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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 ar

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 ...

Volundr 4y ago
I don't think licensing is the only reason people hate Oracle. They have at the very best a mixed record when it comes to open source they've acquired. While they've done pretty well by Java and virtualbox after some initial missteps, other software such as Open office, MySQL, Solaris, ZFS, KSplice, etc has not faired nearly so well...
nvrspyx 4y ago
Thank you for the very detailed response. I recognize that my impression of Oracle was certainly unfair due to my lack of knowledge and experience with them. I also recognize that it was both selfish and ignorant of me to ask for someone to spin this negatively. My comment was in good faith, but I see now that my intention doesn't really change that it was encouraging an unjust characterization of this announcement and was unfairly asking someone else to do the leg work for me. I guess my default (and flawed) heuristic is to assume that a big corporation has an ulterior motive with goodwill or community-focused announcements. I'll take this as a learning opportunity to not blindly adopt what I perceive as the general sentiment, to stop relying on such a heuristic, and to do my own research and evaluation. In addition to the detailed response, thank you for also indirectly kicking my butt into reevaluating how I approach the unknown both logically and emotionally.
- mike_hearn 4y ago
  You're welcome and I don't think you should feel bad, your post seemed OK to me. This particular announcement isn't even meant to generate goodwill really, although I can see why it's interpreted that way. It's not like there's a new open source release coming. It's just resolving some duplication issues in the way these already open source projects are being developed by Oracle "donating" from one arm to the other :) The goodwill should instead come from the decade+ funding of this very advanced and large research project, which is teaching the world a lot about fundamental computer science (complete with large set of academic papers), and for which almost all the core cleverness is given away under liberal licenses. Be aware that they do have a commercial offering built on top of Graal, the enterprise edition. It makes programs go faster, and has a few other useful features. But there's nothing nefarious about that of course.

Volundr 4y ago

I don't think licensing is the only reason people hate Oracle. They have at the very best a mixed record when it comes to open source they've acquired. While they've done pretty well by Java and virtualbox after some initial missteps, other software such as Open office, MySQL, Solaris, ZFS, KSplice, etc has not faired nearly so well...

nvrspyx 4y ago

Thank you for the very detailed response. I recognize that my impression of Oracle was certainly unfair due to my lack of knowledge and experience with them. I also recognize that it was both selfish and ignorant of me to ask for someone to spin this negatively. My comment was in good faith, but I see now that my intention doesn't really change that it was encouraging an unjust characterization of this announcement and was unfairly asking someone else to do the leg work for me. I guess my default (and flawed) heuristic is to assume that a big corporation has an ulterior motive with goodwill or community-focused announcements. I'll take this as a learning opportunity to not blindly adopt what I perceive as the general sentiment, to stop relying on such a heuristic, and to do my own research and evaluation. In addition to the detailed response, thank you for also indirectly kicking my butt into reevaluating how I approach the unknown both logically and emotionally.

mike_hearn 4y ago
You're welcome and I don't think you should feel bad, your post seemed OK to me. This particular announcement isn't even meant to generate goodwill really, although I can see why it's interpreted that way. It's not like there's a new open source release coming. It's just resolving some duplication issues in the way these already open source projects are being developed by Oracle "donating" from one arm to the other :) The goodwill should instead come from the decade+ funding of this very advanced and large research project, which is teaching the world a lot about fundamental computer science (complete with large set of academic papers), and for which almost all the core cleverness is given away under liberal licenses. Be aware that they do have a commercial offering built on top of Graal, the enterprise edition. It makes programs go faster, and has a few other useful features. But there's nothing nefarious about that of course.