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When Oracle bought Sun/Solaris, they took down the public Solaris forums which made my job working with illumos forks very difficult without all the years relev

by bragr 2y ago

When Oracle bought Sun/Solaris, they took down the public Solaris forums which made my job working with illumos forks very difficult without all the years relevant Solaris 10 questions and answers. In that case, it was a naked attempt to force people to license the then new Solaris 11.

Suppafly 2y ago
Oracle is anti-consumer in a ton of ways, I'm not sure why they have so much money to be able to buy and ruin so many other things.
- sydbarrett74 2y ago
  First-mover advantage (or close to first) has a lot to do with it, I imagine. Ellison has been resting on his laurels for over four decades.
- kbolino 2y ago
  They sell to people who buy. I realize that sounds like a tautology, but most of us don't buy software (at least, not often) and instead we primarily use software. People who primarily buy software care about and optimize for very different concerns than people who use software. There's a market built around selling a large product, which will be used by many different kinds of users, to just one specific kind of user, one who has been empowered to make organization-wide purchasing decisions. This is typically done by presenting to that kind of user a curated subset of the application's features, that subset usually being wholly disjoint from what most users will see. These software-buyers will be shown a pretty picture taped to an ugly mess, and since it meets their needs (to whatever extent they have needs for it), will decide to buy based on the pretty picture (and, sometimes, the accompanying sweet-talk lunches). In another generation, the term "nobody got fired for buying IBM" was coined, and this is the kind of people it was talking about. Buying Oracle doesn't create controversy among their peer group.
  - soraminazuki 2y ago
    Oracle's reputation is bad enough that buying it should result in a firing though. At least if it can be avoided. Remember all the unnecessary work they generated throughout the whole industry when they turned the Java license into a extortion trap for unsuspecting companies?
    - kbolino 2y ago
      Yeah, I think their reputation isn't what it used to be. But it takes a long time for these things to percolate up from developers and lawyers to management, and another long time for them to spread from IT-focused businesses to other industries.

by bragr 2y ago

Suppafly 2y ago

Oracle is anti-consumer in a ton of ways, I'm not sure why they have so much money to be able to buy and ruin so many other things.

sydbarrett74 2y ago
First-mover advantage (or close to first) has a lot to do with it, I imagine. Ellison has been resting on his laurels for over four decades.
kbolino 2y ago
They sell to people who buy. I realize that sounds like a tautology, but most of us don't buy software (at least, not often) and instead we primarily use software. People who primarily buy software care about and optimize for very different concerns than people who use software. There's a market built around selling a large product, which will be used by many different kinds of users, to just one specific kind of user, one who has been empowered to make organization-wide purchasing decisions. This is typically done by presenting to that kind of user a curated subset of the application's features, that subset usually being wholly disjoint from what most users will see. These software-buyers will be shown a pretty picture taped to an ugly mess, and since it meets their needs (to whatever extent they have needs for it), will decide to buy based on the pretty picture (and, sometimes, the accompanying sweet-talk lunches). In another generation, the term "nobody got fired for buying IBM" was coined, and this is the kind of people it was talking about. Buying Oracle doesn't create controversy among their peer group.
- soraminazuki 2y ago
  Oracle's reputation is bad enough that buying it should result in a firing though. At least if it can be avoided. Remember all the unnecessary work they generated throughout the whole industry when they turned the Java license into a extortion trap for unsuspecting companies?
  - kbolino 2y ago
    Yeah, I think their reputation isn't what it used to be. But it takes a long time for these things to percolate up from developers and lawyers to management, and another long time for them to spread from IT-focused businesses to other industries.