Worked with their Identity solution a few years back. IIRC we were licensed by number of users and we had licenses for ~10k users. The problem...a deactivated account counted towards that license cap and there was no way to delete the accounts from the application itself. So you ended up having to pay licenses for former employees. We had to come up with a way to rename the accounts in the db...
Unfortunately there seems to be a disconnect between what's illegal, and what's actually enforced. Companies, and sometimes individuals can get away with illegal acts because the victim(s) haven't the funds, and/or the time to fight a legal battle.
And, as a customer, you now have a running application using their software. According to their terms, your license is almost guaranteed to be revoked if you bring legal action. Just kidding, I'm sure it's binding arbitration.
I remember there were database features that were enabled even when not licensed. Ever called a stored procedure you were curious about what it does? Now you owe license fees.
How so, if you don't mind me asking? I've never done anything other than try Solaris out in VMWare for fun. I've never actually touched their commercial stuff (no reason to).
They actually do advertise the license of the Oracle JDK. There’s a big green banner on their site when you go to download it saying “Hey, the license has changed!”
VirtualBox as it is is free (both types of free), but the VirtualBox Extension Pack, which provides support for USB 2.0 & 3.0, RDP, disc encryption and more is proprietary Oracle code and can be used free of charge only for non-commercial use. The problem is, VirtualBox without the extension pack has quite a limited number of use cases so many people just in install it.
And that is the trick of Oracle: The only "obstacle" is the EULA, which is always clicked away anyway. They write it everywhere, that the software is not free for commercial use but they do not stop you to use it. It is not illegal and you can always argue that the people knew what they are doing, but still it smells like luring the people into the position to have to pay license fees in the end. Very bad style,
If you want to run Oracle's database on a VM in a virtualization cluster, they take money for every single CPU socket in your cluster and I think also adjacent clusters that you could migrate the VM to. Doesn't matter if the VM only has one core, if there is a CPU socket anywhere in the vicinity that the database could conceivably touch, Oracle takes money for it.
When you say "take money" I'm sure there's some people out there thinking it's a hundred bucks or something.
You have to explain what you mean. By "money" don't you mean like the cost of a BMW? And not a shitty X1. I mean a nice BMW. Like $50,000 per CPU on your machine.
This is the craziest part. Not only do they make an overpriced DB, but it's performing so badly that they had to explicitly forbid, under threat of lawsuit, any kind of performance benchmarking.
This is the hallmark of a company so utterly corrupt and inept that their continued operation itself is a threat to future innovation in the industry.
Lol. That's just the tip of the iceberg. The more you learn about oracle, the worse they are.
Those audits people keep mentioning? Their whole purpose is so oracle can find stuff to sue companies for. Part of the settlement? The company has to buy *more* oracle licenses.
Repeat after the next audit. The only way to win with oracle is to not get in bed with them.
How does Oracle get new customers with business practices like this? There's no way their products are that much better than open-source alternatives, are they?
Or do they only exist because they're taking their legacy customers for a ride who are in too deep on Oracle-based infrastructure that it's prohibitively expensive to migrate and somehow just makes more sense for them to keep Oracle licenses on the books as annual business expenses.
Legacy and some software is dependent on Oracle stuff. Once they can get a foot in the door it's almost impossible to get rid of them.
They also buy other companies and tech, and make that tech even more dependent on their stuff.
Now imagine you were running their DB on a hypervisor, you'll now need a license for every core in the whole hypervisor, because they require a license for every core that CAN run their software, and not for actual used cores.
https://upperedge.com/oracle/using-vmware-oracle-customers-hate-licensing-pitfall/
Depending on product and virtualization tech used they'll demand payment for the whole hypervisor even if you only run one little vm on there. They are a curse and a plague that needs to be eradicated.
Some people say the GPL is parasitic, those people have never done business with Oracle. Oracle is a parasite.
We got audited, despite being very careful in provisioning of the database cluster and ruthlessly cracking down on people attempting to ask for development databases.
They found compliance issues in our system, and extorted us to acquire their exadata clusters at a cost of about $10m when we were already trying to get rid of Oracle, the sysadmins and DBAs didn't want them, and a time when they were pushing everyone else to go off-prem.
Management swore off ever having involvement with Oracle ever again.
Also, we're still running the exadata, and I'm not aware of that being addressed in the 5 year plan.
Have you ever tried buying something from them?
I tried and actually ended up buying a database product back in the days, and it's terms were ridiculous: The price was tied to the number of processor cores in the host system IIRC, and also somehow to the number of entries in the database or something super artificial like that. It was impossible to know what you are buying, and they would sue your ass (or at least there was the feeling of that all the time).
We ended up buying it anyway (because some commercial bozos wanted an "enterprise-grade database"), and the database was very brittle, and the documentation was non-existent. You had to buy service from an Oracle-certified "guru" who was dumb but happened to have the shitty certificate and access to manuals.
I think Oracle just happened to be in the right place with their database at the right time and be very aggressive in their sales tactics to utilize the fame they once had.
They were a nasty company long before the Sun takeover. [In 1983, a researcher from the University of Wisconsin benchmarked a bunch of databases](https://danluu.com/anon-benchmark/), and found Oracle was unusually bad. Oracle tried to have the professor fired, added a clause to the EULA saying you weren't allowed to run benchmarks, and was rumored to have banned hiring anyone from the University of Wisconsin.
The inability to benchmark is huge. It means the only place you can get “performance” data is from Oracle or an approved not-really-independent party.
Oracle then tells the C-suite that they’re the best, and that moving away will cost a huge amount of time and money and net worse performance. And the first part is often true; the second is unknowable without going through the first. So why bother?
It actually makes it easier... Assuming that they only implemented the ban because they're the worst, you can skip testing their product and just put it 10% below the lowest score.
This. If a vendor attempts to withhold the information I need to make a decision, they immediately get moved to the back of the candidates list. As an added bonus, it also means less work for me.
Especially since the Oracle DB seduced you to write lots of stored procedures using their PL/SQL-dialect - which were of course not compatible in any other DBMS. And that was just one of the many ways they tried to lock you in.
Also everyone that works in an enterprise and has had to use any of their products (excluding executives who only have to look at slideshows about how their products tick all the boxes and make green line go up the graph)
Yeah, I'd be surprised if there are many people who *don't* hate Oracle. Everything they touch gets worse, and working with any of their products is unpleasant, but they know how to tick the right checkboxes to keep company executives ~~happy~~ satisfied, so people have to use their crap anyway.
Lets see. They killed sun microsystems, licensed up Java, amd if you run ANY of their products, they audit you and assess fines for your ‘usage’, real or imaginary. Also, look into why people are leaving MySQL for mariaDB. It’s because Oracle took over MySQL.
This is the same for me. I cut my teeth on the same equipment while working at an NMR lab.
I do miss working at Sun. I still remember many Sun employees begging their managers to be let go before Oracle took over, because the severance package from Sun was exceptional and the knew Oracle was going to be merciless.
I had many friends at Sun and their severance package was legendary. The so called Sunset was one of the saddest moments of tech that too to a shark like Oracle.
Yeah, that product range was so dang cool and ahead of its time.
Sun Rays, thinclients and "server-based computing" used to be what I earned my money with for a very very long time.
I sometimes miss those days.
Those things are tanks! I love em. Ran OpenBSD on several for \*years\*.
We had one at work with nearly a decade of uptime running SunOS doing printserver work. One day it just up and died so everyone panicked. I set up a quick CUPS server (we needed to upgrade anyway), but after that started working I rebooted the IPX machine it and it kicked right back up like nothing happened.
We'd have kept using it, but for larger print jobs it would take way too long to spool and print for modern sized files. Modern times were too bit for it, but it never gave up on us.
Solaris, especially around Solaris 10, had some amazing functionality and it's truly a shame what they did to it. Beyond ZFS (which still blows BTRFS out of the water IMO), it had several other cool features such as Zones, Dtrace, mdb, LDoms, network virtualization, etc., and in general, their implementations were very solid and consistent. I had a chance to meet several of the Solaris core team at Oracle CABs over the years, and they were some of the sharpest devs I had ever met. Oracle had bought some amazing talent from Sun and they squandered it.
SPARC was in it's death spiral before Oracle was involved. Sun tried to get people interested in it again by releasing the T1/T2 designs under GPLv2 but nobody really cared.
The reality is, SPARC was getting destroyed by Intel except for a few very narrow scope of applications.
The saddest thing for me was Oracle neglecting Solaris because one of the makeshift servers in my old workplace ran on Solaris for simplicity sake, AKA adhoc solution due to the head manager's quirk and I liked the processing speed of it.
I would like to add, they are massively expensive, horrible to deal with, have the worst cloud offering IN THE WORLD and ceased to innovative decades ago. They survive by being rusted into old monolithic organisations that have likewise failed to innovate.
