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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.