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What's the Oracle Trial Against SAP Really About?
Ponca City writes "Chris O'Brien writes in the Merucry News that Larry Ellison's lawsuit against bitter rival SAP gives Ellison the opportunity to deliver the final humiliation to his company's greatest foe of the past decade while sending a blunt message to Oracle's next great enemy, Hewlett-Packard: 'This is who you are fighting. This is how determined we are to win. Get ready.' O'Brien writes that it's a crafty bit of psychological warfare that is already having the desired effect. When Oracle decided to subpoena former SAP CEO Léo Apotheker after he was appointed president and CEO of HP, Apotheker decided to stay out of the country to avoid testifying so now we have the bizarre spectacle of the new CEO of the largest technology company in the world unable to show his face in Silicon Valley. Ellison loves to fight. In gaining control of PeopleSoft, Ellison demonstrated the love of combat and confrontation that has made him one of the wealthiest men on the planet. He waged an 18-month hostile takeover bid to acquire the company, and fought off an effort by the US Department of Justice to torpedo the deal. 'Oracle probably could have settled this case [with SAP],' writes O'Brien. 'But why pass up a glorious chance to subpoena Apotheker and send your new opponent running in circles?'"
I've known a few people like that, very combative types. They tend to wind up being very lonely and pathetic later in life.
C|N>K
Oracle seems to be an EXTREMELY abusive company.
Let's route around it. One way: Use PostgreSQL.
Some billionaires only care about being able to abuse people.
These companies are situated in the center of one of the largest changes in human history. Computers and software applications have enabled numerous advances in civilization and benefitted society in countless ways. Despite all the good that has come from computers, it seems like without exception, every single large computer company is lead by a bunch of douche bags who apparently have little concern for anything beyond themselves and their vision of how they want things to be.
Rustling up a quick summary here for anyone looking for background:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Oracle_v._SAP_(2010,_USA)
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Why?
Because I work with closed source software from a vendor that gives me access to Technical Reference Manuals, complete descriptions of all fields and behaviors of the tables?
Is it because I enjoy having full access to the pl/sql code in triggers, stored procedures, workflows, forms and reports, which I can then modify to my own purposes and business objectives of my company?
Or is it that I think SAP acted like a bunch of greedy fucks who gave Oracle very reason to limit my access to the info?
c'mon anon, show me your mighty insight
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Why?
Because you are working with a company that would not hesitate to fuck you over the moment it was convenient or the moment you stopped paying up.
You are entitled to your masochism, but to most here working with oracle now would be akin to being a partner with microsoft of the 90's, sure, on paper you're working together.. expect to get fucked over (except with oracle they wouldn't do it technically, just 4-6 digit licensing fees you weren't expecting).
I would recommend Ingres (which is GPL) for the Data Warehouse environments, PostgreSQL for the mid-sized relational databases and Drizzle for the small-scale systems. (DO NOT support MySql as it is now an Oracle product -- support one of the official forks.)
Likewise, I would recommend using Libre Office (as soon as it hits a major release) over and above Oracle's OpenOffice.
For Java, I would recommend using IBM's JVM where possible (it's largely Oracle's but getting it from IBM will still kick dirt in Oracle's eyes). Where you're running a standalone Java application that can be compiled using GCJ, eliminate the JVM entirely and go native.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Easy. If Oracle owns all the names that the Pointy-Hair Bosses know about, Oracle rules the people with the money. Those who actually use the product? They have no say. Neither do any of the technical folk. So why would Oracle care about them?
However, it is a dangerous game to play. IBM tried the same trick in the 1970s and 80s. It nearly destroyed them when the playing-field shifted away from mainframes. It did destroy companies like Prime. Acorn tried the same stunt in the microcomputer field. They lasted a bit longer than the giants, but they're now only producing televisions, their PC division abandoned in the dirt.
