Slashdot Mirror
Oracle Needs a Clue As Brain Drain Accelerates
The Contrarian writes "It looks like Oracle is not suiting former Sun staff well, nor community members in the Java and OpenOffice.org communities. This weekend saw an unusually large number of rather public departures, with (among many others listed in the article) the VP running Solaris development quitting, the token academic on the JCP walking out and top community leaders at OpenOffice.org nailing their resignations to the door after having the ex-Sun people slam it in their face. The best analysis comes from an unexpected place, with the marketing director of Eclipse — usually loyal defenders of their top-dollar-paying members — turning on Oracle and telling them to get a clue."
Where are they going? And are they hiring?
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Sounds like the staff is downsizing voluntarily (by quitting). Personally I'd rather wait for the layoff and the 1-2 months of severance pay, but whatever. (shrug)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Of course everyone panned the evil, controlling Steve Jobs for dropping Java from OS-X. But everyone else dropping away should be celebrated. No double standard here.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
Oracle is losing good employees, good teams, the kind of people who won't have trouble finding more work. Also a layoff may not have been forthcoming. Oracle doesn't seem to be big on downsizing their Sun acquisition, just mismanaging it. So you could well find if you said "Fuck it, I'll stay on until they lay me off," that in a year you are still there, and still on a horribly mismanaged project that you hate.
Plus they are leaving to make a point.
I'm the operator with my pocket calculator.
I hope they pay the price for their ignorance and hubris. What did they get for buying Sun, exactly? As far as I can tell, they got a busload of very smart engineers who can find work wherever they want, or found new companies. Oracle needs them more than they need Oracle, even in this economy.
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
I've never worked at Oracle or Sun, but if I read the man correctly he is not about to be swayed by either criticism or staff departures, even high level staff. At any rate, replacements can be hired or brought in through acquisition; no engineer or manager is indispensable.
Clearly, Ellison does not think of Oracle as an open, collaborative enterprise like a university, but rather as an empire, like IBM in the '60s and '70s (his own analogy) or Microsoft in the '90s. If people don't like it, tough. They'll usually end up paying him to use his stuff anyway.
Someone has suggested implanting an eye in Mr. Ellison's backside..
So that he can see where his shit is going!
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
"Why would a company just sit in the corner quietly letting the community distrust them, leave, and never want to come back."
Abusiveness is a pastime of billionaires such as Larry Ellison and Bill Gates. They abuse the rest of us because they can. Abusiveness is just a hobby for them.
Both Oracle and Microsoft make so much money because they have virtual monopolies, not because they are good at what they do. It is too difficult and painful to go elsewhere for what they supply, so their customers accept the abusiveness.
Why should Oracle pay these guys? They did not create revenue for Sun or Oracle.
Thanks for being a patent troll to end all patent trolls. Jerks.
He should not dragged the Apple Java issue in here. He should have directed that to Apple. With $50B+ in bank, it is not like Apple could not afford to keep a few Engineers working on the Mac JVM port and it's not as if Oracle must provide JVMs for all platforms - plenty other vendors provide JVMs for their platforms.
I hope they find good and fulfilling work with a company that values them more highly. I'm scared they're going to start messing up VirtualBox next!
Viva Libre Office!!!
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
00.00 The End of Oracle, Now the Nightmare Begins
Larry Ellison was only recently eclipsed by Steve Jobs as the bigger d'bag. No surprise here. I wish at some point it would bite these d'bags in the a**, Unfortunately that never seems to happen.
Back in April '09 Schwartz sent an email out that touched on Oracle and Sun's employees. Specifically:
Having spent a considerable amount of time talking to Oracle, let me assure you they are single minded in their focus on the one asset that doesn't appear in our financial statements: our people. That's their highest priority - creating an inviting and compelling environment in which our brightest minds can continue to invent and deliver the future.
