> (that may be a bit too cynical)

"You actually don't need to be open-minded about Oracle, you are wasting the openness of your mind [...] As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle."

- Bryan Cantrill, https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2046

“Do not make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison.”

What's more human than wanting to make as much money as possible for the least amount of work?

My favourite humans see money as a means to an end.

“Computers aren’t the thing. They’re the thing that gets us to the thing.” - Halt and Catch Fire

One of my favorite YouTubers is Rob Dahm because of that exact reason.

Honestly I would take that oracle job described above in a heartbeat

That made me lol in a bathroom cubicle.

Oracle acquired two of our customers. Within 2 years they were both dead. Meanwhile every other company in the same industry was thriving.

Oracle is where things go to die.

RIP TikTok.

I was getting concerned my kids were spending too much time on TikTok. I guess that problem is solved now.

Do children not enjoy software license audits?

They're just playing the long game. This is the indoctrination to produce future middle managers that will choose Oracle products.

Perhaps the children's audit problems can be overlooked if they would like to purchase some nearly-usable HR management or accountancy software at this time.

An Oracle salesman once regaled me with tales of the "Larry Bonuses" that were payoffs issued to staff sexually harassed by the boss. He seemed to find it hilarious. I was underwhelmed - I have no idea if Ellison is a serial sexual harasser, but the fact that senior sales staff find the idea hilarious and laudable says that maybe you should be worried about what Oracle staff would do with access to information about teenagers.

TikTok will be fine. They will continue existing in every single other country.

Banned in India. Highly dependent if Chinese open their markets or not.

"Banned" in India. In countries like India, most people are using Android and a large number are using third party app stores or installing APKs. So market presence will stay. Monetization will be impossible, sure, but India is not really profitable anyways.

> a large number are using third party app stores or installing APKs

Any source for this? I wasn't aware that third party stores are used by the general population as commonly as the play store anywhere.

I've been to a developing country where I suspect split between play store and bluetooth APK sharing is about 50/50. Most phones have APK sharing application installed at the point of purchase and some people aren't even signed-in on the Play store, despite using the internet and WhatsApp.

Xender is more popular than Play store near where I live

As commonly? Outside of China, not really a thing. But widely used, and complemented even more strongly with installation of APKs? Yes.

As an Indian who is around many non-tech oriented Android users, I am not sure about a large number of people using third-party stores. It will be interesting to see a survey or study about it.

Another thing is that with such bans, all major ISPs and network carriers are instructed to block the traffic to the related domains, so the app won't work anyway unless they roll out with a lot of changes.

Japan and Australia have legislation in the works and there are rumblings in a few EU countries.

India is not a relevant market.

This is one of those comments that I think there should be a wall of fame for it to be displayed. Another one I'm reminded of is this one[0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8279606

You can favourite comments for people to see them in your profile. Click on the time of the comment for the link to appear.

Someone did this for posts last week (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24351073) but I don't know if there would be enough overlap to do it for comments.

IIRC, one of HN's most favorite comments is the one describing the experience of developing the Oracle database.

Here is the list of the most favorited comments on HN as compiled by 'dang:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24360449

Probably this one, then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

Wow, this video about Oracle is a must-watch. I was in fits of laughter.

Bryan is brilliant, but he misses the mark on generalizations. Popular generalizations are actually pretty accurate.

Possibly on a macro scale, rarely on a micro scale.

If you are generalising on the micro scale you're definitely doing it wrong :)

I mean, yeah, but it's a super common bug in humans, who frequently want to translate between scales incorrectly (hence law of large/small numbers gambling errors, some kinds of discrimination/prejudice, bad generalizations, being upset when a 90% likely event doesn't happen, etc.)

As far back as 15 years ago, Oracle had the reputation of being the company where people would come to work, close their office door, and then work on a second job or side project in peace and quiet. Oracle was/is powered by zero innovation and all enterprise sales.

I thought the idea of Microsoft buying TikTok was funny, but I couldn't think of a company more effective to dismantle TikTok than Oracle.

> Oracle was/is powered by zero innovation and all enterprise sales.

Oracle has one of the last couple of proper industrial research labs left in the industry.

It regularly publishes at the top venues in multiple fields and funds a lot of academics.

Also Google, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM... and others

Examples?