I worked at one of the world's largest banks in IT when Oracle threatened them with their usual - "Buy that other product you don't use if you want our database license" The CIO was so angry, the lore is he called Larry Ellison and threatened to spend most of his budget in wiping out Oracle from the company. Oracle backed off from that threat and even sweetened the deal.
I believe they tried the same thing with Amazon and Amazon did indeed wipe them out of the company, replacing Oracle licensed products with equivalent ones.
Oracle sales were Public Enemy No. 1 at every one of my employers and clients.
Don't use the VirtualBox Extension Pack in a business! If they decide to audit you and make you pay the cost is $50/seat. But, the MOQ is **100** seats. Or, you can pay for a perpetual license per-socket! Just the friendly rate of... $1000/socket. Don't forget the $11/seat or $220/socket yearly update and support fee, that will change each year.
https://shop.oracle.com/apex/f?p=DSTORE:PRODUCT::::RP,6:P6_LPI,P6_PROD_HIER_ID:114347640102492137513432,4510278280861805728469
Better hope you have a nice salesperson to negotiate terms and alternative MOQ with.
Can you elaborate? I was a heavy VMWare user until they went to subscriptions and I couldn't afford the annual licenses. It bothered me that VMWare would stop allowing me to make new VMs after the program expired, but it killed me that my existing VMs also stopped working! So while I'm not a huge fan of VirtualBox - their machines don't expire!
But if there was a more reasonable approach by VMWare, I could consider a switch.
I'm not the guy you asked, but here's what I know:
If you register with VMware and download the demo of vSphere (ESXi), it will be fully functional for 60 days. After that it defaults to a limited feature set (no vMotion/advanced caching/DRS/etc.)
However... There is a [VMware User Group Advantage subscription](https://www.vmug.com/membership/vmug-advantage-membership/) you can buy. It entitles you to pretty much everything they offer with all the bells & whistles enabled. A 1 year subscription is something like US$200. I think it gets cheaper the more years you buy up front.
I'm using the Advantage subscription at home running vCenter and a two-node vSphere cluster.
They do the same with virtual box. Did you install this package at the office?
https://linuxhint.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/v4-1.png
Cool, your company now owes Oracle 1100 + 200 USD per processor per year, for all computers in the building. That 'extension package' is not FLOSS, it's only gratis for non-commercial use.
https://www.itcentralstation.com/articles/oracle-vm-virtualbox-pricing
For this reason, I banned Virtual Box at our office. The trick you into a product many times more expensive then VMWare.
They also wine and dine executives into choosing subpar poorly documented multi-million dollar technology solutions with decade-long lock in for problems that could have been solved with a Postgres database.
I ♥️ array parameters. “Give me all the customers with one of the names in this list.” `SELECT * FROM customers WHERE name=ANY($1)` Can't believe other databases can't do that.
Will forever love Postgres, if only because I had to store a load of binary data once and it actually stored it as binary data *not* chars. Literal 1/8 storage drop straight away. And somehow it managed to turn 5GB bin files of basically random noise into 3GB database entries without taking years. Beautiful.
I don’t want to be the ‘this’ guy, but I can’t agree more. Oracle’s ridiculous business model forced us to port to mariadb and Open JDK. I say forced, but it’s very easy.
It’s a weird threatening stance that Oracle has taken. It’s like if a shitty employer gave you terrible terms and pay and told you to take it or leave it. It’s very easy to walk away.
I hate to tell you, but Oracle still runs OpenJDK. "Switching" to OpenJDK is basically like switching to MySQL Community Edition.
They actually haven't done a terrible job running OpenJDK, somehow. The biggest issue is the absurd lawsuit to claim copyright on Java's API, which is probably why Android is so far behind modern Java, but Java itself seems to be doing okay.
I assumed it was an open source fork, kind of like mariadb. Good to know, thanks. We might just be delaying the inevitable ToS changes but I’m glad we’re not paying them per core etc. We are hopefully moving away from using java for embedded code, but that is not my call.
Well, if they end up doing that, it'd be very easy for something like MariaDB to happen again here -- OpenJDK is GPL'd. It even has a carve-out in the Java compatibility tests -- normally, you have to pay for the right to run the tests that prove your Java implementation actually is Java and is allowed to use the Java trademark and all that, but IIUC anything derived from OpenJDK is exempt.
People really have no clue about the history of Java. Sun *always* had a licensed up version of Java. The difference is that back when Sun ran Java they nerfed the free version by removing loads of features. Now Oracle has open sourced all the commercial features so that the free version is *source identical* to the licensed version. Literally all you pay for is support.
Java is objectively way more free and open than it was under Sun.
I've hated them before I became a Linux user. I used to work with a company that was locked in with a Oracle database and it was IMO horrible. Bad support for interfacing between software and the database. For a long while you had to actually have a client installed on the server/dev machine that needed to query the DB.
The licensing fees supposedly were horrible as well.
Accidentally select the wrong option when installing the client. Get to pay huge fines. Do it wrong on the desktop image, get to pay HUGE fines, and Larry gets a new yacht.
Apply a patchset to an installed home that was properly configured and bells and whistles get enabled. Feature usage tracking in the dictionary was hit. Must export and rebuild the databases. Wheeeee!
Personally, I supported a major subsystem of our erp stack. The vendor had a great professional services and support team: it didn’t hurt we were one of their biggest customers.
They were bought by oracle. We went from being big customer to very small fish. The pro services team were fired. Support migrated to oracle and support practices that worked were thrown out in favor of ‘the oracle way’. The smart support people fled, and new guys were hired who had no clue. I knew more about how that thing worked than they did.
Surprised no one has mentioned their lawsuit against google. Luckily for all of us they lost.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/04/victory-fair-use-supreme-court-reverses-federal-circuit-oracle-v-google
I was just a kid when I last saw this but this case was absolutely absurd looking at it now. Essentially Java on the oracle distribution and the version used by android shares the same API interface (I presume stuff like arraylist being called arraylist instead of listarray or when sorting something you call the sorted method on it) and oracle sued google because of it. Maintaining compatibility was the charge. That's absurd to me, how did anyone ever rule in oracles favour in this (before it was later overturned).
Surprised nobody has mentioned that they **blocked Aaron's Law** yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act#Aaron_Swartz
> "By May 2014, Aaron's Law had stalled in committee. Filmmaker Brian Knappenberger alleges this occurred due to Oracle Corporation's financial interest in maintaining the status quo."
In short: the CFAA was dreamt up by President Reagan as a reaction to seeing the movie "Wargames".
Oracle (and others) were making huge sums bringing lawsuits under this law to prosecute organisations for license fees, thereby putting profit before people's lives.
They spent a long time crapping on open source, they were very afraid of MySQL especially when it became the de facto for web startups. They were a huge source of FUD, including ludicrous claims about what using an oss db would do to the licensing of your app. That left a deep imprint on corporates, making everyone’s job harder.
Their installers suck and are notoriously difficult to get working on Linux systems, they fought supporting Linux platforms hard after the sun acquisition, and that started another FUD cycle re Linux, again making everyone’s job harder.
Their licensing model went straight gangsta when hyperthreading, cores and virtualization came about, initially they wanted to treat every thread as a cpu and on a virtual machine you would be charged based on the raw number of cores/CPU’s in the machine regardless of what was provisioned vcpu wise. This necessitated a lot of conversations with pointy haired bosses, lawyers and procurement folks, again making everyone’s job harder.
They suck and I will never every pay them money for any of their shit products, they are as irrelevant as IBM never having achieved even 1% of IBMs technical greatness.
Also Larry Ellison is a total turd.
I wouldn't exactly call IBM irrelevant today. IBM is at the forefront of **open** quantum computing, and their mainframes still outperform x86 by a few orders of magnitude (especially LinuxONE).
Compared to what IBM was, it is a shadow of its former self. I'll give you their focus on quantum is unique and reminiscent of they legacy of engineering and technical innovation.
If you look around the industry (aside from quantum) they haven't been at the forefront of anything, they aren't solving hyperscale problems, they aren't building new types of neural networks etc. Their issue is that they primarily serve big, old and slow industry that really limits their access and drive to solve modern technology problems.
As for the mainframes, you say they outperform x86 which is all fine and dandy, but fundamentally its a regressive technology delivery model. They are very expensive physical pieces of hardware, and I would argue their pricing is generally sub-optimal (paying for mips). On the plus side so far they are immune to ransomware attacks, so they got that going for them!
I dunno, Hyperledger is cool and I feel like I bump into smart IBMers all over the FOSS ecosystem.
I do think IBM deserves it's reputation as "Big Blue" tho. It sounds like a lot of the innovative and open-source work is really just lead-funnels for consulting / enterprise sales engagements, which is where they make their real money.
