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Thank you to everyone behind this effort. At some point, decades ago in the past, Oracle added value to the tech ecosystem. Now, they’re a giant rent-extracting

by lvl155 1y ago

Thank you to everyone behind this effort. At some point, decades ago in the past, Oracle added value to the tech ecosystem. Now, they’re a giant rent-extracting behemoth. I hate the fact that we can’t have nice things in 2025 simply because Oracle owns the IP. Oracle is what happens when corporations become lazy and hand over the keys to some brand names just because “no one ever got fired for buying/hiring _____.” I hope those days are past us.

osigurdson 1y ago
Those days will probably never be behind us because incentive structures in companies make employees risk averse.
fluidcruft 1y ago
When has Oracle ever added value whatsoever to the tech ecosystem?
- tombert 1y ago
  I don’t love Oracle, but GraalVM is pretty cool. That and the vanilla JVM keeps getting updates.
- ternaryoperator 1y ago
  They've done a ton of stuff with Java, including open-sourcing it in its entirety.
- homebrewer 1y ago
  If it's an honest question and not just the beginning of a hate-fest, let's think... Both Java the language and OpenJDK the main runtime & development kit have had much more money and manpower poured into them under Oracle than they ever had previously. Both continue to advance rapidly after almost dying pre-Oracle acquisition. MySQL 8 (released in 2018) was a massive release that brought many long awaited features (like CTEs) to the database, although MySQL's development have stalled during the past few years. Oracle employs several Linux kernel developers and is one of major contributors (especially to XFS and btrfs): https://lwn.net/Articles/1022414 https://lwn.net/Articles/1022414 Not top 3 or even top 10, but better than most companies out there. That's all I can remember. edit: after thinking about it for a couple more minutes, they're also the main developer of GraalVM — the only high quality FOSS AOT compiler for Java (also mentioned by a sibling comment), and are writing one of the major relatively lightweight modern alternatives to Spring (the other two being Micronaut and Quarkus): https://helidon.io https://helidon.io
  - beanjuiceII 1y ago
    people just like hating on successful companies, a HN special.. I ignore most those types of posts on this site because they are without any merit
    - toyg 1y ago
      I think the Oracle hate goes a bit beyond the generic hatred for successful companies (be it Microsoft, FAANG, etc). People actually used to like the products that made these companies explode. Windows 2000 was cool; Facebook was cool; Google was cool. Whenever they stop being pure unadulterated evil for a few minutes, very quickly a lot of people are willing to forgive them and welcome them back into polite society. But as long as most geeks can remember, Oracle has never been cool. At its peak, the company enabled a world of snooty BOFH DBAs, selling unreasonably expensive products to well-oiled middle-managers. And then they started "acqui-squeezing" adjacent products, blackmailing their own customers, and suing everyone in sight. They could cure cancer tomorrow, gifting all the related IPs to the world, and most geeks would still see them as scum trying to whitewash their image - and they would probably be right. There are some great engineers in Oracle, but their management is all that is wrong with capitalism.
      - kragen 1y ago
        From 01979 until about 02000, Oracle's RDBMS software was probably the best in the world, and definitely better than the free-software alternatives like Postgres. (Remember that MariaDB, then named MySQL, didn't become free software until 02000 and didn't support transactions until even later.) For several years after that, it was still the best database for some purposes. And that's true even though the Bastard Database Operators From Hell were present from the very beginning. SQL is kind of shitty, but the relational database model is so great that it makes up for it. And until the rise of entity component systems, SQLite, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB, all the decent implementations were proprietary software. Separately, although SQL's implementation of transactions is even more broken than its implementation of the relational model, transactional concurrency is also great enough to make up for SQL, and, again, all the usable implementations used to be proprietary.
- phartenfeller 1y ago
  I think you underestimate the impact of their database on the world. They were a huge tech innovator in that part (and actually still are).
Someone1234 1y ago
Sun Microsystems definitely added value, tons in fact. Oracle's contributions are less clear-cut, particularly if you don't count all the acquired "achievements."
- gardnr 1y ago
  Sun did engineering. Oracle does business. I’d be surprised if Oracle released the trademark without a fight to the end. They have a special way of decimating open source projects.
  - beanjuiceII 1y ago
    oracle does engineering just fine, and they are actually still around...so maybe Sun was doing it wrong
    - b00ty4breakfast 1y ago
      only if there is a 1-1 correspondence between engineering acumen and money-making acumen, which I'm sure you already know isn't the case.
    - hamburglar 1y ago
      The quality of engineering varies wildly within Oracle, to the point that entire divisions can be relied on to produce absolute garbage because longevity completely trumps talent. Oracle Cloud has great engineering (which these days is quite hampered by bureaucracy and misplaced frugality, in my opinion), but outside OCI and a few small select orgs, the situation is dire. At a couple points my org had hiring crunches and leadership’s short term solution was to find employees from other orgs that could be “loaned” to us. The quality was universally jaw-droppingly low. I had to do code reviews and they would do the craziest junior-developer no-standards stuff that would cause their PRs to get rejected repeatedly, because not only did they make dumb decisions, they didn’t even understand the explanations of why they were dumb decisions. It was infuriating and a horrible waste of time, and the second time around, we tried to say we don’t want that kind of help, but leadership insisted that the free manpower was not optional.

