4 ms·

Oracle going out of business would at least be one thing to celebrate in 2026.

by coldpie 19d ago

infamouscow 19d ago
If Sam and Dario manage to kill Oracle, this whole era of software will have been worth it.
cromka 19d ago
I hope whoever buys their parents, they relicense ZFS
- ghaff 19d ago
  I strongly suspect that broad enthusiasm for copy-on-write filesystems is largely past. Btrfs is out there and is the default for some Fedora editions. While I have no direct connections to that storage world any longer, I'm not convinced that relicensing ZFS would affect the landscape in a major way among the more significant distributions.
  - scheme271 19d ago
    It seems that btrfs is being phased out of fedora. It looks like Fedora will be moving to stratis storage over the next year or two. Btrfs is nice but it's raid5/6 support still seems shaky and there's odd corner cases that apply to all btrfs setups (getting stuck when free space is low is mostly resolved but can still occur).
    - ghaff 19d ago
      I'm not super-plugged into Fedora these days. Red Hat has long been pretty comfortable with a more conventional file system (think it's still XFS out of SGI by default) plus volume management for RHEL. ZFS was a non-starter for licensing reasons and Oracle; btrfs just wasn't there. I suspect things could have played out differently had Oracle relicensed ZFS once upon a time but that ship has likely sailed in a variety of ways.
      - tharkun__ 19d ago
        XFS is a default filesystem in a production system? Really? XFS was dead to me 20 years ago. The only time I ever actually verifiably lost data to a system crash was on XFS. I had actual zero length files with XFS after a crash. Lost actual data. But the file system was in totally happy consistent metadata state. Never ever would I ever consider that filesystem ever again. The ominous "reisserfs" everyone complained about? Never lost a single byte of data to it even when I pulled the plug in the middle of a write operation to test it. No issues with ext4, no experience with btrfs.
        pram 19d ago
        The main problem with ReiserFS is Reiser killed his wife so it is unmaintained.
        ghaff 19d ago
        There is that. I think ReiserSF used to be the default that SUSE used. These days, it seems to be btrfs for root and XFS for everything else.
        tharkun__ 18d ago
        That's why I called it "reisserFS" and not reiserfs. I am well aware of the controversies because of what he did on the non-technical side. I am also of course for a very long time by now not using it any longer. I was merely talking about the experience with XFS "back in the day" and yes I was on reiserfs and then XFS "came up" and I changed my home partition to that, coz I was looking to move off of reisserfs. Power outage. Boom, lost half my home dir. Suddenly lots of totally fine metadata wise files had null length. I did go back to reiserfs until ext4 was stable enough after that. I will never try XFS ever again, sorry. Loosing data is the thing that a file system can't do to me if they want to "retain my business" so to speak. And yes, reiserfs I actually tested and had survive some power outages totally fine too. I believed the XFS hype too much without proper testing. My bad I guess in that sense. We were all young once. But also: Never again XFS ;)
        ghaff 19d ago
    - fpoling 19d ago
      Stratis does not support data integrity checksums. There is dm-integrity hack but it slows down the write speed by halve.
    - ghaff 19d ago
      I no longer have the direct relationships with storage folks at Red Hat that I once did and that stuff may all be over on the IBM side anyway. Stratis (which I wasn't familiar with) does seem to be designed with the intention of bringing a lot of pooling etc. on top of a conventional file system but haven't really looked at or talked to anyone in the storage groups recently. Conventional LVM was pretty old and really designed for a different time.
  - cromka 19d ago
    Is it? I thought the contrary, the immutable distros are possible specifically because of them?. Relicensing it would probably make it into kernel within months and I am absolutely sure adoption would happen quickly. Mind you, ZFS is more important to servers than desktop.
    - ghaff 19d ago
      I expect that there is enough history around ZFS that getting it into the kernel would be a pretty big move.
  - wongarsu 19d ago
    zfs is more mature and has a better feature set. It's also about the best file system for a NAS, since you can detect and repair single bad blocks if you run zfs's version of RAID5/6. btrfs is lighter on memory use and a bit easier to administer (until it eats your data). But if zfs licensing becomes cleared up and it becomes a normal part of the linux kernel that would be a lot more attractive than btrfs to me
  - danudey 19d ago
    As someone who's used btrfs and zfs, btrfs today is still a pale imitation of what zfs was at launch. btrfs feels like people wanted to make a filesystem which had all the 'pretty neat' features of ZFS but without the tightly coupled management and benefits of ZFS (like volume management + RAID + encryption + compression all being managed through one tool). btrfs ended up being basically a consumer version of a few of ZFS's most visible features - transparent compression, subvolumes, and copy-on-write - which then farms out the other most useful features - RAID + volume management + encryption - to the existing tooling. Makes sense for a smaller-scale project, no shade, but it definitely misses the mark if you've spent time on ZFS systems taking advantage of what ZFS has to offer (like recursive snapshots or vdevs).
