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I know absolutely nothing about Oracle, GraalVM, OpenJDK, or Java development in general. I haven't used Java since a CS intro class during my undergrad like 10

I know absolutely nothing about Oracle, GraalVM, OpenJDK, or Java development in general. I haven't used Java since a CS intro class during my undergrad like 10 years ago. Despite this, I've internally adopted the general consensus that Oracle is a terrible, greedy company. Can someone play devil's advocate to explain how this news may actually favor this negative view of Oracle? The sentiment in this thread is praising Oracle's decision here, so I'm just curious if there's an alternative viewpoint that's skeptical or wary of this decision and Oracle's motivation to make it. With that said, I'm not looking for reason to diminish the positives. I'm just curious. Good moves that benefit the community should absolutely be acknowledged and encouraged. EDIT: It looks like another person commented how this may not be benevolent in the context of WebAssembly while I was slowly typing this comment up on mobile. I'd still be interested in this discussion though.

hotpotamus 4y ago
There's an epic rant on youtube from one of the old Sun guys that gets linked occasionally. I can't remember all of it, but basically it goes that Larry Ellison/Oracle is just as simple as a lawnmower - if you stick your hand in it; it'll shred it without emotion because it's just an unthinking machine that cuts whatever you put into in the same way that Oracle is a machine to make money. I've been at this long enough to have had my own experiences and they are indeed as bad as everyone has warned me, but it does feel like something you have to experience yourself (or at least through a trusted party like in my case) to totally believe.
- edp 4y ago
  I think you're talking about Bryan Cantrill : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m
- ethbr0 4y ago
  It seems irrational for anyone to feel unexpectedly angry at a lawnmower for shredding their hand though -- you should have known it was a lawnmower, that's not a recent change, and it never claimed to be anything but a lawnmower. You should just be the normal level of angry that lawnmowers are dangerous. The parent apologist was extremely precise in how they described Oracle. Oracle isn't in the "Be warm and fuzzy to developers" business: they're in the "Provide mission critical software to large enterprises" business. Logic for servicing the latter well makes things look screwy or sinister to people used to the former. Which isn't to say the Oracle salespeople aren't scummy. But most salespeople are scummy. That's what happens when you incentivize closing sales, which is how almost all sales orgs are set up. So audit model + scummy salespeople = bad experiences. But to parent's point: what's a better model for their customer persona?
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    Well, I had a colleague who worked with them directly. He was a product manager who formerly managed incident response, and this was at a company that at one time had incidents that affected significant chunks of the Internet (no longer - that mantle has passed to AWS). It's been a couple years now, so the details are a bit fuzzy, but I remember him saying that dealing with Oracle was about the worst experience he had on the job. Their representatives were outright rude and condescending, and seemingly difficult to no purpose. So that's my (2nd hand) experience with them. I'm a bit young to have ever known much about Sun, but I get the impression that they were very respected for their products and commitment to open source, and Oracle's purchase seems to have really rankled the community. Interestingly, the only Oracle products I use are all from the Sun era - MySQL, Java, Virtualbox, and ZFS.
vbezhenar 4y ago
I'm java developer for the last 15 years or something like that and I can't really say much bad about Oracle Java. IMO Oracle got a good team working on Java. Java is completely open source. There are many builds of Java from different companies, I like liberica one, for example (be aware of Russian roots, though). I have no idea about this graal thing and I think it's rather niche application. I played with it but concluded that it's not ready for me yet.
mike_hearn 4y ago
There isn't any way to spin it negatively. The generalized dislike of Oracle you have seen really comes from a couple of different aspects, neither of which are relevant to this specific announcement: 1. License audits suck. 2. The Google lawsuit (about matters resolved long ago and which don't apply to anyone except Google, really). A lot of ill will comes from people whose companies have been audited. The process is by all accounts very painful. However, what's rarely mentioned in such discussions is the alternatives and why Oracle does this. It's because their software is totally DRM free. It makes sense; you can't have a major airport or bank shutting down suddenly because a license key or credit card expired, can you? Oracle DB is mission critical stuff, it must be always available. That's why they use an audit model - it's "trust but verify". They make their stuff available for free download and you promise not to pirate it. Every so often Oracle turn up and check to see if you're paying for what you're using. At this point there are usually two problems that crop up: 1. The company doesn't actually know if it's correctly paying for Oracle's stuff. It requires a lot of work to find out, maybe the right controls weren't in place and naughty developers just installed more copies because it was convenient etc. Then they discover they've unknowingly been pirating the DB. 2. And/or they discover they didn't understand the licensing model, which historically had some very sharp edges around virtualization (maybe still does). Because the downloads are open and unrestricted by any form of DRM, it's easy to make these mistakes in a company that doesn't have good processes in place. At this point the users have a problem because it's just plain old copyright violation. Oracle prefers not to sue its own users for obvious reasons so at this point a third issue crops up - their sales guys like to cut deals. Buy more of our software and you'll have some useful stuff plus we'll forget about your non-compliance issues. Win/win, right? Not always for the people who aren't at the top of the firm of course, who may now be told to adopt some new product that they wouldn't otherwise have chosen and may not even be told why (it's embarrassing for the executives to admit they ended up in that situation!). It's worth observing that with the cloud these problems go away. Use Oracle DB only in the cloud (or MS SQL etc) and the cloud provider will track your usage and ensure you're paying for it. In turn that means no need for audits. It's very easy to criticize Oracle for the above outcomes. It's harder to come up with alternative approaches beyond really down in the weeds stuff like the exact ways virtualized cores are licensed, etc. The moment you have a commercial product there needs to be some way to ensure users are paying for it (because a lot simply won't if there's nothing in place to make them), but if you accept that outages cannot be caused by DRM or licensing errors, then you are almost forced to go with either the cloud or the audit+true-up approach. Many modern DB firms go hosted-only which brings its own problems (see the recent Azure leak). Plus Oracle DB predates the cloud, so ...
kaba0 4y ago
Is there any “good companies”? I’m fairly sure they all become paperclip optimizers after a certain size and any seemingly good behavior is simply the better option from a profit-maximizing point of view. Do you honestly think that all those libraries care about Pride or Black Lives Matters? Nope, they just had some calculations and as user-facing companies, marketing has a huge role on their profits. A logistic company won’t have done any such thing as they are likely not even known by the general public. Oracle is not really an end-user facing company like Facebook or Google is, so they simply don’t care all that much about that (hence the lawnmower analogy). But.. that’s a good thing as well — you can use the lawnmower for its job, you’ll never be surprised. Graal and OpenJDK and other tech at the bottom of the tech stack are long term investments. Looking at the linux kernel, it is not developed primarily by some hacker in a basement, but by employees paid by Intel, Red Hat, Google, pretty much everyone.