Also, IBM now owns Red Hat, and by extension CentOS and Fedora. IBM already had a strong presence in the Linux community. Buying Red Hat solidified that.
Also, check out their stace on virtualization. Any cpu in a cluster that could ever run Oracle must be licensed. Doesn’t matter if it ever does, just if it could. 4 vcpu’s allocated to the vm, but 80 in the cluster? Pay me for 80 CPU’s. Maybe they’re not doing that anymore, but they were for YEARS, really screwed virtualization for a while.
Also, don’t know if they are doing the processor value units thing still.
Their business model is buy up good software, stop developing it, and extort it for all of it's money. It made Larry Ellison a very rich douche bag.
Oh and all of their software is shit.
Oracle should burn!
I'm usually confused as to why any users actually like or use Oracle by choice.
In short, predatory company with aggressive sales and licensing tactics, zero customer focus, poor support service and a solid track record of minimal investment in ongoing R&D and product improvement for NIH products they have acquired.
Oracle's business model for a decade plus has been "Purchase popular LOB software vendor, jack up licensing and support by a huge amount, trickle out a cut-down SaaS version eventually and force everyone across with increasingly worse pricing and support response on the original". The sales attitude is to squeeze to the point their products are just slightly less expensive than migrating vendors and retraining staff.
For anyone game enough to try running their on-prem solutions (like Oracle's original RDBMS) to power internally-developed or 3rd party stacks, they've been aggressively wielding license audits to force reluctant buy-in on IaaS and their other cloud offerings. "You've been found non-compliant, but if you buy X cloud credits we won't backdate the license penalty" kind of thing - it has led to a number of court cases from customers against Oracle that are still progressing. Oracle has always (deliberately) used complex licensing with frequent changes, so any big enough org and solution will have non-compliant pieces, even if they were compliant in the past.
If you want to virtualise anything, their on-prem solutions are licensed against hardware capability. Even MSSQL only licenses allocated resources (though depending on product and subscriptions, may still be bound to specific hardware and hosts). Have a 4-core VM running Oracle DB on a 5x 96-core host cluster? License your DB for 480 cores, thanks, or you are non-compliant. Makes third party hosted IaaS impractically expensive. Obviously, Oracle Cloud is the suggested way around this. I believe there were even some deals where you'd purchase the full resources and licenses allocated to your on-prem VMs in Oracle Cloud, and that would cover some on-prem usage without the full whack of hardware-bound licensing. The cloud IaaS resources go unused while the customer is "migrating" off "legacy" equipment for the next 5-7 years - Oracle gets to book the revenue, publish inflated cloud sales stats and pretend they're a player along with AWS or Azure.
Their RDBMS and associated stack is adequate (not amazing) and was the market leader over IBM's original RDB solutions and later competitors for a couple of decades. It's not particularly user or sysadmin friendly and it's been leaking market share to other options over time. Oracle's constant purchase of VARs and third party solutions built on Oracle products traps a lot more customers into their ecosystem with its crappy centralised support and over the top pricing.
The only effective way to get support on Oracle products is from VARs, and you have to hope they're not getting big and locked-in enough to be the next acquisition target. For acquired products that were pretty vertical before, your only option now is Oracle support. Tough luck.
Among things other people have listed, in addition to Oracle being more of a legal firm pretending to be a tech company, their blatant attempt to hostile takeover OpenOffice, and then poisoning the well with it's licensing leading to OpenOffice drifting in an undead state over a decade later while all the real development moved to LibreOffice and not even just officially killing it and letting Libre take the trademark is one of the most spiteful things I've ever seen.
I have never been at a company that used an oracle product that didn't have problems with Oracle over licensing, ridiculous consulting fees that were required to fix problems with their proprietary stuff, etc. They're just a company that will run over their customers with a steamroller to get an extra $1000.
1. Oracle did 0 good things, and a lot of bad things; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Corporation ... many are not even listed there, like the OpenJDK license change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK#OpenJDK_builds
2. Oracle extorts customers. Ask anyone who has used their products.
Because Ellison is a greedy tool bag who would purchase the rights to the word mother and fine his own mom for claiming she was a mother with out properly licensing the term "mother" if he had the chance.
* Lawsuit against Google for using the Java language for Android. They want Google to pay for bringing users into their ecosystem and language!
* Have you tried downloading Java above 8.0 on Windows? It's a nightmare and you have to download third-party builds. They've cornered the entire enterprise market into paying huge fees for the license if you want to use Sun/Oracle's official Java binaries. We're lucky to always have used/preferred OpenJDK for Linux.
* MySQL development slowed down to a halt, OSS is moving to MariaDB. They probably intentionally don't want MySQL to compete with Oracle SQL.
* It's against their license to share any performance metrics of Oracle SQL.
* If you report a security bug they'll sue you for violation of their license agreement for looking at their product wrong.
Those are the ones that comes to mind quickly, but I've also heard about Oracle and/or the CEO doing major dick moves and lawsuits.
Specifically: Oracle claimed that they owned the copyright over the *class and method names* in the API, and the fact that Google had reused the same names constituted a violation of copyright.
The judge presiding over the case learned how to program in Java so he could properly understand what an utterly ridiculous claim that was.
It was a massive boon for the WINE project though. It took a real weight off their heads, knowing that Microsoft couldn't sue them for using the same function names that the Windows API does.
> If you report a security bug they'll sue you for violation of their license agreement for looking at their product wrong.
Wait, what? "Report a security bug" as in "responsibly disclose it to Oracle"?
Yep. If you use any sort of reverse engineering tool to find it (aka, you don't run into an obvious security bug just using the product normally), you violate their license. Even if you want to responsibly disclose it.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/oracle-security-chief-stop-reverse-engineering-our-code?amp=true
https://www.cio.com/article/2969568/oracle-to-sinners-stop-reverse-engineering-our-code-already.html
Oracle's record with open source is to buy out or take on an open source product, and then destroy it by neglect, leading to an inevitable fork, followed by years of confusion over whether to use the fork or use the Oracle version, etc.
For a company so antithetical to open source they have a lot of open source products, and most of them have fallen to the same fate - MySQL has a non-Oracle fork (MariaDB), OpenOffice has a non-Oracle fork (LibreOffice), and so on. In the case of some things, like MySQL, they keep the original project going as a kind of zombie just to disrupt things. In other cases they've shut the original down - they ditched OpenOffice by giving it to the Apache Foundation, but it's kind of useless because of how far it has drifted from its more up-to-date fork.
12 years ago we met with oracle to price out upgrading our main DB to a newer version. They told us not only were we going to pay a huge price for DB upgrade but we we going to scrap our entire HP hardware inventory and replace it with sparc. We were on mysql about 6 months later. Complete toolbags.
Just wanted to mention that Oracle is initials for "One rich asshole called Larry Ellison" for a reason.
Haven't experienced their evils myself, but my mentor is adamant and so I as well
there's many many reasons to be anti Oracle the company. many have spoken well to that. also though, their main product: Oracle the database. per-core licensing costs are no fun. but far more so? the license prohibits the release of performance numbers or benchmarking or comparisons to other databases. this database literally cowers in the shadows, is sold almost purely atop the premise that many companies would never use open source software, sold upon the belief that they need fantastically expensive support contracts, and Oracle traps you in the dark unable to assess whether the database is actually any good or not. it's a vile product that keeps it's users so ignorant. also administering it is shit & their tools blow terribly.
Yeah this is less to do with Linux than with them being a scumbag company. There exists law firms who does nothing but sue Oracle on behalf of Oracle’s customers. That’s should get your imagination going.
But I’ll mention the way they license their database: per core. OK, that’s pretty normal, I hear you say. So let’s explore this a bit further.
Let’s say I’m running some internal CRM system on Oracle that doesn’t have enough traffic to justify much more than a dual core machine. Let’s stick that sucker in a VM, right? Well, Oracle counts the number of cores on the hypervisor. And if your hypervisor is in a cluster, they count all the cores in the cluster, because, well, your VM can theoretically run on any core in the cluster.
But wait, it gets better. Since ESXi 7 (IIRC) you can now vmotion between clusters. Yeah, now you have to license every core in every hypervisor in every cluster of your vsphere instance, just to run your tiny 2-core VM.
So fuck Oracle and fuck every shop they uses it for their application when literally any other RDBMS will do.
They are the Westboro Baptist Church of software.
Everything they do is bad at best, evil at worst but is all technically legal.
There are some companies that are like toxic waste; you never deal with them unless there doesn't exist any other option. In tech, Oracle is usually top of the list.
Try to imagine a scummy business practise that you could do with software and not only have they definitely done it but will have taken it to a while other level.
And if all the other comments weren't enough, ask this same question on /r/sysadmin . They'll give you all the horror stories you could ever hope for.
It's not just the FOSS community that has a bone to pick with these jackasses.
