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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."
"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.
Apple is ditching Java and Flash. At the same time, they're actively supporting legitimately open web technologies, they've relaxed restrictions on the use of third-party development tools for iOS, and they ship Ruby bindings for Cocoa (and Ruby on Rails) with every Mac.
I merely see Apple picking and choosing what third-party platforms it likes. And as nearly as I can tell, they're doing it on the basis of quality and meaningful openness. That is, not just looking at whether there's an open specification for something, or an open source implementation, but whether it's de facto controlled by a single vendor and what the intentions of any such vendor seem to be.
I don't think the timing of Apple's Java announcement in relation to the Oracle acquisition is a coincidence. Steve Jobs might be friends with Larry Ellison, but Apple is rumored to have also walked away from ZFS over concerns about how Oracle might handle licensing of it. I don't think Apple trusts Oracle's intentions at all. And who could blame them?
Quite.
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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)
Then as a large business, just *recognising* the value of the Java brand should be enough to stop such disregard for its reputation. Seriously, the impression from any large tech site now is "Oracle is destroying Java". Whether you love it or not, Java is HUGE and everywhere, from Blu-ray players to mobile phones to household PC's and pissing away such a huge and recognised brand is bad business.
Question: If Java if that much of a loss, why not just push it out to the already-external organisations that would happily oversee it for you. Take control of the brand itself (ala Firefox vs Iceweasel), don't do anything with the code yourself, but actually encourage its use and distribution with your branding all over it for free? Same with OpenOffice - that way you get a "this came via Oracle originally" good reputation, you get to control naming rights ("nobody can call it Java or OpenOffice but us") but in a gentle, controlled way, and nobody gets angry and starts resigning / giving you bad press.
It's *hugely* incompetent to hold such an enormous, popular and well-known brand (loss-making or not) and then piss it away in pursuit of some "clear-out" of people who don't agree with you. Next year, Java will be dead and buried and "Coffee" (or whatever) will be on everyone's machine instead and you'll have zero control over it unless you want to start suing former customers for some obscure, irrelevant patents (*cough* Oracle vs Google *cough).
My dad knows what Java is (roughly) and that he "needs it" whenever he gets a new machine, and my dad can barely manage copy / paste. Wasting that sort of brand is like Coke sacking all its executives, suing people who drink it, turning it into a lemonade and still only ever calling it Coke. Then they wonder why people get pissed at them.
All I know is that since Oracle took over Sun, OpenOffice have deserted them, Java have deserted them, they're suing Google (which is a stupid move in the first place with such a weak set of patents stated), and they broke my Eclipse config because they rebranded the Sun Java installer to say "Oracle" and didn't bother to properly inform people at one of their largest external users of the changes. And now the Eclipse guys are ranting and raving at them for poor management of the Java process and brand. I don't really care, as a user, what their beef is. They're not telling me, they're just suing people, making silent changes that break stuff, and making threatening noises, while all I want is somewhere I can reliably download a supported OpenOffice / Java derivative that works. In the space of a few months, they've turned two of the largest IT brands in history into something that people now associate with being sued, and hoping for a fork that's disassociated from Oracle. That's *bad* for business, even if you never intend to use or do anything with OpenOffice / Java yourself.