Re:MySQL man pages silently relicensed away from GPL
by laumars on Wednesday June 19, 2013 @05:18AM
(#5904561)
Oracle make a huge chunk of money from support contracts. I don't have any figures to hand, but when I used to work heavily with Oracle, the support contracts far exceeded the licence costs. And then they have the epic certification fees, on-site consultants and developers, and so on.
So as much as it pains me to say this, I can totally understand why Oracle have removed those resources because it's flies in the face of their business practices:
1. build something massively complex and counter intuitive to developer for and administrate
2. employ the best salesmen to encourage potential customers that your product is the most powerful and flexible tool out there
3. then charge your confused customers ridiculous support fees because they can't manage the solutions they've just bought
This is why my heart sank when Oracle bought Sun. The two businesses couldn't have a more different software culture (Sun Enterprises were, in my opinion, were one of the best for releasing open, well documented and well designed software)
So as much as it pains me to say this, I can totally understand why Oracle have removed those resources because it's flies in the face of their business practices:
1. build something massively complex and counter intuitive to developer for and administrate
2. employ the best salesmen to encourage potential customers that your product is the most powerful and flexible tool out there
3. then charge your confused customers ridiculous support fees because they can't manage the solutions they've just bought
This is why my heart sank when Oracle bought Sun. The two businesses couldn't have a more different software culture (Sun Enterprises were, in my opinion, were one of the best for releasing open, well documented and well designed software)