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I read a similar article in 1995 about how MySQL was going to put Oracle out of business. Oracle now owns MySQL. I live in Austin, Texas and definitely do not

I read a similar article in 1995 about how MySQL was going to put Oracle out of business. Oracle now owns MySQL. I live in Austin, Texas and definitely do not work for Oracle. However they have plans to hire 10,000 people here. For reference, that number represents 40% of Facebook’s headcount. Apple, another old-guard company (Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were great friends), is doing something similar. For all of Oracle’s badness, there is a certain Trump-like authenticity to them. They kind of know their bad, and they just keep on keeping on. Facebook, meanwhile, had to shove it down our throats how awesome and beautiful and world-connecting they were.

teachrdan 8y ago
Yeah, this is the same criticism of Oracle I've been hearing for years. I was under the naive impression that Amazon RDS [0] was going to be an Oracle-killer. Has anyone here actually used it to transition away from Oracle? Because, as I understood it, Oracle makes it exceedingly difficult to transition out of its ecosystem. [0] https://aws.amazon.com/rds/oracle/ https://aws.amazon.com/rds/oracle/
- gowld 8y ago
  It's like AOL. The old customers stay until they die, and the new customers-to-be stop showing up.
e12e 8y ago
> Oracle now owns MySQL. Well, yeah. And no (thanks to MariaDB). Similar story with Solaris/ZFS. > (...) in Austin, Texas (...) [Oracle] have plans to hire 10,000 people (...) Apple (...) is doing something similar. That's interesting. I wonder if this will be about "more cloud" for both companies. Maybe we've seen "peak Free Software" and more secret sauce will hide behind SaaS paywalls in the near future. I think the AGPL was rather prescient here; unfortunately it's not proven successful in the way GPL was. So if and when the big players move everything "home" there's little left on the outside. Not saying it will happen - both Apple, Google and Microsoft are sharing more than before. As of now.
- magduf 8y ago
  >Maybe we've seen "peak Free Software" I think this is definitely true. So much stuff has move to "the cloud" or web services, and honestly, open-source software was a lot more interesting and fun, and seemed to be on more of an upward trajectory, back in the early/mid 2000s. Now Linux on the desktop seems to be something that'll never be reality for regular people and the main open-source thing that seems to be hot is stuff like Docker and Kubernetes, stuff used in enterprise scenarios, while on the desktop everyone's just given up and decided to live with Windows 10 and its spyware or Macbooks and their overly-thin keyboards and buggy OS.
  - washadjeffmad 8y ago
    Reducing platform dependence seems to have removed a great deal of the barrier of consumer adoption of desktop Linux. I see more people all the time trying to figure out how to get it running on their MBPs, trying to understand differences in desktop environments, and how to dual-boot. Browsers on Linux support DRM for viewing popular services like Netflix, and native graphics stack development is improving more rapidly all the time. VFIO with LookingGlass has been great for people who work on Linux and game on Windows, and I think that paves the way for a very interesting future. Perhaps one day we'll see a Windows Gaming container that just does a useful thing without trying to steal the show. Also, FOSS acceptance is so commonplace now that we no longer notice its pervasiveness. Try to find a software or service that doesn't have an open source clause or a succeeding software company that totally eschews it. It might not be front and center in the marketing, but open source is as essential an ingredient in today's development as public access to books is to a more equally literate society.