Oracle will, eventually, fall the same way if they rely on destroying competition and propping up their brand name with buy-outs. The question is how much damage they will inflict on the markets in the meantime.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I dunno. Think about this. If HP's CEO "happens" to end up in a country with no corporate tax, the company can move its "official" HQ there. Instant tax haven - and one that any revision of tax laws couldn't do much about because it would involve the CEO and not just some unused office with only a janitor in it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Larry Ellison is becoming more of a software terrorist every day.
I was a DBA forever, and while I loved the 10 or so years I spent supporting Oracle I noted that consultants (for what its worth) seemed to uniformly hate the place (a note, I supported Peoplesoft Installations for awhile and we saw a lot of consultants come through from Oracle among other places..).
It's really a shame, but when 9 came out and Oracle co-opted java for the first time, they screwed it up and it hasn't really gotten any better since. I think a big reason for this is that the office culture of the place is a reflection of Ellison's arrogance, which is somewhat demotivating (even if only privately) to the people who work there, and their products suffer. So here we are with Oracle now owning java and, surprise surprise, Ellison is out to monetize it. Folks, that's what he does. There's a reason he's one of the richest men alive, he finds choke points in the software market and either buys or kills (and replaces) them.
He reminds me of the Wall Street people who see no moral issues with destroying everything in their path to turn a profit. It's sick, it's wrong, and this is America where for better or worse its legal. Ultimately, these super-arrogant folks will be the death of software as an industry because they simply have no concept of 'enough'. One guy told us (unconfirmed personally, but I have no reason to doubt it) that at Oracle, if you weren't in a position to replace your boss after the first year, your career there was basically over. Ellison calls this 'samurai management' or some such nonsense, but I call it bad business. It's this kind of crap that leads to workplace incivility, and this grudge-holding shit Emperor Larry is famous for is plain old simple hubris. It's ok though, he's getting too old to do it for much longer, and Oracle is rapidly becoming a product worth 1k$ instead of 100k$ per installation. Not that he'll ever be poor, but boy wouldn't it be fun to watch him be humbled.
Imagination is the silver lining of Intelligence.
As I've seen elsewhere on /. :
Move over Darth Gates, it's time for Darth Ellison
ORACLE = One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I disagree with the AC that you are a retard. But I have to comment on this:
Because I work with closed source software from a vendor that gives me access to Technical Reference Manuals, complete descriptions of all fields and behaviors of the tables? Is it because I enjoy having full access to the pl/sql code in triggers, stored procedures, workflows, forms and reports, which I can then modify to my own purposes and business objectives of my company?
A lot of companies/people seem to think that's one of the benefits of closed source software, you get to pay for the privilege of accessing some "Knowledgebase" (with "Technical Reference Manuals", FAQs, HOWTOs, whitepapers etc) and get "Support" etc.
When the fact is with stuff like Postgresql, you often don't need all that because you get to
1) See the technical details and similar stuff for free
2) Post a question on a mailing list, to which the developers reply without any marketing/PR bullshit involved.
I've dealt with OSS and closed source stuff. And there've been many times with the latter that they ask $$$ for access to find out something that would be found by Google if it was OSS.
While I agree with you on principle, Oracle documentation is second to none and that's better than having to post to some mailing list and then having to send configs along with version dependencies. I would so there are lots of pros and cons of both sides of this. Google is not a great way to get documentation on something specific. Just yesterday I was searching for the cause to one-way communication between an Asterisk 1.4 and an Asterisk 1.6 box that had been upgraded from 1.4 and was using the same config. It took a very long time. Contrast that with virtually any Oracle issue which can be resolved within ten minutes on Metalink or if things really get hairy, within two hours via a support request.
Often times you do get what you pay for even if you have to pay too much to get it. I'll agree most of that should be free and in the interest of adoption of product lines that would actually probably be a smart move from a business standpoint. I look at all the people running away from Sun servers because everything is hidden away now by Oracle so its easy to see that hiding the documentation just makes people look for something more open.