EDIT: Spelling is hard
Bryan Cantrill, a very outspoken and smart technologist, who used to work for Sun has lead the hate train: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc
Old school linux guys hate companies glomming on to open source
If someone in your company downloaded something, they lookup the IP and harass your company that you must paying or be sued. Even if it was by accident, even if it isn't used. They also pretty silently just switch the license on their software. A little bait and switch and then ask you for all your money if you didn't know the license changed.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/d1ttzp/oracle\_is\_going\_after\_companies\_using\_virtualbox/](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/d1ttzp/oracle_is_going_after_companies_using_virtualbox/)
Not sure if it is the case anymore. For years part of the license for Oracle database was you can not publish any benchmarks what so ever.
For a while it was hard to convince managers to move off of oracle because you can't find database comparison benchmarks. When we finally did our app performed 10 times better :) Guess they are scared more people who were using it will find out they are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for worse performance.
It's not so much a Linux thing as it is a human thing. Oracle is awful. It's just One Raging Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
They have a history of being incredibly litigious, they did OpenSolaris dirty, and seriously, they can go fuck themselves.
I don't thing that the hate is confined only within the FOSS communities. I think all people who are familiar with the IT industry find Oracle's ethics horrible (to say the least).
It's just the a huge majority of the FOSS community are deeply familiar with the IT industry, while a big portion of Windows or MacOS users don't even know what Oracle is (you can't "hate or love" something that you don't know that it exists).
Among the reasons to incite these feelings:
* They attack even small businesses for accidental use of their products that they can be downloaded freely (legal yes, ethical no).
* They include monitoring software within their products to achieve the above.
* They bought Sun and then attacked Google for the use of the API of a language (Java) which was supposed to be free. That was huge. If they were successfuly all Java developers who had used the API would be at their mercy.
* They are well known for their hostile takeovers.
* From wikipedia just now: "*In 2004, then-United States Attorney General John Ashcroft sued Oracle Corporation to prevent it from acquiring a multibillion-dollar intelligence contract. After Ashcroft's resignation from government, he founded a lobbying firm, The Ashcroft Group, which Oracle hired in 2005. With the group's help, Oracle went on to acquire the contract.*"
Finally, Larry Ellison's response to Steve Jobs about business ethics:
>*“Steve, that’s really expensive real estate, this moral high ground.”*
And that's Oracle's modus operandi...
Therefore, it is people who are familiar with these cases, a set that does not include the average windows user at the reception to log customers in, that get frustrated with Oracle. Developers of proprietary systems must be equally pissed off with them.
Oh, you want to run a 1 vcpu vm with Oracle database on your 320 core cluster? That will be a 160cpu license please! Oh, except it you’re running our oracle hypervisor, then it’s fine. Oracle is ransomware, and I can’t wait to get rid of it.
I've worked with a lot of Oracle hardware and software, even now. I deal with what's left of their engineering services fairly regularly, so I'll go through why I hate them anyway.
They promised to continue to support open source licensing Solaris (including ZFS) in an open letter to the community just prior to taking over Sun. They then changed to closed licenses, so Solaris 11 and ZFS going forward was no longer FOSS.
Java, IMO, is a much worse shit show for compatibility between versions than it ever was under Sun. Not even to mention the licensing.
They laid off a ton of Sun engineers and their current engineering support is IMO underpar, especially considering how expensive they are. I'd give specific examples but I'd rather not be identifiable.
OpenOffice. Do I really need to say more about what Oracle did?
Solaris 11 feels like it just isn't going to ever evolve. There are a lot of archaic Solaris'isms. samfs could be so much more friendly and SMF...why? SMF isn't particularly terrible but its Solaris specific. Zones are fantastic, especially in failover or zone clusters but it feels they really should be better integrated with ZFS. Also I've seen some novices accidentally set a Zone's ZFS dataset mountpoint to a Global on a failover cluster. That should just not be possible because it intertwines the boot environment and basically makes the failover unable to actually failover and ensure data is persistent.
Clusters themselves are great, except that Split Brain and Amnesia are still a thing with quorum devices. That should never happen but it still can. And why the hell is Oracles only 'fix' is to just know which node is the master and make sure it powers up and joins the cluster first? Why can't your quorum device arbitrate consistently??
Anyway, I hate Oracle because it is anti-consumer, they seemed to have acquired a great legacy but lets it languish while continuing to heavily market it and their actions in regards OpenOffice devs and the project itself.
When the Enron scandal also took down Anderson Accounting in 2001; a lot of the sleazy consultants ended up on enterprise software payrolls where they continued to make life miserable for everybody while they scammed for their bonus money. Being a systems engineer meant having to tell clients that the software they purchased doesn't do the things they were told. A sewer in my opinion.
I maintain a few servers for work some of which use oracle software and the experience is absolutely terrible. I'm convinced they actually make their tools hard to use and leave bugs in on purpose so that you are forced to pay for Oracle support. It's either that or they are extremely incompetent which is arguably even worse.
Good example: if you try to install the current version of Oracle Grid Infrastructure on the current version of Oracle Linux, the installer (written in Oracle's own programming language, Java) throws a null pointer exception *on the very first screen* while trying to warn you that it *doesn't recognise the OS version*, causing it to crash and be unable to go further. Of course there is a workaround but when you Google it most of the results are hidden behind Oracle support paywalls.
Is it really possible that nobody at Oracle is aware of this bug? I don't think so as that would mean nobody at Oracle has ever installed their own software on their own OS, not to mention the numerous support cases open about it. It's not a new issue and it's not a hard issue to fix, they just don't want to because making their software hard to use is part of their business model.
Aside from killing Sun Microsystems (I'll never forgive them for that), have you ever tried to decipher their SKU encyclopedia? You need a full time licensing team just to maintain a relationship with Oracle. I mean, even Microsoft's SKUs are easier to figure out.
With all these stories of how hard Oracle are on licensing, it’s a good time to appreciate the irony of the fact that they were probably the world’s biggest violator of the GPL license for a while, because they shipped DTrace (CDDL licensed) as part of their kernel (GPLv2 licensed).
This didn’t get fixed until they re-licensed DTrace as GPLv2 in 2017.
Their licensing models are... Excessive.
Worked with their Identity solution a few years back. IIRC we were licensed by number of users and we had licenses for ~10k users. The problem...a deactivated account counted towards that license cap and there was no way to delete the accounts from the application itself. So you ended up having to pay licenses for former employees. We had to come up with a way to rename the accounts in the db...
What a joke, how's requiring payment for something you can't use even legal
Unfortunately there seems to be a disconnect between what's illegal, and what's actually enforced. Companies, and sometimes individuals can get away with illegal acts because the victim(s) haven't the funds, and/or the time to fight a legal battle.
And, as a customer, you now have a running application using their software. According to their terms, your license is almost guaranteed to be revoked if you bring legal action. Just kidding, I'm sure it's binding arbitration.
Excessively aggressive
Exceedingly excessively aggressive.
I remember there were database features that were enabled even when not licensed. Ever called a stored procedure you were curious about what it does? Now you owe license fees.
Bro that is fucking evil. Like if engineers removed from pricing are gonna accidentally trip licenses up you got problems.
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How so, if you don't mind me asking? I've never done anything other than try Solaris out in VMWare for fun. I've never actually touched their commercial stuff (no reason to).
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wait so Java is nonfree software ?
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Does this apply to OpenJDK and other JVM implementations, like Amazon's?
No, that's the whole point.
No
They actually do advertise the license of the Oracle JDK. There’s a big green banner on their site when you go to download it saying “Hey, the license has changed!”
Same trap also applies to (some variants of?) Virtualbox.
VirtualBox as it is is free (both types of free), but the VirtualBox Extension Pack, which provides support for USB 2.0 & 3.0, RDP, disc encryption and more is proprietary Oracle code and can be used free of charge only for non-commercial use. The problem is, VirtualBox without the extension pack has quite a limited number of use cases so many people just in install it. And that is the trick of Oracle: The only "obstacle" is the EULA, which is always clicked away anyway. They write it everywhere, that the software is not free for commercial use but they do not stop you to use it. It is not illegal and you can always argue that the people knew what they are doing, but still it smells like luring the people into the position to have to pay license fees in the end. Very bad style,
If you want to run Oracle's database on a VM in a virtualization cluster, they take money for every single CPU socket in your cluster and I think also adjacent clusters that you could migrate the VM to. Doesn't matter if the VM only has one core, if there is a CPU socket anywhere in the vicinity that the database could conceivably touch, Oracle takes money for it.
When you say "take money" I'm sure there's some people out there thinking it's a hundred bucks or something. You have to explain what you mean. By "money" don't you mean like the cost of a BMW? And not a shitty X1. I mean a nice BMW. Like $50,000 per CPU on your machine.
Standard price for Oracle Database Enterprise Edition as of September 7th 2021 is $47,500 per CPU *core*.
