I have extensive dealings with both.

Oracle are actually malicious. IBM are just incompetent.

If you can find a good account manager inside IBM for your needs, then there is a chance that you'll be able to get on well. Otherwise you'll have to do what I did which is say publicly shame the head of department on a public platform, with their superiors listening in.

Oracle however, have no shame.

I seriously wonder who is still left at oracle who actually cares about technology and pushing it forward, instead of using it as a tool to squeeze money.

Most competent Sun people have left oracle and are onto greener pastures.

Core database engineering is still strong at Oracle.

However nice their open source work is, RH licensing is already every bit as scummy as the others, at least if my coworkers in the department I used to work for are to be believed. Bait and switch freebies, "we need to run this sketchy shell script on your production system to determine how much money you owe us" nonsense, coming back with a ludicrously inaccurate bill that has to be argued over point-by-point with lawyers, the works.

> bait and switch freebies. How true.

When IBM bought Informix they replaced competent database support with aggressive DB2 marketing droids and presented us with an annual bill sixty times more than Informix had charged.