Usually they have a paper at Sigmod

2018: https://sigmod2018.org/sigmod_industrial_list.shtml

RAPID: In-Memory Analytical Query Processing Engine with Extreme Performance per Watt

2020: https://sigmod2020.org/sigmod_industrial_list.shtml

Database Workload Capacity Planning using Time Series Analysis and Machine Learning

[citation needed]

Less sarcastically, I’d like to see some examples of this as I have a genuine interest in the topic.

> I thought the idea of Microsoft buying TikTok was funny

You're not wrong - it is a little funny.

But on the other hand, they have been running LinkedIn (and Github!) pretty successfully, so it's not that ridiculous.

> running LinkedIn pretty successfully

Minus the avoidable password breaches

You mean the 2012 password breach that happened 4 years before Microsoft acquired the company?

Meh. Require everyone to submit a TLS client certificate to be able to login.

LinkedIn and Github are not TikTok :)

True, but they have both operated independently & incredibly successfully with full support from Microsoft’s leadership. If TikTok had a future, it was at Microsoft.

And Microsoft has a pretty successful consumer products division -- not the cash cow that enterprise sales are to them, but they do have consumer products. Including the Xbox division, which targets a lot of the market that TikTok does. Exactly what direct-to-consumer business targeting people in their teens/early 20s does Oracle have?

> Exactly what direct-to-consumer business targeting people in their teens/early 20s does Oracle have?

Ah, but therein lies the genius of the purchase.

In 40 years, the current TikTok userbase will be technology-hating, risk-adverse VPs -- a prime Oracle demographic.

They're just getting in early.

Speaking of which, I remember when my friends thought Minecraft was going to die because Microsoft bought Mojang.

Speaking of which, I remember when I thought Minecraft andead because Microsoft bought them.d Mojang were

I know people who worked (full time) for Oracle who didn't even need to go to the office, they just did stuff remotely from time to time (never more than one hour/day). They actually had a second full time job that they went to.

Wait Oracle doesn't have open floor plans?

I guess I'll be polishing my resume.

When I was at Oracle I had a private locking office with a window with a mountain view as an intern.

Amazing. When was that?

2013. They’re still in the same offices though.

They paid for an apartment and car as well!

It’s a great place to be, actually.

How is that possible? Is there just a really high supply of window offices? ie. does the office building have a really high window to floor area ratio?

Thin buildings produce a surprising amount of exterior windows. The last high rise I worked in put most of the common functionality near the core (hallways, bathrooms, elevators, printers) to maximize the amount of work space that had a view.

Sadly it was looking out over the West side of Chicago from the West side of the loop, so the view was mediocre even when the weather played nice.

It makes sense when you realise the building is in the shape of a giant pentagram.

Big server rooms and fabrication labs in the middle, and some support staff in cubicles.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (where I work) certainly does. It's about similar working environment to most tech companies in the area, so not exactly something to be driving me to seek employment elsewhere.

One of the nice things about this pandemic has been how silent my office is. So much easier to keep my head down and churn code / solutions to problems out.

Depends. I know someone who has an open office floor. The benefit is that the floors that have open offices have newer cafeterias and more amenities than the ones without open offices. Plus, the offices are pretty empty, even if they are open office.

Yes when I worked there a guy literally played WoW in his cubicle all day. It was no secret. He didn’t get fired for performance either, just culled in a RIF lol.

Technically that would make it a startup incubator :-)

The only reason for Oracle to buy TikTok is purely political. It is a 'truly' us company not a CCP company. And I trust NSA more than I trust CCP.

No, that is pretty much accurate. Their flagship database is outstanding, worth every penny, the one to beat. However everything else they touch just wilts and dies. They don’t just have a black thumb, they have eleven of them. They killed Sun, Solaris, libdb (remember sleepycat software?), Java, and would have killed mysql if it didn’t fork. They are the bane of anyone looking for a job that encounters their horrid candidate management software. Forget COVID, murder hornets, and global warming - my nightmare is that one day Richard Hipp retires or falls ill and Oracle takes over SQLite.

Their flagship database was outstanding 20 years ago.

Today..not worth the price tag. And if you do pay the price tag, you're going to need some high priced DBAs to baby it along.

To your list I would add that with Hudson they achieved such an own-goal that all anyone knows is the renamed fork, Jenkins. (Which I believe was named after Leeroy Jenkins...)

> Their flagship database was outstanding 20 years ago.

Agreed. Having worked with and delivered some great solutions with Oracle DB in the 2000's, I've been telling people since at least 2010, that Oracle used to be the answer to the question, "which enterprise database?", but now is the answer to "which is the one vendor I should avoid at all costs?"