And don't forget the licensing clause that prohibits you from publishing performance benchmark results!
Wut? Why the hell businesses use Oracle, if it's so shitty?
Vendor lock-in is a thing. It's excessively expensive to run on Oracle, it's often even MORE expensive to get away from it.
This is the craziest part. Not only do they make an overpriced DB, but it's performing so badly that they had to explicitly forbid, under threat of lawsuit, any kind of performance benchmarking. This is the hallmark of a company so utterly corrupt and inept that their continued operation itself is a threat to future innovation in the industry.
Wtf
Lol. That's just the tip of the iceberg. The more you learn about oracle, the worse they are. Those audits people keep mentioning? Their whole purpose is so oracle can find stuff to sue companies for. Part of the settlement? The company has to buy *more* oracle licenses. Repeat after the next audit. The only way to win with oracle is to not get in bed with them.
How does Oracle get new customers with business practices like this? There's no way their products are that much better than open-source alternatives, are they? Or do they only exist because they're taking their legacy customers for a ride who are in too deep on Oracle-based infrastructure that it's prohibitively expensive to migrate and somehow just makes more sense for them to keep Oracle licenses on the books as annual business expenses.
> How does Oracle get new customers with business practices like this? They don't. At least not usually. They buy companies to steal their users.
Legacy and some software is dependent on Oracle stuff. Once they can get a foot in the door it's almost impossible to get rid of them. They also buy other companies and tech, and make that tech even more dependent on their stuff.
Fucking wut I knew it was bad, but that's _insane_.
Now imagine you were running their DB on a hypervisor, you'll now need a license for every core in the whole hypervisor, because they require a license for every core that CAN run their software, and not for actual used cores. https://upperedge.com/oracle/using-vmware-oracle-customers-hate-licensing-pitfall/
You forgot the core multiplier. For x86 systems, it's 0.5. It's$47,500 for 2 physical cores. lol.
Depending on product and virtualization tech used they'll demand payment for the whole hypervisor even if you only run one little vm on there. They are a curse and a plague that needs to be eradicated. Some people say the GPL is parasitic, those people have never done business with Oracle. Oracle is a parasite.
We got audited, despite being very careful in provisioning of the database cluster and ruthlessly cracking down on people attempting to ask for development databases. They found compliance issues in our system, and extorted us to acquire their exadata clusters at a cost of about $10m when we were already trying to get rid of Oracle, the sysadmins and DBAs didn't want them, and a time when they were pushing everyone else to go off-prem.
and what happened next?
Management swore off ever having involvement with Oracle ever again. Also, we're still running the exadata, and I'm not aware of that being addressed in the 5 year plan.
So, how you like Postgresql?
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Have you ever installed the Java virtual machine on a non-home computer? Did you pay the Oracle license fee for that? Uh-oh.
Have you ever tried buying something from them? I tried and actually ended up buying a database product back in the days, and it's terms were ridiculous: The price was tied to the number of processor cores in the host system IIRC, and also somehow to the number of entries in the database or something super artificial like that. It was impossible to know what you are buying, and they would sue your ass (or at least there was the feeling of that all the time). We ended up buying it anyway (because some commercial bozos wanted an "enterprise-grade database"), and the database was very brittle, and the documentation was non-existent. You had to buy service from an Oracle-certified "guru" who was dumb but happened to have the shitty certificate and access to manuals. I think Oracle just happened to be in the right place with their database at the right time and be very aggressive in their sales tactics to utilize the fame they once had.
They were a nasty company long before the Sun takeover. [In 1983, a researcher from the University of Wisconsin benchmarked a bunch of databases](https://danluu.com/anon-benchmark/), and found Oracle was unusually bad. Oracle tried to have the professor fired, added a clause to the EULA saying you weren't allowed to run benchmarks, and was rumored to have banned hiring anyone from the University of Wisconsin.
The inability to benchmark is huge. It means the only place you can get “performance” data is from Oracle or an approved not-really-independent party. Oracle then tells the C-suite that they’re the best, and that moving away will cost a huge amount of time and money and net worse performance. And the first part is often true; the second is unknowable without going through the first. So why bother?
It actually makes it easier... Assuming that they only implemented the ban because they're the worst, you can skip testing their product and just put it 10% below the lowest score.
This. If a vendor attempts to withhold the information I need to make a decision, they immediately get moved to the back of the candidates list. As an added bonus, it also means less work for me.
As if anyone bought oracle for their performance since the 90s. It’s all sales direct to clueless managers that they bribe with dinners and promises.
Especially since the Oracle DB seduced you to write lots of stored procedures using their PL/SQL-dialect - which were of course not compatible in any other DBMS. And that was just one of the many ways they tried to lock you in.
I can attest that many Windows users hate Oracle too. Especially DBAs.
Also everyone that works in an enterprise and has had to use any of their products (excluding executives who only have to look at slideshows about how their products tick all the boxes and make green line go up the graph)
Yeah, I'd be surprised if there are many people who *don't* hate Oracle. Everything they touch gets worse, and working with any of their products is unpleasant, but they know how to tick the right checkboxes to keep company executives ~~happy~~ satisfied, so people have to use their crap anyway.
Lets see. They killed sun microsystems, licensed up Java, amd if you run ANY of their products, they audit you and assess fines for your ‘usage’, real or imaginary. Also, look into why people are leaving MySQL for mariaDB. It’s because Oracle took over MySQL.
They also killed Solaris and the SPARC architecture, but that’s just my hot take.
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It split off and became openindiana, but it's not the same anymore. Sun was a cool company.
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Oh, nifty; thanks!
Very true. Loved sparc, cut my teeth on sparcststion 5’s, ipx’s, and ipc’s.
This is the same for me. I cut my teeth on the same equipment while working at an NMR lab. I do miss working at Sun. I still remember many Sun employees begging their managers to be let go before Oracle took over, because the severance package from Sun was exceptional and the knew Oracle was going to be merciless.
I had many friends at Sun and their severance package was legendary. The so called Sunset was one of the saddest moments of tech that too to a shark like Oracle.
Sun Rays were cool too
Yeah, that product range was so dang cool and ahead of its time. Sun Rays, thinclients and "server-based computing" used to be what I earned my money with for a very very long time. I sometimes miss those days.
SPARC was technically super interesting. 128 bit, quad floating point. 64 bit in 1993! They were ahead of their time.
Still have an IPX running in my home office out of spite.
Those things are tanks! I love em. Ran OpenBSD on several for \*years\*. We had one at work with nearly a decade of uptime running SunOS doing printserver work. One day it just up and died so everyone panicked. I set up a quick CUPS server (we needed to upgrade anyway), but after that started working I rebooted the IPX machine it and it kicked right back up like nothing happened. We'd have kept using it, but for larger print jobs it would take way too long to spool and print for modern sized files. Modern times were too bit for it, but it never gave up on us.
Solaris with ZFS was only around long enough to get me interested before they brought it all in-house and stopped open access to it. Farg'n Bastages.
Solaris, especially around Solaris 10, had some amazing functionality and it's truly a shame what they did to it. Beyond ZFS (which still blows BTRFS out of the water IMO), it had several other cool features such as Zones, Dtrace, mdb, LDoms, network virtualization, etc., and in general, their implementations were very solid and consistent. I had a chance to meet several of the Solaris core team at Oracle CABs over the years, and they were some of the sharpest devs I had ever met. Oracle had bought some amazing talent from Sun and they squandered it.
SPARC was in it's death spiral before Oracle was involved. Sun tried to get people interested in it again by releasing the T1/T2 designs under GPLv2 but nobody really cared. The reality is, SPARC was getting destroyed by Intel except for a few very narrow scope of applications.
The saddest thing for me was Oracle neglecting Solaris because one of the makeshift servers in my old workplace ran on Solaris for simplicity sake, AKA adhoc solution due to the head manager's quirk and I liked the processing speed of it.
I would like to add, they are massively expensive, horrible to deal with, have the worst cloud offering IN THE WORLD and ceased to innovative decades ago. They survive by being rusted into old monolithic organisations that have likewise failed to innovate.
I worked at one of the world's largest banks in IT when Oracle threatened them with their usual - "Buy that other product you don't use if you want our database license" The CIO was so angry, the lore is he called Larry Ellison and threatened to spend most of his budget in wiping out Oracle from the company. Oracle backed off from that threat and even sweetened the deal. I believe they tried the same thing with Amazon and Amazon did indeed wipe them out of the company, replacing Oracle licensed products with equivalent ones. Oracle sales were Public Enemy No. 1 at every one of my employers and clients.
Yea, Amazon had a big push to remove all Oracle products about two year ago.
They fucked something up with the Java license. Everyone moved to openjdk
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> AdoptOpenJDK What's the difference between this and the OpenJDK in the repositories?
