers having accurate information is a government regulation. But there are many areas where self regulation works better than government regulation. Print media is a prime example. If one newspaper accepts a bribe for promoting a product, the bribe could come to light and destroy the trust the newspaper has (an intangible asset). To get back to the topic of databases: This is bad press for Oracle. Are they hiding some edge cases where the performance is unacceptable ? Mission critical systems should rather be built on open source databases, which have been properly scrutinized.