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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."
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.
Because communities cost money to maintain. Oracle doesn't care about whiny developers; they only care about the bottom line. Developers will use what they're told by their management. Period. End of story.
As much as Oracle is an anathema to what developers and techies hold dear, until Oracle starts to see some damage to the bottom line, they won't care one iota.
"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.
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. At least, not if you intend to actually be in those markets in 5-10 years.
The trick is that, given what we've seen from Oracle in the past few months, they're pretty much doing their best to monetize (read: ruin for short-term gain) Sun in the dumbest ways possible. They're going around and crapping in everyone's corn-flakes. Of course people think that they're up to no good.
If you're good enough to get a better job somewhere else, just leave. The best people aren't going to get laid off unless they make it quite clear that they aren't doing any work.
Besides, this is about making a statement, making a stand on principle. In early 2009 I quit a job I'd had for 10 years, on principle. It was a tough move to make, but absolutely the right one.
Sometimes, when you are pushed into making a move, you realize it's the move you should have made years before.
The purpose of Java is to get companies to write fancy enterprise apps in Java and sell them Oracle products as the database back-end. Why exactly they'd buy the #1 tool which people use to access your flagship application, and then proceed to alienate everyone who uses it, is beyond me... but I don't see how it helps Oracle make money.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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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Yes. I can speak from the other side of that decision. Several times now I have been in terrible jobs. And I chose to stay. I doubted whether the job was going as badly as it looked. Kept trying to work with people even after they'd clearly demonstrated that they were incompetent, bullying, abusive, and treacherous. At one job it was so bad we never even got around to doing any real work, but stayed mired in political foolishness. We could not agree on what to do, because everyone was so much more interested in being the big man who was calling the shots that they'd rather hang than endorse any plan other than their own. They all saw being the author of The Plan as the ticket to job security. In the end, we all hung, and deserved it.
Why did I stay? Didn't want to be seen as a wimp and a quitter, and don't like giving up. Yes, yes, for fear of looking like a wimp, I wimped out. Talked myself into doubting the meanings of what I was seeing. Then there are all the vague fears of what such a move might do to your career. And you can always find news about the job market being terrible right now, even when it isn't. Too easy to buy into that. Supposedly it doesn't look good on the resume if you're a job hopper. Potential employers will be wondering if you are "reliable". They have a whole bunch of subjective criteria that are all the more powerful for being just about unconscious. If you left one job before you had another job lined up, they'll doubt your sanity. It's very hard, and scary, to walk away from a paycheck. To some people, pay trumps all. No matter how beat up, abused, and demoralized you are, no matter if every proposal you make is instantly mocked, shredded, and dismissed for political reasons that have nothing to do with the merits of the ideas, nor how many doubts and aspersions about your competence and your work ethic are expressed and cast, no matter how many times you are manipulated and shoved into a hopeless situation and then blamed for failing, or framed, you should take it like a man because you are being paid. Stiff upper lip.
Well, no, you shouldn't. No one should take that. Keep some savings on hand so you can leave. Then do so, even if you aren't good enough to get a job somewhere else. Do it not just for your own sake, but for all the others who are in the same boat as you. I wish I had. Staying on is implicit approval of the management. My hat is off to you, sir, for having the guts to give them what they had coming.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
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 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?
And your manager is sitting on a pile of resumes thick enough to beat a rhino to death, many of whom will be prepared to work for significantly less than you're currently making. During a recession, the beatings will continue until morale (or the job market) improves.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
My bigger concern is what it is gonna do to FOSS in general. While I'm primarily a Windows guy I use a lot of FOSS tools and this whole LibreOffice business, now with the developers abandoning ship, could really come back to bite FOSS companies in the butt. How? Because one of the ways to get serious revenue is to be bought out by a bigger company with the resources to put behind your project and who is gonna wanna buy a FOSS software company now? They will look at Oracle and say they didn't get the code (because libreOffice is quickly taking that) and they didn't get the people (because they all split) so what did they get for all that money? Office furniture?
I'm not sure I see that argument. It's perfectly possible to buy a non-FOSS company and drive away all the best talent, squander your customers' good will, lose the market position of your products though underinvestment and/or stupid strategies and generally drive the good name that you paid for into the dirt. In that case, you'd end up with nothing but office furniture too. When you buy a company, sure you have some assets both tangible and intangible. But also what you're really buying is a brand, a place in the market, some mindshare, a community, and good will. If you lose that (which is all too easy to do) then it doesn't matter if the company's products were closed or open, you're still equally screwed.