It was actually named after the butler from Scooby Doo (Hudson was named after Angus Hudson, the butler from Upstairs, Downstairs)

> Which I believe was named after Leeroy Jenkins...

IIRC, they wanted an English butler name[1] snooty enough to match "Hudson" - and Jenkins fit the bill (you can almost hear the British accent)

1. https://www.jenkins.io/blog/2011/01/11/hudsons-future/

Doing business with Oracle is a very risky thing. Their hard selling tactics are despicable, bordering on blackmail.

Oracle software licenses are so opaque that there's almost no way to be compliant and that's by design.

So in essence: Either you pay more for your existing installation or buy some additional shit, which you don't need, or else.

The or else is the threat of a software audit, which is almost guaranteed to find you non-compliant and gives you 30 days to either pay up or get rid of every Oracle software component. Best of luck with that.

There are umpteen stories about this behavior on the web. For example this: [1].

Oracle's business model is not really technology, but a licensing racket for enterprise customers. Sort of

Nice company you have here, would be a shame if something happens to it

[1] https://www.netnetweb.com/content/blog/oracle-audits-will-ge...

edit : rephrased a sentence

SQLite “license”[0]:

Instead of a license, the SQLite source code offers a blessing:

May you do good and not evil May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others May you share freely, never taking more than you give.

[0] https://www.sqlite.org/different.html

Ian Murdock, one of the creators of debian even resigned once sun was acquired by Oracle.

Regarding the MySQL forks, what is the story? Do you mean MariaDB, or some other fork that I'm not aware of? Honestly I'm surprised at how MySQL managed to survive... Among all those other products that you mentioned, I would have thought it would be the first to die, because some people at Oracle might see it as a competitor of Oracle DB.

MySQL success is a mix of momentum, innovation in forks being backported, and a strategic focus on InnoDB at the expense of all other engines.

I'd say they are doing a mediocre job on the whole. But I may just be bitter over recent bugs like renaming a table crashing the server.

didn't Redhat remove MySql from RHEL7 and replace with MariaDB, only to add it back (in addition to Maria) in RHEL8?

Any ideas why?

IIRC are several forks of MySQL other than MariaDB, such as Percona.

Percona is not really a fork, it's the upstream MySQL (8 currently) with some patches which add more visibility to what's going on inside (and some performance stuff like the thread pool).

Arguable these kind of "forks" are the one that keep mysql development and innovation progressing because those vendors would often submit those patches upstream.

> Their flagship database is outstanding, worth every penny, the one to beat.

Nah. If it were any good then the license wouldn't prohibit you from benchmarking it.

Not sure they successfully killed Java yet ...

>Oracle is set to be announced as TikTok’s “trusted tech partner” in the U.S., and the deal is likely not to be structured as an outright sale, the person said.

Bytedance isn’t actually selling TikTok, and the White House gets its win.

Sounds like "joint ventures" that western companies are forced to have in China.

Except in that case, China expects and demands access to virtually everything of any value whatsoever.

Part of me reads this as ByteDance China getting the last laugh in the game by essentially selling to the least qualified buyer.

On the other hand, when I think fun, young, quirky, etc...my mind goes right to Oracle.

I'd say they have been successful with a lot of their acquisitions: BEA, PeopleSoft, Seibel, and many more. Also, I think they have been a better steward of Java than Solaris had been since Java 6.

https://www.oracle.com/corporate/acquisitions/

> Also, I think they have been a better steward of Java than Solaris had been since Java 6.

Sun (the company), not Solaris (the OS). But yeah, Java has done relatively well.

All our clients (some with massive deployments for the time) dropped Weblogic and other BEA products the moment of the acquisition. Where did they do well?

Who is using BEA software now? How is Siebel faring against SFDC? (I honestly don't know, wishing to have nothing to do with either.)

Peoplesoft was pretty entrenched when Oracle bought it, and the state of other options in that field remains pretty grim.

I wonder if there was some deal China made with Zhang Yiming to have ByteDance take a worse offer from Oracle, knowing Oracle would end up killing it.

I don’t know. Netsuite, while a very complicated piece of software, has thrived under Oracle. It’s one of the most powerful ERPs in existence.

No idea why you were down voted. You are 100% correct.

I also got downvoted - maybe someone fucked up their NetSuite implementation.

No it's not.

Anybody remember PeopleSoft?