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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

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.

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.