    - ghaff 19d ago
      I don't know the whole history of btrfs (although its primary maintainer was I think at Oracle at one point) but ZFS was definitely built from a hierarchical storage enterprise mindset. Given different historical circumstances, it could probably have picked up more traction. But not sure what would change today even with an Oracle licensing change.
jollyllama 19d ago
If it happens in 2026, they will likely be bailed out.
petilon 19d ago
Larry Ellison's son had to scale down his media and TV empire ambitions when Oracle stock crashed. That's one thing to celebrate, because we don't want CNN to be controlled by the Ellisons.
- jgalt212 19d ago
  That's true, but then again, CNN is a mere husk of its former self. Something needs to change, but maybe it's too late for profit-driven news media.
  - abeppu 19d ago
    But isn't not-for-profit news media also struggling?
    - saturn8601 19d ago
      From what I can see, online media has finally taken over. The horrendous coverage from the 2024 election may have finally been the last straw for many people. People seem to be focusing more on individual reporters, subscribing directly to good journalists who have gone out on their own. We are also seeing a thing that pleases me ver much: Reporters focusing on the subjects they are experts in and not doing a jack of all trades master of none. Its made me accept that I wont get top tier news in every subject so I have to pick what really matters to me(Tech, Food, entertainment, geopolitics of specific regions of the world etc.). On the low end though its more bleak. TikTok slop, Youtuber "commentators" etc.
      - dylan604 19d ago
        > From what I can see, online media has finally taken over. Makes me think of Neil Gaiman's American Gods
  - xp84 19d ago
    It’s been more than a decade when CNN was a respected institution. I agree it’s too late for the news media in general. Their incentives are unfortunately all lined up just like social media: pure ragebait is the fully optimized product. The only thing changing from now on is fine tweaks to get it slightly more… ragey.
ags16 19d ago
[flagged]
- deleted 19d ago
  [deleted]
macintux 19d ago
Not for the employees, obvs. I'm not going to celebrate misery, especially if that misery makes an already-tough job market that much worse.
stuaxo 19d ago
"Dear Santa..."
this_user 19d ago
They are still making billions from highly sticky enterprise customers, which is more than enough to survive. Otherwise, Microsoft would have gone out of business years ago.
- petilon 19d ago
  > They are still making billions from highly sticky enterprise customers That's true. This lets Oracle coast for a while. But if they coast for too long SAP will overtake them.
- kstrauser 19d ago
  Sure, but then they're out of the "growth" stock category they so badly wanted to be in, with its higher valuation multipliers, then in the stodgy "keep the lights on" niche. If a company makes $10B this year, and you had a way of knowing it was going to make $10B every year from now on, there's not much incentive to invest in it. Note that this doesn't make for a bad company! You can run a $0-profit company indefinitely and give employees nice jobs for providing nice services to your customers. There's nothing wrong with that. It's great! But you don't get the same multiples for that arrangment as you do for a company that's growing quickly. Lower multiples = stock drops = One Medium Wealthy Asshole Called Larry Ellison, and that's something I simply do not think he could tolerate.
- rsynnott 19d ago
  Microsoft has _nothing_ like the debt load that Oracle does.
SwellJoe 19d ago
Putting a big X on the Ellison photo in the rogue's gallery of tech elites will be satisfying. In an industry chock full of despicable men, Ellison is a real standout.
Byvrsakjo10 19d ago
Why do we loathe Oracle again? And what do they do exactly for Larry Ellison share in the company to be worth 100bn?
- coldpie 19d ago
  > Why do we loathe Oracle again? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_... https://www.patentleaderboard.com/company/oracle https://www.patentleaderboard.com/company/oracle
immibis2 19d ago
I wonder which shitty company will become the new Oracle. Oracle wasn't the first Oracle.
- kstrauser 19d ago
  Who was the first Oracle? Did IBM transition into it before Oracle did?
  - cyberax 19d ago
    IBM has always been better than Oracle. It makes giant expensive software and hardware that require arcane knowledge to keep them running. But they also run reliably once you insert enough money. Oracle's stuff JustDoesn'tWork(tm) once you move past its core database offering. And even that (see: RAC) is sometimes problematic.
    - petre 19d ago
      IBM buying Oracle for pennies on a dollar would be great outcome.
- wpm 19d ago
  Broadcom would buy up all of Oracle's useful IP and patents and continue the grift.
jmspring 19d ago
Happen to agree. But to the comment above, yes, it's rack and stack but I suspect Oracle's legion of lawyers can put some sort of spin on this.
sleight42 19d ago
I'd distill that to: Larry Ellison going bankrupt would be the universe rendering a rare justice.