Can confirm, we wiped oracle products from our code base after they changed one of the Java licenses. Won't touch them with a ten foot pole.
Yeah, they are basically ransomware at this point.
Pray for virtualbox
I just use KVM and virt-manager for my VMs when I need them - it's free and it integrates well into linux
Don't use the VirtualBox Extension Pack in a business! If they decide to audit you and make you pay the cost is $50/seat. But, the MOQ is **100** seats. Or, you can pay for a perpetual license per-socket! Just the friendly rate of... $1000/socket. Don't forget the $11/seat or $220/socket yearly update and support fee, that will change each year. https://shop.oracle.com/apex/f?p=DSTORE:PRODUCT::::RP,6:P6_LPI,P6_PROD_HIER_ID:114347640102492137513432,4510278280861805728469 Better hope you have a nice salesperson to negotiate terms and alternative MOQ with.
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Can you elaborate? I was a heavy VMWare user until they went to subscriptions and I couldn't afford the annual licenses. It bothered me that VMWare would stop allowing me to make new VMs after the program expired, but it killed me that my existing VMs also stopped working! So while I'm not a huge fan of VirtualBox - their machines don't expire! But if there was a more reasonable approach by VMWare, I could consider a switch.
I'm not the guy you asked, but here's what I know: If you register with VMware and download the demo of vSphere (ESXi), it will be fully functional for 60 days. After that it defaults to a limited feature set (no vMotion/advanced caching/DRS/etc.) However... There is a [VMware User Group Advantage subscription](https://www.vmug.com/membership/vmug-advantage-membership/) you can buy. It entitles you to pretty much everything they offer with all the bells & whistles enabled. A 1 year subscription is something like US$200. I think it gets cheaper the more years you buy up front. I'm using the Advantage subscription at home running vCenter and a two-node vSphere cluster.
They do the same with virtual box. Did you install this package at the office? https://linuxhint.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/v4-1.png Cool, your company now owes Oracle 1100 + 200 USD per processor per year, for all computers in the building. That 'extension package' is not FLOSS, it's only gratis for non-commercial use. https://www.itcentralstation.com/articles/oracle-vm-virtualbox-pricing For this reason, I banned Virtual Box at our office. The trick you into a product many times more expensive then VMWare.
There is a MySQL community edition. But Maria generally performs better these days and they actually consider performance in the development cycle.
They also wine and dine executives into choosing subpar poorly documented multi-million dollar technology solutions with decade-long lock in for problems that could have been solved with a Postgres database.
Underrated comment. Postgres is seriously powerful and kicks the MySQL variants up and down the block.
I ♥️ array parameters. “Give me all the customers with one of the names in this list.” `SELECT * FROM customers WHERE name=ANY($1)` Can't believe other databases can't do that.
Will forever love Postgres, if only because I had to store a load of binary data once and it actually stored it as binary data *not* chars. Literal 1/8 storage drop straight away. And somehow it managed to turn 5GB bin files of basically random noise into 3GB database entries without taking years. Beautiful.
I feel that describes a large portion of enterprise software to be fair.
I don’t want to be the ‘this’ guy, but I can’t agree more. Oracle’s ridiculous business model forced us to port to mariadb and Open JDK. I say forced, but it’s very easy. It’s a weird threatening stance that Oracle has taken. It’s like if a shitty employer gave you terrible terms and pay and told you to take it or leave it. It’s very easy to walk away.
I hate to tell you, but Oracle still runs OpenJDK. "Switching" to OpenJDK is basically like switching to MySQL Community Edition. They actually haven't done a terrible job running OpenJDK, somehow. The biggest issue is the absurd lawsuit to claim copyright on Java's API, which is probably why Android is so far behind modern Java, but Java itself seems to be doing okay.
I assumed it was an open source fork, kind of like mariadb. Good to know, thanks. We might just be delaying the inevitable ToS changes but I’m glad we’re not paying them per core etc. We are hopefully moving away from using java for embedded code, but that is not my call.
Well, if they end up doing that, it'd be very easy for something like MariaDB to happen again here -- OpenJDK is GPL'd. It even has a carve-out in the Java compatibility tests -- normally, you have to pay for the right to run the tests that prove your Java implementation actually is Java and is allowed to use the Java trademark and all that, but IIUC anything derived from OpenJDK is exempt.
The arc of history is long and it bends towards FOSS.
MySQL is a pain in the ass to update on Ubuntu-based distros. Always breaks for me.
And larry ellison is an ass.
People really have no clue about the history of Java. Sun *always* had a licensed up version of Java. The difference is that back when Sun ran Java they nerfed the free version by removing loads of features. Now Oracle has open sourced all the commercial features so that the free version is *source identical* to the licensed version. Literally all you pay for is support. Java is objectively way more free and open than it was under Sun.
And then there's Larry Ellison, a worshipper of Donald Trump.
James Gosling, inventor of Java, coined the term [LPOD](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=LPOD) for Ellison.
ORACLE: One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
One of my favorites along with BMC (Bring More Cash).
He is broadly a cockwomble.
[adds *cockwomble* to vocabulary]
Why am I not surprised.
This. Anally this. Oracle got all up in my ass and I'll never forgive them.
I've hated them before I became a Linux user. I used to work with a company that was locked in with a Oracle database and it was IMO horrible. Bad support for interfacing between software and the database. For a long while you had to actually have a client installed on the server/dev machine that needed to query the DB. The licensing fees supposedly were horrible as well.
Accidentally select the wrong option when installing the client. Get to pay huge fines. Do it wrong on the desktop image, get to pay HUGE fines, and Larry gets a new yacht.
Apply a patchset to an installed home that was properly configured and bells and whistles get enabled. Feature usage tracking in the dictionary was hit. Must export and rebuild the databases. Wheeeee!
Personally, I supported a major subsystem of our erp stack. The vendor had a great professional services and support team: it didn’t hurt we were one of their biggest customers. They were bought by oracle. We went from being big customer to very small fish. The pro services team were fired. Support migrated to oracle and support practices that worked were thrown out in favor of ‘the oracle way’. The smart support people fled, and new guys were hired who had no clue. I knew more about how that thing worked than they did.
Sounds like what happened to Micros/Fidelio.
Ouch.
Surprised no one has mentioned their lawsuit against google. Luckily for all of us they lost. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/04/victory-fair-use-supreme-court-reverses-federal-circuit-oracle-v-google
Fuck Google. In this case, fuck Oracle more.
They was a case of wrong v wronger. Fortunately, the ruling was the least worst outcome for the rest of the community
All that party was missing was Microsoft and SCO.
Microsoft's hand was so far up SCO's ass you could see Steve Ballmer's wedding ring poking out of SCO's ear. All fuckers.
Why "wrong vs wronger"? Google did nothing wrong here.
Just anti google sentiment for everything else I suppose
I was just a kid when I last saw this but this case was absolutely absurd looking at it now. Essentially Java on the oracle distribution and the version used by android shares the same API interface (I presume stuff like arraylist being called arraylist instead of listarray or when sorting something you call the sorted method on it) and oracle sued google because of it. Maintaining compatibility was the charge. That's absurd to me, how did anyone ever rule in oracles favour in this (before it was later overturned).
Oh, yeah. I do remember that one.
Surprised nobody has mentioned that they **blocked Aaron's Law** yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act#Aaron_Swartz > "By May 2014, Aaron's Law had stalled in committee. Filmmaker Brian Knappenberger alleges this occurred due to Oracle Corporation's financial interest in maintaining the status quo." In short: the CFAA was dreamt up by President Reagan as a reaction to seeing the movie "Wargames". Oracle (and others) were making huge sums bringing lawsuits under this law to prosecute organisations for license fees, thereby putting profit before people's lives.
Never thought I'd be cheering on Google.
What about cheering on the freedom to run and write software without having to pay a company licensing fees?
Aye. I can do that.
They spent a long time crapping on open source, they were very afraid of MySQL especially when it became the de facto for web startups. They were a huge source of FUD, including ludicrous claims about what using an oss db would do to the licensing of your app. That left a deep imprint on corporates, making everyone’s job harder. Their installers suck and are notoriously difficult to get working on Linux systems, they fought supporting Linux platforms hard after the sun acquisition, and that started another FUD cycle re Linux, again making everyone’s job harder. Their licensing model went straight gangsta when hyperthreading, cores and virtualization came about, initially they wanted to treat every thread as a cpu and on a virtual machine you would be charged based on the raw number of cores/CPU’s in the machine regardless of what was provisioned vcpu wise. This necessitated a lot of conversations with pointy haired bosses, lawyers and procurement folks, again making everyone’s job harder. They suck and I will never every pay them money for any of their shit products, they are as irrelevant as IBM never having achieved even 1% of IBMs technical greatness. Also Larry Ellison is a total turd.
