5 ms·

Genuine question, what was so bad about Larry Ellison?

kick 7y ago
"As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple!" "This company is very straightforward, in its defense. This company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity -- that's it! ...Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah... you talk to Oracle, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!'" "You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle." -- Bryan Cantrill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc
- armitron 7y ago
  Bryan Cantrill went on to peddle Node.js to the clueless shortly after that rant so I wouldn't put much weight on what he says.
  - bzbz 7y ago
    To be fair, Node is a hell of a useful tool, given the right context. Don’t pigeonhole it into a box just because the box that he tried to pigeonhole it into isn’t the right fit.
- a_imho 7y ago
  My takeway from the rant is that Oracle is upfront about being a business.
  - tinus_hn 7y ago
    A proper business serves to improve the world and make money doing so. Oracle serves to make money in whatever sleazy way they can get away with, improving the world has nothing to do with it.
rswail 7y ago
ORACLE = One Raging Asshole Called Larry Ellison Oracle is well known for arbitrary and complex licensing that have the effect of locking customers to Oracle under threats of audits. Recently it has taken to pushing customers via licensing changes on to its own Cloud environment. Its incumbency in F100 companies ensures a vendor lockin that is only slowly deteriorating. Oracle's record of acquisition and product EOL is also well known. It's responsible for the fork of Hudson to Jenkins, the collapse of Solaris, the API court case with Google (attempting to use copyright on API definitions to stop new implementations), the fork of MySQL to MariaDB, etc etc
- robocat 7y ago
  I hate that VirtualBox is owned by Oracle (Innotek GmbH was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008). I have used VirtualBox for a decade for my VM on Ubuntu - it just worked better than VMWare for me (I recently bought a VMWare licence, but went back to VBox). Ages ago I even tried to pay Oracle for it, since they documented that they wanted USD50 per seat, but when I emailed them they had no way to accept the money! Oracle strikes me as a deeply disfunctional organisation.
  - toast0 7y ago
    > Oracle strikes me as a deeply disfunctional organisation. Sure, they're deeply dysfunctional, but all big corps are pretty dysfunctional about money. I was working for a company purchased by a Fortune 500, and had a bill from a company purchased by Oracle. Between their Accounts Receivable, and our Accounts Payable, once it took about 3 months to pay the quarterly bill. Only some of the dysfunction was Oracle's fault. :P
  - indigochill 7y ago
    >I have used VirtualBox for a decade for my VM on Ubuntu As a long-time VBox user myself, a neat thing I figured out almost by accident the other day: you can port VBox images to QEMU/KVM trivially on Ubuntu (and then use Virtual Machine Manager for the VBox-like graphical front-end). Just unarchive the OVF file from VBox, then use QEMU to convert the resulting VMDK file to your format of choice (such as qcow2). Import your new disk image into VMM and done!
codesushi42 7y ago
Oh, shit. I confused Larry Ellison with Scott McNealy. Carry on.
fargle 7y ago
- he'd happier destroy 10 or 100 million man-hours of good effort for a couple hundred-K of sales. see Solaris. - trying to assert IP rights on an API. see java lawsuit. - uses vendor lock-in to sell an inferior product that a better replacement is free (like postresql, mysql, etc.) Oh yes, I think Oracle is evil, in a way worse than the worst years of M$. And larry ... is clearly the responsible party. In my ethos, good capitalism is good itself and for everyone. Wise leaders play for the "long game" and this benefits them, their shareholders, and everyone else. This was the pattern of Sun. In particular Sun, even in the years when the UNIX wars were not very nice. larry (and bill) are simply diseased vultures who trade short term personal gain for mass global loss. Someday, while old larry will be fine, his shareholders will have nothing but a bag of sh*t.

kick 7y ago

"As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple!" "This company is very straightforward, in its defense. This company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity -- that's it! ...Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah... you talk to Oracle, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!'" "You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle." -- Bryan Cantrill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc

armitron 7y ago
Bryan Cantrill went on to peddle Node.js to the clueless shortly after that rant so I wouldn't put much weight on what he says.
- bzbz 7y ago
  To be fair, Node is a hell of a useful tool, given the right context. Don’t pigeonhole it into a box just because the box that he tried to pigeonhole it into isn’t the right fit.
a_imho 7y ago
My takeway from the rant is that Oracle is upfront about being a business.
- tinus_hn 7y ago
  A proper business serves to improve the world and make money doing so. Oracle serves to make money in whatever sleazy way they can get away with, improving the world has nothing to do with it.

rswail 7y ago

ORACLE = One Raging Asshole Called Larry Ellison Oracle is well known for arbitrary and complex licensing that have the effect of locking customers to Oracle under threats of audits. Recently it has taken to pushing customers via licensing changes on to its own Cloud environment. Its incumbency in F100 companies ensures a vendor lockin that is only slowly deteriorating. Oracle's record of acquisition and product EOL is also well known. It's responsible for the fork of Hudson to Jenkins, the collapse of Solaris, the API court case with Google (attempting to use copyright on API definitions to stop new implementations), the fork of MySQL to MariaDB, etc etc

robocat 7y ago
I hate that VirtualBox is owned by Oracle (Innotek GmbH was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008). I have used VirtualBox for a decade for my VM on Ubuntu - it just worked better than VMWare for me (I recently bought a VMWare licence, but went back to VBox). Ages ago I even tried to pay Oracle for it, since they documented that they wanted USD50 per seat, but when I emailed them they had no way to accept the money! Oracle strikes me as a deeply disfunctional organisation.
- toast0 7y ago
  > Oracle strikes me as a deeply disfunctional organisation. Sure, they're deeply dysfunctional, but all big corps are pretty dysfunctional about money. I was working for a company purchased by a Fortune 500, and had a bill from a company purchased by Oracle. Between their Accounts Receivable, and our Accounts Payable, once it took about 3 months to pay the quarterly bill. Only some of the dysfunction was Oracle's fault. :P
- indigochill 7y ago
  >I have used VirtualBox for a decade for my VM on Ubuntu As a long-time VBox user myself, a neat thing I figured out almost by accident the other day: you can port VBox images to QEMU/KVM trivially on Ubuntu (and then use Virtual Machine Manager for the VBox-like graphical front-end). Just unarchive the OVF file from VBox, then use QEMU to convert the resulting VMDK file to your format of choice (such as qcow2). Import your new disk image into VMM and done!

codesushi42 7y ago

Oh, shit. I confused Larry Ellison with Scott McNealy. Carry on.

fargle 7y ago

- he'd happier destroy 10 or 100 million man-hours of good effort for a couple hundred-K of sales. see Solaris. - trying to assert IP rights on an API. see java lawsuit. - uses vendor lock-in to sell an inferior product that a better replacement is free (like postresql, mysql, etc.) Oh yes, I think Oracle is evil, in a way worse than the worst years of M$. And larry ... is clearly the responsible party. In my ethos, good capitalism is good itself and for everyone. Wise leaders play for the "long game" and this benefits them, their shareholders, and everyone else. This was the pattern of Sun. In particular Sun, even in the years when the UNIX wars were not very nice. larry (and bill) are simply diseased vultures who trade short term personal gain for mass global loss. Someday, while old larry will be fine, his shareholders will have nothing but a bag of sh*t.