Oracle going out of business would at least be one thing to celebrate in 2026.

by coldpie 19d ago

Oracle going out of business would at least be one thing to celebrate in 2026.

infamouscow 19d ago

If Sam and Dario manage to kill Oracle, this whole era of software will have been worth it.

cromka 19d ago

I hope whoever buys their parents, they relicense ZFS

ghaff 19d ago
I strongly suspect that broad enthusiasm for copy-on-write filesystems is largely past. Btrfs is out there and is the default for some Fedora editions. While I have no direct connections to that storage world any longer, I'm not convinced that relicensing ZFS would affect the landscape in a major way among the more significant distributions.
- scheme271 19d ago
  It seems that btrfs is being phased out of fedora. It looks like Fedora will be moving to stratis storage over the next year or two. Btrfs is nice but it's raid5/6 support still seems shaky and there's odd corner cases that apply to all btrfs setups (getting stuck when free space is low is mostly resolved but can still occur).
  - ghaff 19d ago
    I'm not super-plugged into Fedora these days. Red Hat has long been pretty comfortable with a more conventional file system (think it's still XFS out of SGI by default) plus volume management for RHEL. ZFS was a non-starter for licensing reasons and Oracle; btrfs just wasn't there. I suspect things could have played out differently had Oracle relicensed ZFS once upon a time but that ship has likely sailed in a variety of ways.
    - tharkun__ 19d ago
      XFS is a default filesystem in a production system? Really? XFS was dead to me 20 years ago. The only time I ever actually verifiably lost data to a system crash was on XFS. I had actual zero length files with XFS after a crash. Lost actual data. But the file system was in totally happy consistent metadata state. Never ever would I ever consider that filesystem ever again. The ominous "reisserfs" everyone complained about? Never lost a single byte of data to it even when I pulled the plug in the middle of a write operation to test it. No issues with ext4, no experience with btrfs.
      - pram 19d ago
        The main problem with ReiserFS is Reiser killed his wife so it is unmaintained.
        ghaff 19d ago
        There is that. I think ReiserSF used to be the default that SUSE used. These days, it seems to be btrfs for root and XFS for everything else.
        tharkun__ 18d ago
        That's why I called it "reisserFS" and not reiserfs. I am well aware of the controversies because of what he did on the non-technical side. I am also of course for a very long time by now not using it any longer. I was merely talking about the experience with XFS "back in the day" and yes I was on reiserfs and then XFS "came up" and I changed my home partition to that, coz I was looking to move off of reisserfs. Power outage. Boom, lost half my home dir. Suddenly lots of totally fine metadata wise files had null length. I did go back to reiserfs until ext4 was stable enough after that. I will never try XFS ever again, sorry. Loosing data is the thing that a file system can't do to me if they want to "retain my business" so to speak. And yes, reiserfs I actually tested and had survive some power outages totally fine too. I believed the XFS hype too much without proper testing. My bad I guess in that sense. We were all young once. But also: Never again XFS ;)
      - ghaff 19d ago
  - fpoling 19d ago
    Stratis does not support data integrity checksums. There is dm-integrity hack but it slows down the write speed by halve.
  - ghaff 19d ago
    I no longer have the direct relationships with storage folks at Red Hat that I once did and that stuff may all be over on the IBM side anyway. Stratis (which I wasn't familiar with) does seem to be designed with the intention of bringing a lot of pooling etc. on top of a conventional file system but haven't really looked at or talked to anyone in the storage groups recently. Conventional LVM was pretty old and really designed for a different time.
- cromka 19d ago
  Is it? I thought the contrary, the immutable distros are possible specifically because of them?. Relicensing it would probably make it into kernel within months and I am absolutely sure adoption would happen quickly. Mind you, ZFS is more important to servers than desktop.
  - ghaff 19d ago
    I expect that there is enough history around ZFS that getting it into the kernel would be a pretty big move.
- wongarsu 19d ago
  zfs is more mature and has a better feature set. It's also about the best file system for a NAS, since you can detect and repair single bad blocks if you run zfs's version of RAID5/6. btrfs is lighter on memory use and a bit easier to administer (until it eats your data). But if zfs licensing becomes cleared up and it becomes a normal part of the linux kernel that would be a lot more attractive than btrfs to me
- danudey 19d ago
  As someone who's used btrfs and zfs, btrfs today is still a pale imitation of what zfs was at launch. btrfs feels like people wanted to make a filesystem which had all the 'pretty neat' features of ZFS but without the tightly coupled management and benefits of ZFS (like volume management + RAID + encryption + compression all being managed through one tool). btrfs ended up being basically a consumer version of a few of ZFS's most visible features - transparent compression, subvolumes, and copy-on-write - which then farms out the other most useful features - RAID + volume management + encryption - to the existing tooling. Makes sense for a smaller-scale project, no shade, but it definitely misses the mark if you've spent time on ZFS systems taking advantage of what ZFS has to offer (like recursive snapshots or vdevs).
  - ghaff 19d ago
    I don't know the whole history of btrfs (although its primary maintainer was I think at Oracle at one point) but ZFS was definitely built from a hierarchical storage enterprise mindset. Given different historical circumstances, it could probably have picked up more traction. But not sure what would change today even with an Oracle licensing change.

