They also have really questionable business ethics. At one startup, I caught them grabbing an unauthorized copy of our customer's source code when we were on-site at the Emerald City to tune it. It wasn't a rogue engineer, either; it was an order at least from their manager and probably higher. At another startup, we pitched a shared-cache idea to take advantage of our hardware. They declined to work with us, then included exactly that feature as a marquee element of their next major release. Then I worked at Red Hat, where anger over their re-badging of RHEL as OEL (among other deeds) ran deep. Over and over again, they've abused partners and customers and even employees. They were the most evil company in the industry before Facebook and others even existed.

See also: Bryan Cantrill's "lawnmower" talk about what happened to Solaris after the Oracle acquisition. https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc

https://ariadne.space/2021/07/14/oracle-cloud-sucks/ this person had their account terminated for the crime of running an IRC server.

They also have a track record of leaving dials in their software that are very easy to turn on but now mean you need to be on a higher license tier and will ding you in an audit and expect penalty fees for it (e.g. various flags in Oracle DB, Extensions Pack [1] in virtualbox, Java features[2] like Java Flight Recorder)

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/d1ttzp/oracle_is_...

[2]: https://upperedge.com/oracle/top-3-reasons-oracle-java-users...

They tend to have aggressive sales, high degree of lock in, and high license costs.

You basically get stuck paying lots for Oracle software and that doesn't directly equate to value the software provides