hotpotamus 4y ago

There's an epic rant on youtube from one of the old Sun guys that gets linked occasionally. I can't remember all of it, but basically it goes that Larry Ellison/Oracle is just as simple as a lawnmower - if you stick your hand in it; it'll shred it without emotion because it's just an unthinking machine that cuts whatever you put into in the same way that Oracle is a machine to make money. I've been at this long enough to have had my own experiences and they are indeed as bad as everyone has warned me, but it does feel like something you have to experience yourself (or at least through a trusted party like in my case) to totally believe.

edp 4y ago
I think you're talking about Bryan Cantrill : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m
ethbr0 4y ago
It seems irrational for anyone to feel unexpectedly angry at a lawnmower for shredding their hand though -- you should have known it was a lawnmower, that's not a recent change, and it never claimed to be anything but a lawnmower. You should just be the normal level of angry that lawnmowers are dangerous. The parent apologist was extremely precise in how they described Oracle. Oracle isn't in the "Be warm and fuzzy to developers" business: they're in the "Provide mission critical software to large enterprises" business. Logic for servicing the latter well makes things look screwy or sinister to people used to the former. Which isn't to say the Oracle salespeople aren't scummy. But most salespeople are scummy. That's what happens when you incentivize closing sales, which is how almost all sales orgs are set up. So audit model + scummy salespeople = bad experiences. But to parent's point: what's a better model for their customer persona?
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  Well, I had a colleague who worked with them directly. He was a product manager who formerly managed incident response, and this was at a company that at one time had incidents that affected significant chunks of the Internet (no longer - that mantle has passed to AWS). It's been a couple years now, so the details are a bit fuzzy, but I remember him saying that dealing with Oracle was about the worst experience he had on the job. Their representatives were outright rude and condescending, and seemingly difficult to no purpose. So that's my (2nd hand) experience with them. I'm a bit young to have ever known much about Sun, but I get the impression that they were very respected for their products and commitment to open source, and Oracle's purchase seems to have really rankled the community. Interestingly, the only Oracle products I use are all from the Sun era - MySQL, Java, Virtualbox, and ZFS.