by lvl155 1y ago

osigurdson 1y ago

Those days will probably never be behind us because incentive structures in companies make employees risk averse.

fluidcruft 1y ago

When has Oracle ever added value whatsoever to the tech ecosystem?

tombert 1y ago
I don’t love Oracle, but GraalVM is pretty cool. That and the vanilla JVM keeps getting updates.
ternaryoperator 1y ago
They've done a ton of stuff with Java, including open-sourcing it in its entirety.
homebrewer 1y ago
If it's an honest question and not just the beginning of a hate-fest, let's think... Both Java the language and OpenJDK the main runtime & development kit have had much more money and manpower poured into them under Oracle than they ever had previously. Both continue to advance rapidly after almost dying pre-Oracle acquisition. MySQL 8 (released in 2018) was a massive release that brought many long awaited features (like CTEs) to the database, although MySQL's development have stalled during the past few years. Oracle employs several Linux kernel developers and is one of major contributors (especially to XFS and btrfs): https://lwn.net/Articles/1022414 https://lwn.net/Articles/1022414 Not top 3 or even top 10, but better than most companies out there. That's all I can remember. edit: after thinking about it for a couple more minutes, they're also the main developer of GraalVM — the only high quality FOSS AOT compiler for Java (also mentioned by a sibling comment), and are writing one of the major relatively lightweight modern alternatives to Spring (the other two being Micronaut and Quarkus): https://helidon.io https://helidon.io
- beanjuiceII 1y ago
  people just like hating on successful companies, a HN special.. I ignore most those types of posts on this site because they are without any merit
  - toyg 1y ago
    I think the Oracle hate goes a bit beyond the generic hatred for successful companies (be it Microsoft, FAANG, etc). People actually used to like the products that made these companies explode. Windows 2000 was cool; Facebook was cool; Google was cool. Whenever they stop being pure unadulterated evil for a few minutes, very quickly a lot of people are willing to forgive them and welcome them back into polite society. But as long as most geeks can remember, Oracle has never been cool. At its peak, the company enabled a world of snooty BOFH DBAs, selling unreasonably expensive products to well-oiled middle-managers. And then they started "acqui-squeezing" adjacent products, blackmailing their own customers, and suing everyone in sight. They could cure cancer tomorrow, gifting all the related IPs to the world, and most geeks would still see them as scum trying to whitewash their image - and they would probably be right. There are some great engineers in Oracle, but their management is all that is wrong with capitalism.
    - kragen 1y ago
      From 01979 until about 02000, Oracle's RDBMS software was probably the best in the world, and definitely better than the free-software alternatives like Postgres. (Remember that MariaDB, then named MySQL, didn't become free software until 02000 and didn't support transactions until even later.) For several years after that, it was still the best database for some purposes. And that's true even though the Bastard Database Operators From Hell were present from the very beginning. SQL is kind of shitty, but the relational database model is so great that it makes up for it. And until the rise of entity component systems, SQLite, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB, all the decent implementations were proprietary software. Separately, although SQL's implementation of transactions is even more broken than its implementation of the relational model, transactional concurrency is also great enough to make up for SQL, and, again, all the usable implementations used to be proprietary.
phartenfeller 1y ago
I think you underestimate the impact of their database on the world. They were a huge tech innovator in that part (and actually still are).

Someone1234 1y ago

Sun Microsystems definitely added value, tons in fact. Oracle's contributions are less clear-cut, particularly if you don't count all the acquired "achievements."

gardnr 1y ago
Sun did engineering. Oracle does business. I’d be surprised if Oracle released the trademark without a fight to the end. They have a special way of decimating open source projects.
- beanjuiceII 1y ago
  oracle does engineering just fine, and they are actually still around...so maybe Sun was doing it wrong
  - b00ty4breakfast 1y ago
    only if there is a 1-1 correspondence between engineering acumen and money-making acumen, which I'm sure you already know isn't the case.
  - hamburglar 1y ago
    The quality of engineering varies wildly within Oracle, to the point that entire divisions can be relied on to produce absolute garbage because longevity completely trumps talent. Oracle Cloud has great engineering (which these days is quite hampered by bureaucracy and misplaced frugality, in my opinion), but outside OCI and a few small select orgs, the situation is dire. At a couple points my org had hiring crunches and leadership’s short term solution was to find employees from other orgs that could be “loaned” to us. The quality was universally jaw-droppingly low. I had to do code reviews and they would do the craziest junior-developer no-standards stuff that would cause their PRs to get rejected repeatedly, because not only did they make dumb decisions, they didn’t even understand the explanations of why they were dumb decisions. It was infuriating and a horrible waste of time, and the second time around, we tried to say we don’t want that kind of help, but leadership insisted that the free manpower was not optional.