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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."
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
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 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.
these people aren't dropping java, they're dropping oracle. there is a big difference - this has nothing to do with apple or your beloved SJ. you wont find too many oracle-haters who dont also believe java should be freed from oracle (and therefore still used globally).
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
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
Beg pardon, but I pretty much see Apple dropping Java support as telling, rather than a bad thing. It means Apple is looking to control all ends of the development chain.
If your cell-mate protests your imprisonment by staging a hunger strike, it might not help you out, but it's a nice gesture.
If your jailer protests your imprisonment by disposing of that symbolic key to your cell you can be pretty sure he's not really doing you a favour.
Two men claimed to have walked into a bar. Only one had the bruises to prove it.
"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.
You're really drawing a false parallel here. The motivations behind Apple's deprecation of 3rd party platforms are pretty transparent.
Just because people are unhappy with Apple doesn't mean they can't also be unhappy with Oracle.
Oversimplification is always bad.
Thanks for being a patent troll to end all patent trolls. Jerks.
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.
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.
Seems to me this is a bunch of people standing up for what they believe in even though it may cost them financially. It would be nice to see a few Apple employees do the same.
Maybe the fact that there aren't a slew of Apple employees leaving means that a lot of people are happy to work for Apple. Just sayin'...
Sapere aude!
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
or they see the writing on the wall and want nothing to do with whatever bullshit Oracle's up to.
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.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
Didn't Apple employees call themselves slaves a few months ago and file a class action suit?
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.
Yeah, like Microsoft... wait, they got sued for doing that (admittedly MSFT were playing hardball, and struck out).
Maybe I'll try to support the other end of your argument, and point out that Apple is only 10% of the market... wait, no, because they used to be more like 2%. Seems they're big enough now that Jobs figures he can pressure Sun(Oracle) into paying Apple, or at least providing their product for free, rather than paying Sun(Oracle) licensing fees for the privilege of writing up a port of Sun(Oracle)'s product.
If Oracle drops the ball, here, they may just be desperate enough to do it... on the other hand, with the JVM being deprecated on Macs, it's quite possible there will be a hardware shift to support software backends.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
"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.
Seems to me this is a bunch of people standing up for what they believe in even though it may cost them financially. It would be nice to see a few Apple employees do the same.
Really tough working for a company that sells popular products.
I merely see Apple picking and choosing what third-party platforms it likes.
True but they are closing off their software to others which isn't all that open. I know it all sounds circular (open to promote things that aren't open?...um?), but the point being is that Apple does understand the open aspect of things, unlike say Microsoft. Apple however is pushing these open stacks as a means to promote their hardware first and foremost. That's not a bad thing in the world of business and go them. However, I liken all their openness to the small snafu that begot WebKit. In the end Apple came through, barely and still continue to limp with the KHTML people, but it really took some points from their whole openness thing.
It is one thing to embrace openness to promote your stack. It is another thing to give parts of your stack back to the open community. Much like Microsoft's contribution to the Linux Kernel for their Hyper-V, I am so glad that they are continuing to support that contribution (oh wait they're not.)
Oracle is another beast altogether. They have taken something that has grown a very fruitful community; and have given reasons to their supporters to provide ammo to the Java detractors. It's something when someone like Miguel de Icaza who likes to bash Java starts quoting James Gosling to support one of his points for disliking Java. That my friend is a clear sign that all is not well (in that, "I'm in my house and I'm surrounded by fire" kind of not well way.)
Hell, at least IBM has a voice in the Java community, albeit a small one that many people carefully listen to and take with a grain of salt, but Oracle is just acting like Open-Source doesn't exist and really could care less (well couldn't say that for sure since Oracle is saying how they feel at all) what feelings or sentiments get stepped on in the process of driving that bottom dollar. That's going to build of an aversion to the Java platform. Maybe at first like how you would shy away from someone with a cold, but it may very well build up to say tuberculosis style aversion. With the way Oracle's running this show we've reached flu stage in record time.
[citation needed]
http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/08/08/07/132229.shtml
That was 2 years ago.
Java is Dead. Netcraft confirms.
And Steve Jobs already knew it...
But come on, who didnt see this coming ?
Until such time they can get away with it again of course. They played their cards too early, and we now know what their hand is.
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!
Hmm... have you actually looked for jobs recently? You may be surprised that besides JavaScript (which is a different non-overlapping area entirely) there are probably more jobs available for Java than all the others you've listed combined. Perl is miniscule, PHP has quite a large following, but I wouldn't want to write anything large for it. Ruby is a niche (fad?) that seems to have stabilized, and most VB development has been absorbed by C# after MS killed it in the 6->.net cross over.
Bye!
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?
It already is
OK I bit on the troll.
Java is far far from dead. If your are writing Enterprise grade web applications it will be in Java. Yes of course there will be some very notable exceptions.
It just looks like you spewed random scripting languages. With zippo understanding of how they fit into the eco-system of net aware application languages.
PHP is holding steady.
Perl is dying. ( Waiting for v6 myself )
Python is the current cool kid.
Ruby lost shiny mojo.
Javascript is about to splinter.
VB are you mad? It's a bad beer and a worse language.
Java is the server language. Now it's battling for the mobile space.
---
Now all that said. Do I like Java? Absolutely not. It's excessively verbose, far from elegant. If you can't code for it cleanly then toss and exception which has turned out to be the norm. It has spawned some of the worst frameworks / models / comms, ( SOAP / Portlets / .... ). It is a huge resource hog. It is SLOW.
Java is dead. Nothing to see here. Move along.
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.
The Apple employees I know are having a good time doing interesting and challenging work on projects they think are important. So they are standing up for what they believe in.
Apple has its upsides and downsides as an employer, but they aren't doing the things that Oracle's been doing to drive developers away.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
The AC, please, can stay laughting after he makes a cluster of active instances of Oracle serving the same database.
Rethinking email
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?
Ruby seems to be very good for small projects, so its presence may be more than a fad (but will hardly grow, at least until some fundamental advancements on the language). Here at Brazil, C# and PHP are growing fast. C# has a tendency to lead to failed projects*, and Java has already took over the servers, with nowhere to grow anymore.
* I guess that is more due to managers that spend huge sums of money on what they could get for free than about a bad language and environment. But I've seen people burned because of the environment too.
Rethinking email
Here is a good basis to start reading. For whatever reason, people forget there are numerous commercial PostgreSQL offerings. If you need to compete with Oracle on the high end, PostgreSQL absolutely has solutions, as do many other companies.
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."
Java is an excellent language. But I'm not at all thrilled by the libraries. Any of them. And needing three levels of indirection to use a file is just stupid. (Some people seem to like it, and I'll never understand that.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Heard of Iced Tea? LibreOffice? Any of numerous MySQL forks?
Open your eyes, it's happening NOW, not sometime in the future. (Actually, it's well under weigh, and started happening several months ago, even before the purchase was finalized.)
The problem, such as it is, is that FOSS projects don't have large advertising budgets. That's one of the reasons why it's important that distributions put things together properly.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The breaking point for me was when I proposed slipping an unplanned feature into a release that was in high demand based on customer feedback. I even offered to code it in my off hours so as not to increase development costs and the QA team was on board with absorbing the testing. But my proposal was summarily rejected without discussion.
No offense, but maybe eight months on the job is too soon for a recent college grad to start proposing out-of-scope feature changes to a high-profile, shipping product midway in the development cycle? Maybe the QA team "was on board," but the manager who rejected your idea was the one would would ultimately have had to own those changes, so it's his job on the line and it's his call to make.
Breakfast served all day!
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?