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  > Maybe we've seen "peak Free Software" and more secret sauce will hide behind SaaS paywalls in the near future. Not only SaaS paywalls, thanks to non-copyleft licenses, more appreciated by companies, we are back to the shareware days. Now you get the source with the light version, instead of a limited 30 days trial. However many goodies are only on the commercial version. Likewise, even if Linux has won on the server and seems to be winning on IoT, there are now several contenders on the embedded space with BSD licenses (Mbed, Arduino, RTOS, Nuttx, TinyOS, ...). In any case, it is understandable as it is easier to create a business model in such scenarios.
watwut 8y ago
It is not just that aggressive selling. For years and large databases, Oracle database was better then MySQL for years. It was expensive, but came with better tools, had better performance on large data (including when queries were badly written as many of them are), reporting and what not. None of it matters for smaller projects, but it did mattered for larger projects and in particular for large projects under time pressure. I have worked with all three, MySQL/Oracle/Mssql and imo, "MySQL is going to put Oracle out of business" was largely wishful thinking. Once you take "open source is better then proprietary software" as an axiom, then it is easy to ignore weaknesses of whatever open source alternative is there now or claim them irrelevant.
- amluto 8y ago
  > None of it matters for smaller projects, but it did mattered for larger projects and in particular for large projects under time pressure. In my very limited experience with Oracle, it sucked for a small project for two reasons. The client library took multiple seconds to load. And the connection string I had to pass was almost impossible to figure out.
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    I think there was a joke I read once about the Oracle database that it will do anything in a roughly constant amount of time, but it's a large constant.
dijit 8y ago
> Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were great friends Whoa whoa whao, this is the opposite of what I believe to be true, I have little to believe they were really friends, in fact when Oracle bought Sun Apple stopped integrating ZFS because Jobs didn't want to be associated or beholden to Larry Ellison... [0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/zfs-the-other-new-apple-file-system-that-almost-was-until-it-wasnt/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/zfs-the-other-new-ap...
- bcantrill 8y ago
  There were absolutely friends -- to the point that Larry would say "my best friend Steve" almost as if it were one word. This left me with two questions, both essentially mean-spirited: (1) Could "only" be substituted for "best"? And (2) Did Steve ever say "my best friend Larry"?
- ozim 8y ago
  So you are only person that did not read Steve Jobs biography yet? I was also trying to skip it because everyone seems to be reading it. After couple pages it sucked me in and I was reading it until last page really interested, so Walter Isaacson wrote it well. Spoiler: there was quite some pages about Larry Ellison and what was going on between Steve Jobs and him.
- gruturo 8y ago
  Yes they were friends. Steve Jobs was even Larry Ellison's wedding photographer: https://inshorts.com/en/news/steve-jobs-was-the-photographer-in-ellisons-marriage-1471446159906 https://inshorts.com/en/news/steve-jobs-was-the-photographer... https://petapixel.com/2010/10/08/steve-jobs-the-wedding-photographer/ https://petapixel.com/2010/10/08/steve-jobs-the-wedding-phot...
AboutTheWhisles 8y ago
> they have plans to hire 10,000 people here That's a lot of lawyers. Could this be a plan to shut down one place, open up the same jobs in another and shed people who have worked there for a while and have inflated salaries?