I suspect the most interesting point here is whether Oracle considers these departures to be a problem or not - the open source community obviously has its priorities and skill sets it would consider key, but Oracle may take a different view.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
One day Oracle will reach the end of the road - perhaps that day is visible in the distance?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Oracle has never been a place to make a career. On average, employees leave every 3 years. Why? because that is the culture encouraged by Ellison - politics among employees
is that oracle is in it for the patents. They bought Sun for their Java patents et al. They have already brought suit against Google for Android and are going to milk the legal machine while killing off any Java advancements. Oracle couldn't care less about Java... but they do care about multi billion dollar industries who use it... I give Java another year, maybe two, before it's completely dead....
Von Drashek, is that you?
Oracle in and by itself is already a clue
Oracle makes money. Their business model and their execution of it is profitable.
Sun does not. Their business model and their execution is not profitable.
If Oracle adopts Sun's practices, Oracle's support of any community will be as successful as Sun's wasn't.
If you're in favor of companies funding open source projects, please explain how releasing Solaris and Java under open source licenses earned any money for Sun.
"When you're that big, it's easy to step on people just by moving around."
Have you ever seen a horse or an elephant step on a human? Generally, I've found, they know they are big, so they are careful. Oracle and Microsoft could be careful. The fact that they aren't careful shows their abusiveness is deliberate.
Working at Oracle is a bit crazy. They'll fork over $1200 for fancy chairs, but if you want a 1920x1200 screen instead of the default 1440x900 then the laptop request has to go to Larry Ellison's office for personal approval. IT denied my request for 8GB ram on my test server to load a >4GB dataset. I'm looking at eBay to find an old server with 16GB ram so I can actually get my testing done. No, I'm not joking.
Oracle pays well and has good benefits, but sometimes it is extremely frustrating to be unable to obtain the tools and resources you need to do your job. That kind of thing can drive you crazy.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
I think Steve Jobs personifies the circle of Apple developers best. The hardware and software work so well because they are so tightly integrated. Style first and substance later. The substance has come slowly in the MacOS X world, slowly poured its way into the iPod -> iPhone -> iPad... That's not to say that Apple has had their shortcomings but employees (developers, mainly) look at the computer as one may look at a stylish coffee maker.
The employees aren't leaving because they're uber-happy, anyone who has written a book about working with Steve Jobs could openly explain that to someone else. The employees stay because they share a common thread with Steve Jobs; beauty of design. It's sort of like that strange love-hate relationship that painters have with the world in general (so to say, but an amazingly short-coming way of putting it).
Java developers are washing their hands of Oracle because of trust issues. Being a Java developer I can attest that Oracle has really dropped the ball on one simple task, communication. In the end Oracle may be getting big contracts and developers will use whatever they are told to use but trust goes a long way. Openly talking about your plans for something is a good way to develop trust, as any woman may openly explain to someone else. Oracle isn't doing a good job at that, in fact, they are pretty much sucking balls at it.
So, Oracle may still do a banged up job at making their bottom dollar look good but they do so at the risk of making all the developers groan at each and every moment of writing code, in the end somebody is going to get tired of the bitching and either fire some talent or start doing small, one-off tasks on some other stack. At that point the small cracks are going to slowly add up and it's going to make universal trust for Oracle take a big nose dive.
PS: I hate Apple, but you got to show some respect for the developers who are truly looking at an OS like a painter would look at a canvas, but their still pure evil.
And Apple too is not pleased with Oracle, as they have allowed Java to begin deprecating. Oracle has to keep it updated on the platform. So, it's all going to be up to Oracle, to keep Oracle going. They are pissing people off left and right. I love Java. I'm sad to see this happening.
For those not used to Java land, Doug Lea is the person behind java.util.concurrent - a set of concurrent classes/methods/etc.
Probably one of the best components in the current JDK.
I thought Java died years ago already, since it was pummelled by just about every other interpreter - Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Java Script, VB... those are all better in some respect and far more popular.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The answer is to make PostgreSQL as powerful as Oracle DB.
Need I say more?
