7 ms·

Oracle Java police start knocking on Fortune 200's doors for first time

76 points by dangle1 2y ago

Terr_ 2y ago
Reminds me of a funny quip that's stuck with me, about "falling into a trap": > [Oracle, as contrasted to Sun Microsystems] It's more like: "Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money." [...] > If you were to actually have a conversation with a bank--a friggin bank--[...]Whether you believe it or not, you will get a very societally-engaged answer. [...] You talk to Oracle, it's like "No, we don't fuckin' make dreams happen, we make money, that's what we do!" [...] > Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing [Oracle CEO] Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just doesn't--like, mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think "Oh, the lawnmower hates me"--lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle. -- Brian Cantrill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=35m32s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=35m32s
- talldayo 2y ago
  The longer I live, the more companies I see fill Oracle's archetype. It feels like a bad omen for capitalism.
  - gear54rus 2y ago
    What social/political force do you see opposing that trend? Or why is that a bad omen?
    - talldayo 2y ago
      Socially and politically I don't see much opposition. Nobody in Congress is getting mad about paying for Oracle and nobody protesting in the street even knows what their product is. And realistically, that's probably just how Oracle likes it. The less you know about them the better, their job is twisting the arm of your favorite business and little else. At least in the field of software, Oracle probably considers the proliferation of free software an enemy. But even then, Oracle mastered the art of obfuscating open interfaces and charging people money for support contracts. It's hard to choose any one thing that kills Oracle, but high-quality free software probably goes a long way towards forcing them to change. > Or why is that a bad omen? Oracle is a do-nothing company in the most literal sense. You can only have so many of them around before capitalism as a whole collapses under the weight of it's own incompetence.
      - lye 2y ago
        > Oracle is a do-nothing company Maybe this is true wrt their main product, I neither know nor care about it. The sooner it leaves this Earth, the better for all of us as far as I am concerned. But both OpenJDK (and Java generally) and MySQL have been on fire since they were acquired by Oracle. Compare the stagnation during the last few years under Sun with massive features that's been coming to both more recently: https://dev.mysql.com/blog-archive/the-complete-list-of-new-features-in-mysql-8-0/ https://dev.mysql.com/blog-archive/the-complete-list-of-new-... Java got many shiny things, a few examples off the top of my head: an almost pauseless GC leagues ahead of all FOSS competition, modules, Go-style green threads, many language features like immutable records, ADTs, switch expressions, etc. Things like value types are on the horizon. Oracle is by far the main developer of both the language and its most popular implementation. Adoptium and company mostly just take the source and repackage under their own brand.
      - beachy 2y ago
        > Oracle is a do-nothing company in the most literal sense. You can only have so many of them around before capitalism as a whole collapses under the weight of it's own incompetence. Pretty hyperbolic. There's already a reply to your post that talks about what Oracle have done with Java, but rest assured that Oracle has and does employ armies of developers - as well as sales people and the rest of the big software ecosystem. Whether you like what they build is another thing - it's hard to get excited about boring gigantic ERP systems for example - but saying they don't do anything is absurd.
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      Ideally stakeholder capitalism. Bad omen because otherwise people will just discard capitalism altogether.
      - throwaway48476 2y ago
        "Stakeholder capitalism" exists so people can talk about what they ought to be doing in language vague enough they never have to actually alter their behavior in any tangible way.
        llamaimperative 2y ago
        Turns out it’s hard to build unambiguous moral systems in a complex reality.
    - jayd16 2y ago
      Maybe this is just idealizing the past but it used to feel like for the most part people wanted to be good and do good work and play fair. Some people were cutthroat vultures but it was distasteful and you would see pushback. These days it's expected. Doing good isn't even in the discussion unless it's being cynically mocked. Evading taxes? That makes you smart... Even being devoted to your work is conflated with being exploited by your employer, and with the way things are it's understandable. I hope we see some idealism return to American industry. It'll take a reversal of the plundering of the middle class.
