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Unfortunately I think this is a naive take, because it's focused on technical superiority. That's only part of the story. Companies partner with massive vendo

Unfortunately I think this is a naive take, because it's focused on technical superiority. That's only part of the story. Companies partner with massive vendors like Oracle and jump through their hoops to remain in support contracts because it enables them to defer some liability and satisfy various regulatory checklists. Think about a database instability scenario for an online retailer, and consider if you'd rather be the CTO who is to blame for self-hosting, or the CTO who can defer blame onward to the vendor. It's an unfortunate reality in many "enterprise" environments.

jamesrr39 5y ago
sure, there are companies that stay on Oracle, and Oracle the company isn't going away any time soon. But other companies that were on Oracle have moved/are moving away to other enterprise-palatable services (e.g. AWS), and new companies rarely pick Oracle. Self-hosting is certainly not the only choice nowadays, there are many other companies offering managed databases/other cloud products.
LeifCarrotson 5y ago
The interesting thing is that it's not a financial question of blame for the CTO, it's a reputation problem. It's unlikely that even Oracle would pay to make someone whole after a data loss incident. But the reality is that the ability to blame Oracle or another black-box product from some vendor instead of your in-house instance of some open-source project (that no one outside of engineering has heard of) has real career-altering value to stakeholders. Maybe unjustified, but the effect exists nonetheless.