The disadvantage is that the employees most likely to volunteer for redundancy are often those the employer would least wish to lose, namely the good performers who are able to find a new job easily.
I was working at a company recently acquired by Oracle in 2005 (name left as exercise for reader), and my coworker pretty much told his manager he wanted the severance. This guy was pretty good and self-directed, but he was not an Oracle type (more of an independent consultant), and Oracle won by cutting him loose, and the guy got enough cash to start his consultancy... with which he's doing well.
Moral: Sometimes the folks who want to leave won't necessarily be doing well for your company, even though they're stellar and very hireable (note: I left after a year as the merged company wasn't a fit for me either).
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
... simply because most Oracle client stuff runs on it/is written in it. Oracle depends on Java in a lot of ways, and I think it's strategic for them as well, especially against IBM which also relies heavily on Java.
That some high-end people leave Oracle now is not a surprise nor do I think that Oracle will give a hoot: Oracle hasn't become big by sitting on their hands or because they hired only stupid people, they have a lot of clever people on staff as well, they know the brains will come in sooner or later or maybe they already have them on their payroll. Either way: just because some guy did something some years ago at Sun doesn't make that person irreplaceable at Oracle, on the contrary: it might be that person has a vision which worked back then but has no value in the future.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
The alternative to these individuals quitting at Oracle is going bankrupt at Sun. I'm as stanch a FOSS guy as the rest, but Sun blew away $750 million in the final 6 months of 2008 before their acquisition. These cats can take their show on the road, and fork it to Oracle, and that's cool. However, Sun no longer had the resources to plow into FOSS, and Oracle, as any good acquirer, is trying to make a rather large digestion profitable.
Short story: Sun tried to make a business of FOSS and failed. Oracle, on the other hand, loves profit.
Chris
christopherwinslett at gmail dot com (So it doesn't say anonymous coward)
I didn't say it was moral, good for you, or the route to improved community(s) relationships. It is what Oracle does: make money.
No, you're not listening, er reading. You don't make money by paying billions of dollars buying a company then dumping that company's products. Nor do you as a software business make money by treating developers of your platform like shit. Oracle is foolhardy doing so. Sure right now they're the 800 pound gorilla but there are other enterprise scale databases on the market. Microsoft will even help customers transition from Oracle to SQL Server. IBM has it's own offering, DB2 as does HP. Of course there are also open source based DBMSs such as ones based on PostgreSQL, Computer Associates spin-off Ingres, and Firebird.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Wow, you're gibberish isn't even close to accurate. Maybe you should've used the internet to very quickly debunk your own assumptions before wasting our time with them.
Bye!
Sun had the foresight to make their major products, including Java, available under open source community's preferred license. So get off your butts already and start coding. Its freedom of information, not freedom to be lazy bums who want to leech free stuff from Oracle.
They got hardware which is what they've wanted for a long time. Sun has a wide range of great hardware and a very solid OS.
While Oracle got an OS, Solaris, Solaris like many other unices is losing marketshare to Linux, which may be why Oracle used Red Hat Linux as a basis for it's own distro.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I hope they find good and fulfilling work with a company that values them more highly. I'm scared they're going to start messing up VirtualBox next!
I wanted to use VirtualBox on my Mac, dual-booting Snow Leopard and Lucid Lynx, so I could run one OS in a VM while booted into the other. After spending a lot of tyme researching it though I decided I'd rather pay for VMWare Fusion.
Also, because OpenOffice does not come in a native Mac version I use the NeoOffice fork.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Java is dead. Nothing to see here. Move along.
HP have done this with VMS (fired VMS Engineering in the US and moved the development of VMS to India).
The result has NOT been good.
The latest release (V8.4) has a number of basic errors and other issues in it which have undermined confidence within the VMS community. The patch kits produced routinely have basic errors which show a lack of proper testing and understanding.