teachrdan 8y ago

Yeah, this is the same criticism of Oracle I've been hearing for years. I was under the naive impression that Amazon RDS [0] was going to be an Oracle-killer. Has anyone here actually used it to transition away from Oracle? Because, as I understood it, Oracle makes it exceedingly difficult to transition out of its ecosystem. [0] https://aws.amazon.com/rds/oracle/ https://aws.amazon.com/rds/oracle/

gowld 8y ago
It's like AOL. The old customers stay until they die, and the new customers-to-be stop showing up.

e12e 8y ago

> Oracle now owns MySQL. Well, yeah. And no (thanks to MariaDB). Similar story with Solaris/ZFS. > (...) in Austin, Texas (...) [Oracle] have plans to hire 10,000 people (...) Apple (...) is doing something similar. That's interesting. I wonder if this will be about "more cloud" for both companies. Maybe we've seen "peak Free Software" and more secret sauce will hide behind SaaS paywalls in the near future. I think the AGPL was rather prescient here; unfortunately it's not proven successful in the way GPL was. So if and when the big players move everything "home" there's little left on the outside. Not saying it will happen - both Apple, Google and Microsoft are sharing more than before. As of now.

magduf 8y ago
>Maybe we've seen "peak Free Software" I think this is definitely true. So much stuff has move to "the cloud" or web services, and honestly, open-source software was a lot more interesting and fun, and seemed to be on more of an upward trajectory, back in the early/mid 2000s. Now Linux on the desktop seems to be something that'll never be reality for regular people and the main open-source thing that seems to be hot is stuff like Docker and Kubernetes, stuff used in enterprise scenarios, while on the desktop everyone's just given up and decided to live with Windows 10 and its spyware or Macbooks and their overly-thin keyboards and buggy OS.
- washadjeffmad 8y ago
  Reducing platform dependence seems to have removed a great deal of the barrier of consumer adoption of desktop Linux. I see more people all the time trying to figure out how to get it running on their MBPs, trying to understand differences in desktop environments, and how to dual-boot. Browsers on Linux support DRM for viewing popular services like Netflix, and native graphics stack development is improving more rapidly all the time. VFIO with LookingGlass has been great for people who work on Linux and game on Windows, and I think that paves the way for a very interesting future. Perhaps one day we'll see a Windows Gaming container that just does a useful thing without trying to steal the show. Also, FOSS acceptance is so commonplace now that we no longer notice its pervasiveness. Try to find a software or service that doesn't have an open source clause or a succeeding software company that totally eschews it. It might not be front and center in the marketing, but open source is as essential an ingredient in today's development as public access to books is to a more equally literate society.
pjmlp 8y ago
> Maybe we've seen "peak Free Software" and more secret sauce will hide behind SaaS paywalls in the near future. Not only SaaS paywalls, thanks to non-copyleft licenses, more appreciated by companies, we are back to the shareware days. Now you get the source with the light version, instead of a limited 30 days trial. However many goodies are only on the commercial version. Likewise, even if Linux has won on the server and seems to be winning on IoT, there are now several contenders on the embedded space with BSD licenses (Mbed, Arduino, RTOS, Nuttx, TinyOS, ...). In any case, it is understandable as it is easier to create a business model in such scenarios.

watwut 8y ago

It is not just that aggressive selling. For years and large databases, Oracle database was better then MySQL for years. It was expensive, but came with better tools, had better performance on large data (including when queries were badly written as many of them are), reporting and what not. None of it matters for smaller projects, but it did mattered for larger projects and in particular for large projects under time pressure. I have worked with all three, MySQL/Oracle/Mssql and imo, "MySQL is going to put Oracle out of business" was largely wishful thinking. Once you take "open source is better then proprietary software" as an axiom, then it is easy to ignore weaknesses of whatever open source alternative is there now or claim them irrelevant.

amluto 8y ago
> None of it matters for smaller projects, but it did mattered for larger projects and in particular for large projects under time pressure. In my very limited experience with Oracle, it sucked for a small project for two reasons. The client library took multiple seconds to load. And the connection string I had to pass was almost impossible to figure out.
- perl4ever 8y ago
  I think there was a joke I read once about the Oracle database that it will do anything in a roughly constant amount of time, but it's a large constant.

dijit 8y ago

> Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were great friends Whoa whoa whao, this is the opposite of what I believe to be true, I have little to believe they were really friends, in fact when Oracle bought Sun Apple stopped integrating ZFS because Jobs didn't want to be associated or beholden to Larry Ellison... [0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/zfs-the-other-new-apple-file-system-that-almost-was-until-it-wasnt/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/zfs-the-other-new-ap...

bcantrill 8y ago
There were absolutely friends -- to the point that Larry would say "my best friend Steve" almost as if it were one word. This left me with two questions, both essentially mean-spirited: (1) Could "only" be substituted for "best"? And (2) Did Steve ever say "my best friend Larry"?
ozim 8y ago
So you are only person that did not read Steve Jobs biography yet? I was also trying to skip it because everyone seems to be reading it. After couple pages it sucked me in and I was reading it until last page really interested, so Walter Isaacson wrote it well. Spoiler: there was quite some pages about Larry Ellison and what was going on between Steve Jobs and him.
gruturo 8y ago
Yes they were friends. Steve Jobs was even Larry Ellison's wedding photographer: https://inshorts.com/en/news/steve-jobs-was-the-photographer-in-ellisons-marriage-1471446159906 https://inshorts.com/en/news/steve-jobs-was-the-photographer... https://petapixel.com/2010/10/08/steve-jobs-the-wedding-photographer/ https://petapixel.com/2010/10/08/steve-jobs-the-wedding-phot...

AboutTheWhisles 8y ago

> they have plans to hire 10,000 people here That's a lot of lawyers. Could this be a plan to shut down one place, open up the same jobs in another and shed people who have worked there for a while and have inflated salaries?