      - soulbadguy 2y ago
        > Maybe this is just idealizing the past but it used to feel like for the most part people wanted to be good and do good work and play fair. Some people were cutthroat vultures but it was distasteful and you would see pushback. It seems that in the past things where somewhat different. The sole focus on maximizing shareholder value is something that happened quite recently. A lot of people trace that to Jack Welch who took over General Electric in the 80's I highly recommend https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Broke-Capitalism-America_and/dp/198217644X https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Broke-Capitalism-America_and/... if you are curious about it.The book documents well the transformation which gave us the modern version of US companies.
        throwup238 2y ago
        Jack Welch was an unrelated sideshow. The biggest change was the development of "shareholder primacy" which very quickly became dogma in the business world: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=63145 https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=63145
  - axus 2y ago
    I'd guess Broadcom, but I'm only aware of the VMware issue. Any of their other product lines get hit? With Oracle, you know it's just a matter of time.
    - tw04 2y ago
      Literally every one of their products. All the Symantec assets, all the CA assets. It’s their playbook.
  - treyd 2y ago
    This is the end result to be expected as every profitable business model that doesn't screw its customers over runs its course and finance capital pushes corporations to continue to pay out to shareholders in growth and dividends despite the shrinking opportunities for it. Any business that doesn't behave like this will eventually be outcompeted by ones that do.
- sys_64738 2y ago
  You got to remember /why/ there was such backlash against Oracle when they took over Sun. All Senior Staff Engineers and above were offered positions as Staff Engineers or they could exit the company by rejecting the offer. The cushy spots that Sun Alum felt they had earned and could maintain after the Sun-set evaporated. That's the reason for the hatred from a lot of exiting folk at that time but they'll always tell the story with their slant.
  - throwaway48476 2y ago
    It's not as if such stories are counterbalanced by other people saying what a wonderful place oracle is.
    - sys_64738 2y ago
      Only those with grievances to air make them known. Plenty of rank and file under Oracle thought it absolutely great due to eight year of stability before the end. Nothing really changed during that time as we still did the exact same day to day function with only macro Oracle decisions impacting. E.g. S11 absolutely will ship on 11/11/11 as Larry decided that.
  - cryptonector 2y ago
    Oracle killed OpenSolaris in a tremendous knee-jerk overreaction, and that was that. After that it was head for the exits. It kills me that Oracle killed OpenSolaris but then they saw the light with OpenJDK.
DowagerDave 2y ago
>> founder and CEO of Palisade Compliance, an independent Oracle licensing advisory company. What a world we live in when there's a market for a company providing this service. Oracle is truly a disgusting company. They offer a very generous cloud computing package but you'd have to be insane to build on it.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- burnte 2y ago
  > They offer a very generous cloud computing package but you'd have to be insane to build on it. Absolutely. I've seen companies get into major trouble building on Oracle products, then when renewal time comes the prices triple and they literally can't afford it. One company I consulted with in 2000 just shut down rather than renew with Oracle. They were a smallish startup and the Oracle costs blew the budget out of the water, they decided to just kill that idea. And Salesforce is the same. Great product, viscous company. I had a major row with then in '21 over licensing fees during contract renewal negotiations. Details aside, the exec I dealt with made it clear they felt they had us over a barrel and had zero desire to help us. I said if we can't even get some flexibility we'll have to move to another product. He literally laughed at me and said he didn't care. So I moved the entire company to a competitor in 45 days. He sent an email a few days before the signing deadline asking when I'd sign it, I said, "we're on another product now so we won't be renewing. You're free to terminate our account at any time. We've removed all sensitive data already." He called my cell several times a day for two weeks after that. I never answered.
  - zeroCalories 2y ago