'We want to keep MySQL, Java, Solaris, VirtualBox and other Sun products alive, but we can't help it if the staff don't, and in particular, we can't be blamed if MySQL suffers a significant downturn impact because of this. Our relationship with other players in the marketplace has played no part in our thinking with regard to the purchase of Sun, and we are very sorry to hear about the Party of Java Doom held by some irresponsible marketing staff at Microsoft. I understand that this was not sanctioned by management. Of course it's sad, but those people leaving unfortunately have free will, and no place in our company', said a fictitious Oracle spokesman.
If the real purpose in purchasing Sun was to get the hardware and hardware design talent then letting the various OSS projects taht Sun dabbled in die is a good idea. Rather than killing the projects directly, which would create bad press and feelings.... Oracle is just letting them quetly die. Why does Oracle care if competitive OSS projects like mySQL, open office or community Java live? This is really a very clever strategy on Oracle's part. They got the core of Sun and can quietly kill the various projects that they don't need or want.
Hard to see how Open Office can possibly make any money for Oracle. Does anyone pay for support on Open Office? (duck) Does anyone even use it?
I just hope the btrfs people don't leave Oracle. btrfs is great! I love cp --reflink
People here seem to have some strong anti-Oracle views, but I'm grateful for the contributions they have made.
Yes, Bill Gates was guilty of many sins and while his self-rehabliliation may be self-serving, some good will come out of it.
So tell me: outside of yet another Stanford building with his name on it, what is Steve Jobs doing with all that sheeple lucre?
so their customers accept the abusiveness.
I think you mean "their customers forward the abusiveness onto their underlings (i.e. typical slashdot readers)".
(Or are you saying that the working-class on-the-floor techies are making the RDBMS purchasing decisions... ?)
This presumes Oracle as an entity gives a rats ass about the specific former Sun people leaving Oracle. Oracle has a certain set of goals, and whose to say that this set of people are quality 'assets' for those goals. Oracle may not really care about Solaris, Office Suites, or the viability of the Java platform as a 'community' friendly entity. There are plenty of arguments to be made why they may want to care about one or the other, but the fact is Oracle has a certain vision, wanted a subset of Sun's assets, and the rest was either a freebie not worth working to retain, or potentially considered to be 'liabilities' undercutting the bottom line. I personally think the latter is inaccurate, but we are talking about a heavily proprietary company that probably has a view of open source software as an evil to be tolerated only as much as required to get their high-margin platform in the hands of customers.
Oracle is eroding Sun's reputation amongst the technically savvy, but they may consider that crowd as uselessly stingy/self-sufficient/hard to please for the comfy margins they like to make on software and services.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Lots of debate here about who needs which skills at what cost in customers, and whether Oracle can change this in their customers. That's not QUITE the right discussion.
The opportunity for Oracle is to move away from that totally. They buy client and code expertise in so that they can build appliances. In other words, customers don't buy Java, or Oracle. They buy an Oracle doohickey that does (say) their financials for them, and configuration for their enterprise is all in the business and rules layers.
In this manner the customer then buys expertise in making it do the right things FROM ORACLE, at £1000 per day. That is why Oracle want control of a full stack of expertise; so they can resell it at pricing driven by their strong brand in the boardroom.
SAP are already doing this, by the way.
"... and more and more now there are all kinds of electronic goodies available" -- Pink Floyd 1972
Since Oracle has taken over Sun we have started an aggressive program of getting rid of Solaris systems. Reason is they are fucking people on the pricing. Turns out for most everything, Windows or Linux does just as well.
All the moves they've been making smack of something that may bring them some cash in the short term, but fuck them in the long term. If they overcharge for everything, generate tons of bad will, and get a reputation as a company that will stab you in the back, well they may have real trouble finding customers in few years.
Good will is important, at least when you are talking about clients. You need to work not to piss them off and to convince them you won't screw them over.
You can't build a heavily community-driven business model around things like OO, Java, and, to some extent, Oracle, and then just cut it off and let things fester.
It seems to be working just fine for Slashdot.