vbezhenar 4y ago

I'm java developer for the last 15 years or something like that and I can't really say much bad about Oracle Java. IMO Oracle got a good team working on Java. Java is completely open source. There are many builds of Java from different companies, I like liberica one, for example (be aware of Russian roots, though). I have no idea about this graal thing and I think it's rather niche application. I played with it but concluded that it's not ready for me yet.

mike_hearn 4y ago

There isn't any way to spin it negatively. The generalized dislike of Oracle you have seen really comes from a couple of different aspects, neither of which are relevant to this specific announcement: 1. License audits suck. 2. The Google lawsuit (about matters resolved long ago and which don't apply to anyone except Google, really). A lot of ill will comes from people whose companies have been audited. The process is by all accounts very painful. However, what's rarely mentioned in such discussions is the alternatives and why Oracle does this. It's because their software is totally DRM free. It makes sense; you can't have a major airport or bank shutting down suddenly because a license key or credit card expired, can you? Oracle DB is mission critical stuff, it must be always available. That's why they use an audit model - it's "trust but verify". They make their stuff available for free download and you promise not to pirate it. Every so often Oracle turn up and check to see if you're paying for what you're using. At this point there are usually two problems that crop up: 1. The company doesn't actually know if it's correctly paying for Oracle's stuff. It requires a lot of work to find out, maybe the right controls weren't in place and naughty developers just installed more copies because it was convenient etc. Then they discover they've unknowingly been pirating the DB. 2. And/or they discover they didn't understand the licensing model, which historically had some very sharp edges around virtualization (maybe still does). Because the downloads are open and unrestricted by any form of DRM, it's easy to make these mistakes in a company that doesn't have good processes in place. At this point the users have a problem because it's just plain old copyright violation. Oracle prefers not to sue its own users for obvious reasons so at this point a third issue crops up - their sales guys like to cut deals. Buy more of our software and you'll have some useful stuff plus we'll forget about your non-compliance issues. Win/win, right? Not always for the people who aren't at the top of the firm of course, who may now be told to adopt some new product that they wouldn't otherwise have chosen and may not even be told why (it's embarrassing for the executives to admit they ended up in that situation!). It's worth observing that with the cloud these problems go away. Use Oracle DB only in the cloud (or MS SQL etc) and the cloud provider will track your usage and ensure you're paying for it. In turn that means no need for audits. It's very easy to criticize Oracle for the above outcomes. It's harder to come up with alternative approaches beyond really down in the weeds stuff like the exact ways virtualized cores are licensed, etc. The moment you have a commercial product there needs to be some way to ensure users are paying for it (because a lot simply won't if there's nothing in place to make them), but if you accept that outages cannot be caused by DRM or licensing errors, then you are almost forced to go with either the cloud or the audit+true-up approach. Many modern DB firms go hosted-only which brings its own problems (see the recent Azure leak). Plus Oracle DB predates the cloud, so ...

kaba0 4y ago

Is there any “good companies”? I’m fairly sure they all become paperclip optimizers after a certain size and any seemingly good behavior is simply the better option from a profit-maximizing point of view. Do you honestly think that all those libraries care about Pride or Black Lives Matters? Nope, they just had some calculations and as user-facing companies, marketing has a huge role on their profits. A logistic company won’t have done any such thing as they are likely not even known by the general public. Oracle is not really an end-user facing company like Facebook or Google is, so they simply don’t care all that much about that (hence the lawnmower analogy). But.. that’s a good thing as well — you can use the lawnmower for its job, you’ll never be surprised. Graal and OpenJDK and other tech at the bottom of the tech stack are long term investments. Looking at the linux kernel, it is not developed primarily by some hacker in a basement, but by employees paid by Intel, Red Hat, Google, pretty much everyone.