    Sounds like hell. When I feel a sales or business person trying to manipulate me something shuts off in my brain and I just stop talking to them. Maybe the difference is just the skill of the manipulator, but I infinitely prefer it when people are talking candidly about the situation without mind games.
    - 2y ago
MissTake 2y ago
Brilliant idea. Find all the companies who are probably already seething about Broadcoms ridiculous price increases, and kick them in the metaphorical financial nuts some more. I mean, how can this go wrong for them? /s
cbsmith 2y ago
Not really for the first time.
lolinder 2y ago
I'm genuinely curious: Why do companies use Oracle JDKs? Is there value that they provide to enterprises over the FOSS JDKs, or is it just a default and/or a mistake because of confusing naming?
- metadat 2y ago
  In fact, Oracle also funds the open-source version, OpenJDK. The Oracle EE JDK has some extra features which can be enabled (e.g. fancier G1 garbage collector, IIRC), and there's also GraalVM EE which provides an even faster runtime. Also worth noting GraalVM CE (Community Edition) which is pretty spectacular. Futamura Projection, anyone? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_evaluation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_evaluation (This is the badass future space tech part of Graal :) That said, OpenJDK works totally fine for many cases.
  - pharaohgeek 2y ago
    Compiling Java to native code via GraalVM is really amazing. The Quarkus framework supports this, and the startup time and memory utilization is incredible compared to the JVM. I deploy native-built Java apps as AWS Lambdas and the startup time and resource utilization are so much better by comparison.
    - willsmith72 2y ago
      what are the cold starts like?
      - metadat 2y ago
        Faster, because it's a native executable.
        willsmith72 2y ago
        Right, but I mean there's faster than spring boot (30 seconds), then there's fast enough for a typical web experience (<500ms) My experience on lambda is with node and python, and I've always needed to pay for concurrency. Cold starts were 1-3s, which is not good enough for a web api
jiggawatts 2y ago
Just a reminder to everyone that .NET is open-source, runs on Linux and Mac natively, and ASP.NET is one of the nicest web development platforms around, especially if you prefer to keep things simple and generate HTML server-side like Tim Berners Lee intended. VS Code is free, Intellij Rider is free for open-source projects, GitHub is free, etc...
- soulbadguy 2y ago
  +1. Sadly it's very hard to displace java/jvm moat. And MSFT image in the open source world is still not stellar. But if i were to be in position to chose a new stack for a standard CRUD/Backend app, .Net >> Jvm
  - taftster 2y ago
    I just hate method names starting with a capital letter. I hate it so much, I put up with Java web/mvc products just to spite myself.
    - jiggawatts 2y ago
      do You start sentences with lower case, and then capitalise the second word? because That's what Java reads like to me.
      - taftster 2y ago
        But the method is never really the thing you start a "sentence" with, though. You enter a method from a class, either statically or through an instance reference. Even in C#, if you have a local reference to a class instance, you use a camelCase naming approach before entering the method name. So at least in Java, this scenario is more consistent (from your "sentence" argument).
  - eikenberry 2y ago
    Are those the only two options?
- 2y ago
freitzkriesler2 2y ago
I miss Sun Microsystems so much guys, it's unreal.
kstrauser 2y ago
I'm serious here: that's why I don't touch JVM languages. Sure, maybe you use OpenJDK. Have fun arguing that point against Oracle's legal division. It's too bad. I hear that the JVM's an engineering marvel. It may be, but Oracle darn near beat freaking Google in a lawsuit. What chance does anyone else have?
- salawat 2y ago
  Pretty good considering the precedent has been set.
- lililililililll 2y ago
  [flagged]
Havoc 2y ago
> Oracle, Java, subscription, compliance, locked in, license negotiations I’m just surprised there are still people willing to deal with this at all. Surely at some point you just rip off the bandaid? Unless you’re up to your eyeballs in legacy code in which case…oracle acquisition was 15 years ago and everyone knows how they roll. If you’re still on it with no plan B…good luck with that
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
neonsunset 2y ago
It is hilarious and ironic to read this title, after hearing so many times how C#/F# and .NET (released under MIT, including most of the tooling bits) are not "truly open-source and free". Makes me feel ever so slightly vindicated. Oh, and .NET comes as "full package" - you don't need to pay for extra performance features existing or future, or read through license text if you want to use AOT capability for AWS Lambdas.

