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 s

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.