jollyllama 19d ago

If it happens in 2026, they will likely be bailed out.

petilon 19d ago

Larry Ellison's son had to scale down his media and TV empire ambitions when Oracle stock crashed. That's one thing to celebrate, because we don't want CNN to be controlled by the Ellisons.

jgalt212 19d ago
That's true, but then again, CNN is a mere husk of its former self. Something needs to change, but maybe it's too late for profit-driven news media.
- abeppu 19d ago
  But isn't not-for-profit news media also struggling?
  - saturn8601 19d ago
    From what I can see, online media has finally taken over. The horrendous coverage from the 2024 election may have finally been the last straw for many people. People seem to be focusing more on individual reporters, subscribing directly to good journalists who have gone out on their own. We are also seeing a thing that pleases me ver much: Reporters focusing on the subjects they are experts in and not doing a jack of all trades master of none. Its made me accept that I wont get top tier news in every subject so I have to pick what really matters to me(Tech, Food, entertainment, geopolitics of specific regions of the world etc.). On the low end though its more bleak. TikTok slop, Youtuber "commentators" etc.
    - dylan604 19d ago
      > From what I can see, online media has finally taken over. Makes me think of Neil Gaiman's American Gods
- xp84 19d ago
  It’s been more than a decade when CNN was a respected institution. I agree it’s too late for the news media in general. Their incentives are unfortunately all lined up just like social media: pure ragebait is the fully optimized product. The only thing changing from now on is fine tweaks to get it slightly more… ragey.

ags16 19d ago

[flagged]

deleted 19d ago
[deleted]

macintux 19d ago

Not for the employees, obvs. I'm not going to celebrate misery, especially if that misery makes an already-tough job market that much worse.

stuaxo 19d ago

"Dear Santa..."

this_user 19d ago

They are still making billions from highly sticky enterprise customers, which is more than enough to survive. Otherwise, Microsoft would have gone out of business years ago.

petilon 19d ago
> They are still making billions from highly sticky enterprise customers That's true. This lets Oracle coast for a while. But if they coast for too long SAP will overtake them.
kstrauser 19d ago
Sure, but then they're out of the "growth" stock category they so badly wanted to be in, with its higher valuation multipliers, then in the stodgy "keep the lights on" niche. If a company makes $10B this year, and you had a way of knowing it was going to make $10B every year from now on, there's not much incentive to invest in it. Note that this doesn't make for a bad company! You can run a $0-profit company indefinitely and give employees nice jobs for providing nice services to your customers. There's nothing wrong with that. It's great! But you don't get the same multiples for that arrangment as you do for a company that's growing quickly. Lower multiples = stock drops = One Medium Wealthy Asshole Called Larry Ellison, and that's something I simply do not think he could tolerate.
rsynnott 19d ago
Microsoft has _nothing_ like the debt load that Oracle does.

SwellJoe 19d ago

Putting a big X on the Ellison photo in the rogue's gallery of tech elites will be satisfying. In an industry chock full of despicable men, Ellison is a real standout.

Byvrsakjo10 19d ago

Why do we loathe Oracle again? And what do they do exactly for Larry Ellison share in the company to be worth 100bn?

coldpie 19d ago
> Why do we loathe Oracle again? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_... https://www.patentleaderboard.com/company/oracle https://www.patentleaderboard.com/company/oracle

immibis2 19d ago

I wonder which shitty company will become the new Oracle. Oracle wasn't the first Oracle.

kstrauser 19d ago
Who was the first Oracle? Did IBM transition into it before Oracle did?
- cyberax 19d ago
  IBM has always been better than Oracle. It makes giant expensive software and hardware that require arcane knowledge to keep them running. But they also run reliably once you insert enough money. Oracle's stuff JustDoesn'tWork(tm) once you move past its core database offering. And even that (see: RAC) is sometimes problematic.
  - petre 19d ago
    IBM buying Oracle for pennies on a dollar would be great outcome.
wpm 19d ago
Broadcom would buy up all of Oracle's useful IP and patents and continue the grift.

jmspring 19d ago

Happen to agree. But to the comment above, yes, it's rack and stack but I suspect Oracle's legion of lawyers can put some sort of spin on this.

sleight42 19d ago

I'd distill that to: Larry Ellison going bankrupt would be the universe rendering a rare justice.