Oracle is in serious trouble these days despite their spending spree, they lack focus and it shows in their product line. I think most people would agree that you only use Oracle for the database, all of their other apps are simply a joke with open source alternatives being very attractive for reporting and collaboration. ERP options still appear to be lacking but the concept as a whole seems to going away anyway. That's probably why Oracle wanted Sun, to have a complete platform for their database completely supported from head to toe the way Apple does it.
This isn't my area, but perennial cost cutting was the problem. After a solid start reducing fat and focusing on core missions, old Jack ended up going off the rails simply because the money kept rolling.
His philosophy shared a great deal in common with the a very unpopular practice in modern governance known as a strategy of tensions.
He wanted to keep up to 10% of the talent force on steady march out the door regardless of their performance and regardless of how well things were going. This cost cutting measure depends upon the other 90% not leaping to the conclusion that an arbitrary management will eventually come for them as well... And hoping that they instead believe there was something inferior about the 10%; hoping that they will strive to validate the faith of retention that their fearless leader has placed in them. Not a good situation.
Then there was the idea to cut all involvement in any endeavor where the company was not challenging for the crown of industry leader. This of course removes innovation and cross-pollination leaving the remaining servants absent vision and experience coming from outside their own little box.
Wikipedia claims he was known as Neutron Jack. I think that may be taking it a little too far, but you get the point.
Unfortunately, many of these things are only learned through hard experience, working on multiple database platforms and then trying to port what works on one to an alternative.
The biggest difference I already mentioned - symmetric multi-node scalability for a single database. So called "shared nothing" database clusters (different nodes host different tables or table partitions) have been common in proprietary databases for many years. I believe there are variants of PostgreSQL out there that can do that.
Oracle pioneered symmetric "shared everything" relational database clusters with Oracle Parallel Server in the late 80s. I understand IBM did the same thing on mainframes with DB2 on Parallel Sysplex a few years later. PostgreSQL doesn't do symmetric clustering yet, but I imagine it will a few years down the road.
On paper, DB2 (for example) is the rough equivalent of Oracle. In practice, developers and DBAs run into enough obstacles doing simple things like alter table operations that Oracle is much easier to administer once it is set up properly. In addition, in Oracle you can do all sorts of database administration operations online without interrupting running applications. More recent versions can rebuild an index while there are active transactions against a table, for example.
My PostgreSQL experience is a little old. The most annoying problem I had was that numeric types needed to match in queries for the optimizer to work properly. I would join a SMALLINT column to an INTEGER column or literal and the index would be ignored. That may be fixed, I don't know. Oracle by contrast uses a uniform NUMBER type comparable to DECIMAL in most databases for everything, which is very convenient. You can increase the numeric precision or scale of any column in constant time, for example. DB2 traditionally required a table export and reload to do this.
If you store integers in 16 bit fields, it is usually tricky to change them all to 32 bit fields without at least stopping all transactions and rewriting every row (which is what PostgreSQL does). Oracle uses variable precision BCD number storage for everything to avoid that problem. I don't know if active transactions can run against a PostgreSQL table while a column type is being altered or not. In any case, you get the idea.
Oracle has an outstanding cost based query optimizer, that can handle views that are built on top of several other layers of views without much of a problem. I haven't tested that in PostgreSQL lately, but what I could really use with the latter are updateable views that filter on session variables. Oracle has PL/SQL "packages" that can store session specific state. Views can refer to package variables such that they limit the rows delivered to a user in that session, which is extremely handy for making virtual private databases.
There are just lots of these kind of things which have been added to Oracle simply due to a very high end client base willing to pay very high rates for the latest and greatest "enterprise edition" stuff. If you don't need the EE stuff, and don't need lots of cores, Oracle is just about as expensive as any other proprietary database, including relatively weak databases like MySQL (now that Oracle owns it) or commercially supported/tweaked versions of PostgreSQL like EnterpriseDB.