76 points by dangle1 2y ago

Reminds me of a funny quip that's stuck with me, about "falling into a trap": > [Oracle, as contrasted to Sun Microsystems] It's more like: "Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money." [...] > If you were to actually have a conversation with a bank--a friggin bank--[...]Whether you believe it or not, you will get a very societally-engaged answer. [...] You talk to Oracle, it's like "No, we don't fuckin' make dreams happen, we make money, that's what we do!" [...] > Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing [Oracle CEO] Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just doesn't--like, mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think "Oh, the lawnmower hates me"--lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle. -- Brian Cantrill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=35m32s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=35m32s

talldayo 2y ago
The longer I live, the more companies I see fill Oracle's archetype. It feels like a bad omen for capitalism.
- gear54rus 2y ago
  What social/political force do you see opposing that trend? Or why is that a bad omen?
  - talldayo 2y ago
    Socially and politically I don't see much opposition. Nobody in Congress is getting mad about paying for Oracle and nobody protesting in the street even knows what their product is. And realistically, that's probably just how Oracle likes it. The less you know about them the better, their job is twisting the arm of your favorite business and little else. At least in the field of software, Oracle probably considers the proliferation of free software an enemy. But even then, Oracle mastered the art of obfuscating open interfaces and charging people money for support contracts. It's hard to choose any one thing that kills Oracle, but high-quality free software probably goes a long way towards forcing them to change. > Or why is that a bad omen? Oracle is a do-nothing company in the most literal sense. You can only have so many of them around before capitalism as a whole collapses under the weight of it's own incompetence.
    - lye 2y ago
      > Oracle is a do-nothing company Maybe this is true wrt their main product, I neither know nor care about it. The sooner it leaves this Earth, the better for all of us as far as I am concerned. But both OpenJDK (and Java generally) and MySQL have been on fire since they were acquired by Oracle. Compare the stagnation during the last few years under Sun with massive features that's been coming to both more recently: https://dev.mysql.com/blog-archive/the-complete-list-of-new-features-in-mysql-8-0/ https://dev.mysql.com/blog-archive/the-complete-list-of-new-... Java got many shiny things, a few examples off the top of my head: an almost pauseless GC leagues ahead of all FOSS competition, modules, Go-style green threads, many language features like immutable records, ADTs, switch expressions, etc. Things like value types are on the horizon. Oracle is by far the main developer of both the language and its most popular implementation. Adoptium and company mostly just take the source and repackage under their own brand.
    - beachy 2y ago
      > Oracle is a do-nothing company in the most literal sense. You can only have so many of them around before capitalism as a whole collapses under the weight of it's own incompetence. Pretty hyperbolic. There's already a reply to your post that talks about what Oracle have done with Java, but rest assured that Oracle has and does employ armies of developers - as well as sales people and the rest of the big software ecosystem. Whether you like what they build is another thing - it's hard to get excited about boring gigantic ERP systems for example - but saying they don't do anything is absurd.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    Ideally stakeholder capitalism. Bad omen because otherwise people will just discard capitalism altogether.
    - throwaway48476 2y ago
      "Stakeholder capitalism" exists so people can talk about what they ought to be doing in language vague enough they never have to actually alter their behavior in any tangible way.
      - llamaimperative 2y ago
        Turns out it’s hard to build unambiguous moral systems in a complex reality.
  - jayd16 2y ago
    Maybe this is just idealizing the past but it used to feel like for the most part people wanted to be good and do good work and play fair. Some people were cutthroat vultures but it was distasteful and you would see pushback. These days it's expected. Doing good isn't even in the discussion unless it's being cynically mocked. Evading taxes? That makes you smart... Even being devoted to your work is conflated with being exploited by your employer, and with the way things are it's understandable. I hope we see some idealism return to American industry. It'll take a reversal of the plundering of the middle class.
    - soulbadguy 2y ago
      > Maybe this is just idealizing the past but it used to feel like for the most part people wanted to be good and do good work and play fair. Some people were cutthroat vultures but it was distasteful and you would see pushback. It seems that in the past things where somewhat different. The sole focus on maximizing shareholder value is something that happened quite recently. A lot of people trace that to Jack Welch who took over General Electric in the 80's I highly recommend https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Broke-Capitalism-America_and/dp/198217644X https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Broke-Capitalism-America_and/... if you are curious about it.The book documents well the transformation which gave us the modern version of US companies.
      - throwup238 2y ago
        Jack Welch was an unrelated sideshow. The biggest change was the development of "shareholder primacy" which very quickly became dogma in the business world: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=63145 https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=63145
- axus 2y ago
  I'd guess Broadcom, but I'm only aware of the VMware issue. Any of their other product lines get hit? With Oracle, you know it's just a matter of time.
  - tw04 2y ago
    Literally every one of their products. All the Symantec assets, all the CA assets. It’s their playbook.
- treyd 2y ago
  This is the end result to be expected as every profitable business model that doesn't screw its customers over runs its course and finance capital pushes corporations to continue to pay out to shareholders in growth and dividends despite the shrinking opportunities for it. Any business that doesn't behave like this will eventually be outcompeted by ones that do.
sys_64738 2y ago
You got to remember /why/ there was such backlash against Oracle when they took over Sun. All Senior Staff Engineers and above were offered positions as Staff Engineers or they could exit the company by rejecting the offer. The cushy spots that Sun Alum felt they had earned and could maintain after the Sun-set evaporated. That's the reason for the hatred from a lot of exiting folk at that time but they'll always tell the story with their slant.
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  It's not as if such stories are counterbalanced by other people saying what a wonderful place oracle is.
  - sys_64738 2y ago
    Only those with grievances to air make them known. Plenty of rank and file under Oracle thought it absolutely great due to eight year of stability before the end. Nothing really changed during that time as we still did the exact same day to day function with only macro Oracle decisions impacting. E.g. S11 absolutely will ship on 11/11/11 as Larry decided that.
- cryptonector 2y ago
  Oracle killed OpenSolaris in a tremendous knee-jerk overreaction, and that was that. After that it was head for the exits. It kills me that Oracle killed OpenSolaris but then they saw the light with OpenJDK.

