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Damn that private sector for inventing things that create progress. Let's pretend it's actually stopping progress when it creates progress.

h2odragon 3y ago
u seriously arguing oracle as a source of progress? "embrace, extinguish and extort" Oracle?
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > u seriously This is highly ironic. I was replying to your second paragraph. But on Oracle: I don't like Oracle very much, but you'd be wrong to think that the jump into relational databases on commodity hardware wasn't massively facilitated by Oracle. We aren't all renting mainframes in the cloud right now in a large part down to Oracle's advances in the last quarter of the 20th century. Oracle is still the world's third-largest tech company. That means what it does, even today, is extremely valuable.
  - phkahler 3y ago
    >> Oracle is still the world's third-largest tech company. That means what it does, even today, is extremely valuable. Not going to refute that, but what is that value really? Database software is readily available for free, so there's actually very little value in just the software right? Is it the stability of the product? Support? Just the big name behind it? Those are probably part of it.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      If you're creating a bank in 2024 from scratch, maybe you could now rely on OSS. But you'd probably rather still have a big name that has great expertise in what you want to do across all types of hardware who can come in and make sure things work. And that's from the perspective of not having the cost of changing. If you have to move off Oracle, which provides all these things, you'd have to spend a fortune and still be taking a higher risk.
phkahler 3y ago
>> Damn that private sector for inventing things that create progress. Let's pretend it's actually stopping progress when it creates progress. The software may be beneficial, but the siphoning off of "profit" only benefits the company owners. It's friction. That's not to say it's bad. I once had a conversation with a reasonably successful investor. I tried to point out that he didn't contribute anything and get lectured on how hard he works to pick good investments. I really had to spell it out - the money comes from a transaction between the company and its customers. The customer gets something and the company gets money. The money pays for the employees who make the things or provide the service or whatever. Profit goes to the owners/investors but it really does nothing for the people who actually provide something or pay for that something. There was a time when a company issued shares to raise money, and those investors actually did something for the company. Every trader since then is simply trying to profit on what those before them did while offering zero value in the actual transactions making money for the company. I'm not saying that's bad, its how the system works today and it seems to work reasonably well. But lets not pretend the "profit" isn't friction between the parties involved in the transactions that lead to that profit.

h2odragon 3y ago

u seriously arguing oracle as a source of progress? "embrace, extinguish and extort" Oracle?

robertlagrant 3y ago
> u seriously This is highly ironic. I was replying to your second paragraph. But on Oracle: I don't like Oracle very much, but you'd be wrong to think that the jump into relational databases on commodity hardware wasn't massively facilitated by Oracle. We aren't all renting mainframes in the cloud right now in a large part down to Oracle's advances in the last quarter of the 20th century. Oracle is still the world's third-largest tech company. That means what it does, even today, is extremely valuable.
- phkahler 3y ago
  >> Oracle is still the world's third-largest tech company. That means what it does, even today, is extremely valuable. Not going to refute that, but what is that value really? Database software is readily available for free, so there's actually very little value in just the software right? Is it the stability of the product? Support? Just the big name behind it? Those are probably part of it.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    If you're creating a bank in 2024 from scratch, maybe you could now rely on OSS. But you'd probably rather still have a big name that has great expertise in what you want to do across all types of hardware who can come in and make sure things work. And that's from the perspective of not having the cost of changing. If you have to move off Oracle, which provides all these things, you'd have to spend a fortune and still be taking a higher risk.

phkahler 3y ago

>> Damn that private sector for inventing things that create progress. Let's pretend it's actually stopping progress when it creates progress. The software may be beneficial, but the siphoning off of "profit" only benefits the company owners. It's friction. That's not to say it's bad. I once had a conversation with a reasonably successful investor. I tried to point out that he didn't contribute anything and get lectured on how hard he works to pick good investments. I really had to spell it out - the money comes from a transaction between the company and its customers. The customer gets something and the company gets money. The money pays for the employees who make the things or provide the service or whatever. Profit goes to the owners/investors but it really does nothing for the people who actually provide something or pay for that something. There was a time when a company issued shares to raise money, and those investors actually did something for the company. Every trader since then is simply trying to profit on what those before them did while offering zero value in the actual transactions making money for the company. I'm not saying that's bad, its how the system works today and it seems to work reasonably well. But lets not pretend the "profit" isn't friction between the parties involved in the transactions that lead to that profit.