=)
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Nor do you as a software business make money by treating developers of your platform like shit.
Ha! Tell that to Apple.
That is a relatively new thing at Apple, one I disagree with. Years ago I joined as a member of Apple Developer Connection, however I don't think I'll ever pay for a membership again.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
My employer, one of the biggest Solaris/Sun users you can imagine, is fed up with Sun/Oracle and has given them their marching orders.
I suppose the high brass was hoping for some leadership and clarity, what they are getting is that lots of people that they trust, either for technical or commercial reasons, are jumping ship and Oracle is hicking up prices.
Oracle has the foot in the door in many places thanks to Sun technology, they are cutting that foot and they don't seem to care (did you check how much more expensive is now training for Sun stuff? everybody and his dog is spending their training budgets in Red Hat....).
Is Oracle really thinking tha they can make business by alienating so many big (and small, uuuuhhhh, you should listen to the small, they are fuming) clients?
That has always been the case.
That has nothing to do with this debate. The job market has been crap for at least 5 years.
At some point that should not scare anybody, what will happen is that one will spend more time between jobs, that is all, but in general people are weel paid in the fewer jobs available which are passed around as people move.
This post is in response to posts that say "Java is not important -- if we kill Java it won't matter that much". I disagree and the fact that Oracle is preventing the language from growing and potentially killing its future is big news and should not be dismissed lightly.
There is a saying, "democracy is the very worst form of government with the exception of all others." I have a similar opinion about Java.
Let me list four key strengths that Java has:
1. If you write code using primitives (such as byte arrays and char arrays) you can write parsing and syntax processing code that has near C-like performance. This applies to other tasks that need high performance such as querying or processing data. It is why higher level scripting languages can be written on top of Java.
2. It eliminates a lot of the dangerous, painful, and unstable aspects of programming in a non scripting language like C. It does garbage collection and does not allow you to corrupt your application memory or your heap in hard to detect ways. It provides clean stack dumps when errors do occur and prevents the application from crashing from silly programming mistakes.
3. It has excellent threading and synchronization support that can be used in a flexible and high performing way.
4. It can run on more than one platform with some success.
Other alternatives do not provide all four of these features (C# misses out on #4, Ruby, Python miss out on #1 and #3, and so on). I am not much of a fan of some of the libraries that have been built on Java (such as J2EE). Google and Eclipse's use of Java is much closer to how I think Java is supposed to be used for development projects. Because of the bad reputation that some Java libraries (such as J2EE and Swing) generate, some begin to associate Java with those libraries and rightfully believe that the world would be better off without them. But Java is used for much more than that. A lot of the more recent scripting languages are now written in Java or have popular ports to Java. As an example, some large portal applications use a variant of PHP ported to Java. And of course, there is Android. If you remember Oracle is suing Google right now for Android's use of Java so Oracle is quite aware of its importance for the future.
"I... love... this... companyyyyeeaEEEAAAAAHHH!"
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Actually nobody even needs to live, they may want to but they don't need to do so.
Well, if you want to follow that to its logical conclusion (which I'd argue you already have, but didn't recognise it)
I have thought about it to it's logical conclusion. As stated in the post you replied to I am disabled, a disability I acquired when I was hit while riding my bike by a moving van. I was a college student when I was hit and it didn't take long for me to realize what I lost, almost everything I learned in my classes among other things. In the years since, more than 10, my life has been a living hell. But as some of the doctors and therapists I saw said, I am stubborn, and I hate to give up.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
At my university, we've been using Solaris 10 on SPARC's for many years now, with students new to Unix and ZFS's backup and snapshot capabilities, our computing environment has been lovely. Although the original userspace tools were dated (GCC 3.2, X11R6, vi 6.3), we had workarounds and most importantly we've rarely had downtimes on the SPARC's.
But after the buyout, we've switched from SPARC to x86_64 running Ubuntu, the environment is a huge mess now, it does not seem to stand up to the stress of us students slamming the environment a day or two before assignments are due.