DowagerDave 2y ago

>> founder and CEO of Palisade Compliance, an independent Oracle licensing advisory company. What a world we live in when there's a market for a company providing this service. Oracle is truly a disgusting company. They offer a very generous cloud computing package but you'd have to be insane to build on it.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
burnte 2y ago
> They offer a very generous cloud computing package but you'd have to be insane to build on it. Absolutely. I've seen companies get into major trouble building on Oracle products, then when renewal time comes the prices triple and they literally can't afford it. One company I consulted with in 2000 just shut down rather than renew with Oracle. They were a smallish startup and the Oracle costs blew the budget out of the water, they decided to just kill that idea. And Salesforce is the same. Great product, viscous company. I had a major row with then in '21 over licensing fees during contract renewal negotiations. Details aside, the exec I dealt with made it clear they felt they had us over a barrel and had zero desire to help us. I said if we can't even get some flexibility we'll have to move to another product. He literally laughed at me and said he didn't care. So I moved the entire company to a competitor in 45 days. He sent an email a few days before the signing deadline asking when I'd sign it, I said, "we're on another product now so we won't be renewing. You're free to terminate our account at any time. We've removed all sensitive data already." He called my cell several times a day for two weeks after that. I never answered.
- zeroCalories 2y ago
  Sounds like hell. When I feel a sales or business person trying to manipulate me something shuts off in my brain and I just stop talking to them. Maybe the difference is just the skill of the manipulator, but I infinitely prefer it when people are talking candidly about the situation without mind games.
  - 2y ago