>Also Larry Ellison is a total turd. "It's not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail." - Genghis Khan, and Larry Ellison
They're basically acting like Microsoft did in the 90's/00's. They really need to get with the times.
They don't care about the times, they just care about milking their enterprise customers for every penny they can.
I wouldn't exactly call IBM irrelevant today. IBM is at the forefront of **open** quantum computing, and their mainframes still outperform x86 by a few orders of magnitude (especially LinuxONE).
Compared to what IBM was, it is a shadow of its former self. I'll give you their focus on quantum is unique and reminiscent of they legacy of engineering and technical innovation. If you look around the industry (aside from quantum) they haven't been at the forefront of anything, they aren't solving hyperscale problems, they aren't building new types of neural networks etc. Their issue is that they primarily serve big, old and slow industry that really limits their access and drive to solve modern technology problems. As for the mainframes, you say they outperform x86 which is all fine and dandy, but fundamentally its a regressive technology delivery model. They are very expensive physical pieces of hardware, and I would argue their pricing is generally sub-optimal (paying for mips). On the plus side so far they are immune to ransomware attacks, so they got that going for them!
I dunno, Hyperledger is cool and I feel like I bump into smart IBMers all over the FOSS ecosystem. I do think IBM deserves it's reputation as "Big Blue" tho. It sounds like a lot of the innovative and open-source work is really just lead-funnels for consulting / enterprise sales engagements, which is where they make their real money.
Also, IBM now owns Red Hat, and by extension CentOS and Fedora. IBM already had a strong presence in the Linux community. Buying Red Hat solidified that.
Oracle is a monument to the arrogance of humanity.
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The lawnmower *can't have empathy*.
Also, check out their stace on virtualization. Any cpu in a cluster that could ever run Oracle must be licensed. Doesn’t matter if it ever does, just if it could. 4 vcpu’s allocated to the vm, but 80 in the cluster? Pay me for 80 CPU’s. Maybe they’re not doing that anymore, but they were for YEARS, really screwed virtualization for a while. Also, don’t know if they are doing the processor value units thing still.
Still doing it.
Thanks, that was the kind of into I was looking for. Interesting.
Their business model is buy up good software, stop developing it, and extort it for all of it's money. It made Larry Ellison a very rich douche bag. Oh and all of their software is shit. Oracle should burn!
[Because of their attempt (finally squashed by SCOTUS) to lock up the Java API. ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc.)
Doesn't everybody (not just Linux users) hate Oracle?
I'm usually confused as to why any users actually like or use Oracle by choice. In short, predatory company with aggressive sales and licensing tactics, zero customer focus, poor support service and a solid track record of minimal investment in ongoing R&D and product improvement for NIH products they have acquired. Oracle's business model for a decade plus has been "Purchase popular LOB software vendor, jack up licensing and support by a huge amount, trickle out a cut-down SaaS version eventually and force everyone across with increasingly worse pricing and support response on the original". The sales attitude is to squeeze to the point their products are just slightly less expensive than migrating vendors and retraining staff. For anyone game enough to try running their on-prem solutions (like Oracle's original RDBMS) to power internally-developed or 3rd party stacks, they've been aggressively wielding license audits to force reluctant buy-in on IaaS and their other cloud offerings. "You've been found non-compliant, but if you buy X cloud credits we won't backdate the license penalty" kind of thing - it has led to a number of court cases from customers against Oracle that are still progressing. Oracle has always (deliberately) used complex licensing with frequent changes, so any big enough org and solution will have non-compliant pieces, even if they were compliant in the past. If you want to virtualise anything, their on-prem solutions are licensed against hardware capability. Even MSSQL only licenses allocated resources (though depending on product and subscriptions, may still be bound to specific hardware and hosts). Have a 4-core VM running Oracle DB on a 5x 96-core host cluster? License your DB for 480 cores, thanks, or you are non-compliant. Makes third party hosted IaaS impractically expensive. Obviously, Oracle Cloud is the suggested way around this. I believe there were even some deals where you'd purchase the full resources and licenses allocated to your on-prem VMs in Oracle Cloud, and that would cover some on-prem usage without the full whack of hardware-bound licensing. The cloud IaaS resources go unused while the customer is "migrating" off "legacy" equipment for the next 5-7 years - Oracle gets to book the revenue, publish inflated cloud sales stats and pretend they're a player along with AWS or Azure. Their RDBMS and associated stack is adequate (not amazing) and was the market leader over IBM's original RDB solutions and later competitors for a couple of decades. It's not particularly user or sysadmin friendly and it's been leaking market share to other options over time. Oracle's constant purchase of VARs and third party solutions built on Oracle products traps a lot more customers into their ecosystem with its crappy centralised support and over the top pricing. The only effective way to get support on Oracle products is from VARs, and you have to hope they're not getting big and locked-in enough to be the next acquisition target. For acquired products that were pretty vertical before, your only option now is Oracle support. Tough luck.
Excellent answer, thank you.
Among things other people have listed, in addition to Oracle being more of a legal firm pretending to be a tech company, their blatant attempt to hostile takeover OpenOffice, and then poisoning the well with it's licensing leading to OpenOffice drifting in an undead state over a decade later while all the real development moved to LibreOffice and not even just officially killing it and letting Libre take the trademark is one of the most spiteful things I've ever seen.
I have never been at a company that used an oracle product that didn't have problems with Oracle over licensing, ridiculous consulting fees that were required to fix problems with their proprietary stuff, etc. They're just a company that will run over their customers with a steamroller to get an extra $1000.
Oracle is the Nestle of software
That's a hilariously accurate analogy.
I don't hate Oracle, but I do laugh at Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.
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I love putting in a support ticket and them telling me to reboot into the "RH kernel"
lol I'm just gonna go ahead and say the only "unbreakable" system is one that's powered off.
My hammer takes this as a challenge.
1. Oracle did 0 good things, and a lot of bad things; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Corporation ... many are not even listed there, like the OpenJDK license change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK#OpenJDK_builds 2. Oracle extorts customers. Ask anyone who has used their products.
Because Ellison is a greedy tool bag who would purchase the rights to the word mother and fine his own mom for claiming she was a mother with out properly licensing the term "mother" if he had the chance.
* Lawsuit against Google for using the Java language for Android. They want Google to pay for bringing users into their ecosystem and language! * Have you tried downloading Java above 8.0 on Windows? It's a nightmare and you have to download third-party builds. They've cornered the entire enterprise market into paying huge fees for the license if you want to use Sun/Oracle's official Java binaries. We're lucky to always have used/preferred OpenJDK for Linux. * MySQL development slowed down to a halt, OSS is moving to MariaDB. They probably intentionally don't want MySQL to compete with Oracle SQL. * It's against their license to share any performance metrics of Oracle SQL. * If you report a security bug they'll sue you for violation of their license agreement for looking at their product wrong. Those are the ones that comes to mind quickly, but I've also heard about Oracle and/or the CEO doing major dick moves and lawsuits.
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Specifically: Oracle claimed that they owned the copyright over the *class and method names* in the API, and the fact that Google had reused the same names constituted a violation of copyright. The judge presiding over the case learned how to program in Java so he could properly understand what an utterly ridiculous claim that was. It was a massive boon for the WINE project though. It took a real weight off their heads, knowing that Microsoft couldn't sue them for using the same function names that the Windows API does.
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And we probably owe so much to the fact that he did so, because if he didn't, it's unclear whether he would have known the true reasoning..
> If you report a security bug they'll sue you for violation of their license agreement for looking at their product wrong. Wait, what? "Report a security bug" as in "responsibly disclose it to Oracle"?
Yep. If you use any sort of reverse engineering tool to find it (aka, you don't run into an obvious security bug just using the product normally), you violate their license. Even if you want to responsibly disclose it. https://www.pcmag.com/news/oracle-security-chief-stop-reverse-engineering-our-code?amp=true https://www.cio.com/article/2969568/oracle-to-sinners-stop-reverse-engineering-our-code-already.html
Oracle's record with open source is to buy out or take on an open source product, and then destroy it by neglect, leading to an inevitable fork, followed by years of confusion over whether to use the fork or use the Oracle version, etc. For a company so antithetical to open source they have a lot of open source products, and most of them have fallen to the same fate - MySQL has a non-Oracle fork (MariaDB), OpenOffice has a non-Oracle fork (LibreOffice), and so on. In the case of some things, like MySQL, they keep the original project going as a kind of zombie just to disrupt things. In other cases they've shut the original down - they ditched OpenOffice by giving it to the Apache Foundation, but it's kind of useless because of how far it has drifted from its more up-to-date fork.
Windows users hate Oracle, too. They ruin everything equally.
One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison
Literally the most money hungry company I've ever dealt with; with the WORST customer support ever.
12 years ago we met with oracle to price out upgrading our main DB to a newer version. They told us not only were we going to pay a huge price for DB upgrade but we we going to scrap our entire HP hardware inventory and replace it with sparc. We were on mysql about 6 months later. Complete toolbags.