MissTake 2y ago

Brilliant idea. Find all the companies who are probably already seething about Broadcoms ridiculous price increases, and kick them in the metaphorical financial nuts some more. I mean, how can this go wrong for them? /s

cbsmith 2y ago

Not really for the first time.

lolinder 2y ago

I'm genuinely curious: Why do companies use Oracle JDKs? Is there value that they provide to enterprises over the FOSS JDKs, or is it just a default and/or a mistake because of confusing naming?

metadat 2y ago
In fact, Oracle also funds the open-source version, OpenJDK. The Oracle EE JDK has some extra features which can be enabled (e.g. fancier G1 garbage collector, IIRC), and there's also GraalVM EE which provides an even faster runtime. Also worth noting GraalVM CE (Community Edition) which is pretty spectacular. Futamura Projection, anyone? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_evaluation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_evaluation (This is the badass future space tech part of Graal :) That said, OpenJDK works totally fine for many cases.
- pharaohgeek 2y ago
  Compiling Java to native code via GraalVM is really amazing. The Quarkus framework supports this, and the startup time and memory utilization is incredible compared to the JVM. I deploy native-built Java apps as AWS Lambdas and the startup time and resource utilization are so much better by comparison.
  - willsmith72 2y ago
    what are the cold starts like?
    - metadat 2y ago
      Faster, because it's a native executable.
      - willsmith72 2y ago
        Right, but I mean there's faster than spring boot (30 seconds), then there's fast enough for a typical web experience (<500ms) My experience on lambda is with node and python, and I've always needed to pay for concurrency. Cold starts were 1-3s, which is not good enough for a web api

jiggawatts 2y ago

Just a reminder to everyone that .NET is open-source, runs on Linux and Mac natively, and ASP.NET is one of the nicest web development platforms around, especially if you prefer to keep things simple and generate HTML server-side like Tim Berners Lee intended. VS Code is free, Intellij Rider is free for open-source projects, GitHub is free, etc...

soulbadguy 2y ago
+1. Sadly it's very hard to displace java/jvm moat. And MSFT image in the open source world is still not stellar. But if i were to be in position to chose a new stack for a standard CRUD/Backend app, .Net >> Jvm
- taftster 2y ago
  I just hate method names starting with a capital letter. I hate it so much, I put up with Java web/mvc products just to spite myself.
  - jiggawatts 2y ago
    do You start sentences with lower case, and then capitalise the second word? because That's what Java reads like to me.
    - taftster 2y ago
      But the method is never really the thing you start a "sentence" with, though. You enter a method from a class, either statically or through an instance reference. Even in C#, if you have a local reference to a class instance, you use a camelCase naming approach before entering the method name. So at least in Java, this scenario is more consistent (from your "sentence" argument).
- eikenberry 2y ago
  Are those the only two options?
2y ago

freitzkriesler2 2y ago

I miss Sun Microsystems so much guys, it's unreal.

kstrauser 2y ago

I'm serious here: that's why I don't touch JVM languages. Sure, maybe you use OpenJDK. Have fun arguing that point against Oracle's legal division. It's too bad. I hear that the JVM's an engineering marvel. It may be, but Oracle darn near beat freaking Google in a lawsuit. What chance does anyone else have?

salawat 2y ago
Pretty good considering the precedent has been set.
lililililililll 2y ago
[flagged]

Havoc 2y ago

> Oracle, Java, subscription, compliance, locked in, license negotiations I’m just surprised there are still people willing to deal with this at all. Surely at some point you just rip off the bandaid? Unless you’re up to your eyeballs in legacy code in which case…oracle acquisition was 15 years ago and everyone knows how they roll. If you’re still on it with no plan B…good luck with that

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

neonsunset 2y ago

It is hilarious and ironic to read this title, after hearing so many times how C#/F# and .NET (released under MIT, including most of the tooling bits) are not "truly open-source and free". Makes me feel ever so slightly vindicated. Oh, and .NET comes as "full package" - you don't need to pay for extra performance features existing or future, or read through license text if you want to use AOT capability for AWS Lambdas.