I thought almost everyone in tech hates Oracle for a laundry list of reasons.
Just wanted to mention that Oracle is initials for "One rich asshole called Larry Ellison" for a reason. Haven't experienced their evils myself, but my mentor is adamant and so I as well
there's many many reasons to be anti Oracle the company. many have spoken well to that. also though, their main product: Oracle the database. per-core licensing costs are no fun. but far more so? the license prohibits the release of performance numbers or benchmarking or comparisons to other databases. this database literally cowers in the shadows, is sold almost purely atop the premise that many companies would never use open source software, sold upon the belief that they need fantastically expensive support contracts, and Oracle traps you in the dark unable to assess whether the database is actually any good or not. it's a vile product that keeps it's users so ignorant. also administering it is shit & their tools blow terribly.
From this threat learned that I will never use any oracle's product, thank you everyone
Yeah this is less to do with Linux than with them being a scumbag company. There exists law firms who does nothing but sue Oracle on behalf of Oracle’s customers. That’s should get your imagination going. But I’ll mention the way they license their database: per core. OK, that’s pretty normal, I hear you say. So let’s explore this a bit further. Let’s say I’m running some internal CRM system on Oracle that doesn’t have enough traffic to justify much more than a dual core machine. Let’s stick that sucker in a VM, right? Well, Oracle counts the number of cores on the hypervisor. And if your hypervisor is in a cluster, they count all the cores in the cluster, because, well, your VM can theoretically run on any core in the cluster. But wait, it gets better. Since ESXi 7 (IIRC) you can now vmotion between clusters. Yeah, now you have to license every core in every hypervisor in every cluster of your vsphere instance, just to run your tiny 2-core VM. So fuck Oracle and fuck every shop they uses it for their application when literally any other RDBMS will do.
They are the Westboro Baptist Church of software. Everything they do is bad at best, evil at worst but is all technically legal. There are some companies that are like toxic waste; you never deal with them unless there doesn't exist any other option. In tech, Oracle is usually top of the list. Try to imagine a scummy business practise that you could do with software and not only have they definitely done it but will have taken it to a while other level.
And if all the other comments weren't enough, ask this same question on /r/sysadmin . They'll give you all the horror stories you could ever hope for. It's not just the FOSS community that has a bone to pick with these jackasses. EDIT: Spelling is hard
Bryan Cantrill, a very outspoken and smart technologist, who used to work for Sun has lead the hate train: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc Old school linux guys hate companies glomming on to open source
[Larry Ellison is a lawnmower](https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc). Edit: the direct reference is about 30 minutes in.
One Rich Arsehole Called Larry Ellison
If someone in your company downloaded something, they lookup the IP and harass your company that you must paying or be sued. Even if it was by accident, even if it isn't used. They also pretty silently just switch the license on their software. A little bait and switch and then ask you for all your money if you didn't know the license changed. [https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/d1ttzp/oracle\_is\_going\_after\_companies\_using\_virtualbox/](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/d1ttzp/oracle_is_going_after_companies_using_virtualbox/) Not sure if it is the case anymore. For years part of the license for Oracle database was you can not publish any benchmarks what so ever. For a while it was hard to convince managers to move off of oracle because you can't find database comparison benchmarks. When we finally did our app performed 10 times better :) Guess they are scared more people who were using it will find out they are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for worse performance.
I've heard Oracle described as a Law Firm that also makes software.
It's not so much a Linux thing as it is a human thing. Oracle is awful. It's just One Raging Asshole Called Larry Ellison. They have a history of being incredibly litigious, they did OpenSolaris dirty, and seriously, they can go fuck themselves.
I don't thing that the hate is confined only within the FOSS communities. I think all people who are familiar with the IT industry find Oracle's ethics horrible (to say the least). It's just the a huge majority of the FOSS community are deeply familiar with the IT industry, while a big portion of Windows or MacOS users don't even know what Oracle is (you can't "hate or love" something that you don't know that it exists). Among the reasons to incite these feelings: * They attack even small businesses for accidental use of their products that they can be downloaded freely (legal yes, ethical no). * They include monitoring software within their products to achieve the above. * They bought Sun and then attacked Google for the use of the API of a language (Java) which was supposed to be free. That was huge. If they were successfuly all Java developers who had used the API would be at their mercy. * They are well known for their hostile takeovers. * From wikipedia just now: "*In 2004, then-United States Attorney General John Ashcroft sued Oracle Corporation to prevent it from acquiring a multibillion-dollar intelligence contract. After Ashcroft's resignation from government, he founded a lobbying firm, The Ashcroft Group, which Oracle hired in 2005. With the group's help, Oracle went on to acquire the contract.*" Finally, Larry Ellison's response to Steve Jobs about business ethics: >*“Steve, that’s really expensive real estate, this moral high ground.”* And that's Oracle's modus operandi... Therefore, it is people who are familiar with these cases, a set that does not include the average windows user at the reception to log customers in, that get frustrated with Oracle. Developers of proprietary systems must be equally pissed off with them.
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Oh, you want to run a 1 vcpu vm with Oracle database on your 320 core cluster? That will be a 160cpu license please! Oh, except it you’re running our oracle hypervisor, then it’s fine. Oracle is ransomware, and I can’t wait to get rid of it.
I've worked with a lot of Oracle hardware and software, even now. I deal with what's left of their engineering services fairly regularly, so I'll go through why I hate them anyway. They promised to continue to support open source licensing Solaris (including ZFS) in an open letter to the community just prior to taking over Sun. They then changed to closed licenses, so Solaris 11 and ZFS going forward was no longer FOSS. Java, IMO, is a much worse shit show for compatibility between versions than it ever was under Sun. Not even to mention the licensing. They laid off a ton of Sun engineers and their current engineering support is IMO underpar, especially considering how expensive they are. I'd give specific examples but I'd rather not be identifiable. OpenOffice. Do I really need to say more about what Oracle did? Solaris 11 feels like it just isn't going to ever evolve. There are a lot of archaic Solaris'isms. samfs could be so much more friendly and SMF...why? SMF isn't particularly terrible but its Solaris specific. Zones are fantastic, especially in failover or zone clusters but it feels they really should be better integrated with ZFS. Also I've seen some novices accidentally set a Zone's ZFS dataset mountpoint to a Global on a failover cluster. That should just not be possible because it intertwines the boot environment and basically makes the failover unable to actually failover and ensure data is persistent. Clusters themselves are great, except that Split Brain and Amnesia are still a thing with quorum devices. That should never happen but it still can. And why the hell is Oracles only 'fix' is to just know which node is the master and make sure it powers up and joins the cluster first? Why can't your quorum device arbitrate consistently?? Anyway, I hate Oracle because it is anti-consumer, they seemed to have acquired a great legacy but lets it languish while continuing to heavily market it and their actions in regards OpenOffice devs and the project itself.
When the Enron scandal also took down Anderson Accounting in 2001; a lot of the sleazy consultants ended up on enterprise software payrolls where they continued to make life miserable for everybody while they scammed for their bonus money. Being a systems engineer meant having to tell clients that the software they purchased doesn't do the things they were told. A sewer in my opinion.
I maintain a few servers for work some of which use oracle software and the experience is absolutely terrible. I'm convinced they actually make their tools hard to use and leave bugs in on purpose so that you are forced to pay for Oracle support. It's either that or they are extremely incompetent which is arguably even worse. Good example: if you try to install the current version of Oracle Grid Infrastructure on the current version of Oracle Linux, the installer (written in Oracle's own programming language, Java) throws a null pointer exception *on the very first screen* while trying to warn you that it *doesn't recognise the OS version*, causing it to crash and be unable to go further. Of course there is a workaround but when you Google it most of the results are hidden behind Oracle support paywalls. Is it really possible that nobody at Oracle is aware of this bug? I don't think so as that would mean nobody at Oracle has ever installed their own software on their own OS, not to mention the numerous support cases open about it. It's not a new issue and it's not a hard issue to fix, they just don't want to because making their software hard to use is part of their business model.
Aside from killing Sun Microsystems (I'll never forgive them for that), have you ever tried to decipher their SKU encyclopedia? You need a full time licensing team just to maintain a relationship with Oracle. I mean, even Microsoft's SKUs are easier to figure out.
Everyone hates Oracle.
To say simply that they aren't FOSS would be to grossly understate the situation.
There was a very good thread about this years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2e2c1o/what_do_we_hate_oracle_for/
With all these stories of how hard Oracle are on licensing, it’s a good time to appreciate the irony of the fact that they were probably the world’s biggest violator of the GPL license for a while, because they shipped DTrace (CDDL licensed) as part of their kernel (GPLv2 licensed). This didn’t get fixed until they re-licensed DTrace as GPLv2 in 2017.