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Oracle CEO Larry Ellison Steps Down
mrspoonsi writes Oracle founder Larry Ellison is stepping down as CEO. He will be replaced by two executives. Former Oracle presidents Safra Catz and Mark Hurd will be co-CEOs. Ellison will be the Executive Chairman of Oracle's Board, and the company's CTO. Oracle's shares are off by 3% on the news. "Larry has made it very clear that he wants to keep working full time and focus his energy on product engineering, technology development and strategy," said the Oracle Board's Presiding Director, Dr. Michael Boskin.
What's the difference between God and Larry Ellison? God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison
For those who don't get the joke. Larry owns most of the real estate on the the island of Lanai. Lanai also happens to be the name of a popular style of roofed patio that originates from Hawaii.
Eh, it'll take a few more Ages for this.
This is just Melkor, who is Morgoth, Black Foe of the Industry being cast out.
We've got to wait for a Sauron to appear, then fall, then appear again. Possibly some H1Bs will be involved in taking a ring to an island in Hawaii.
He is 1/4 of the shareholders.
He makes all his money from shares
His salary is $1.00
He does get 7 million shares a year though. Pittance compared to the 1.1 billion he already owns.
They look great for hardware manufacturers! If Oracle were to go away, RAM manufacturers would go out of business.
Just to represent another side to the argument, and because I like getting modded down for expressing my opinion - I don't think Oracle deserves ALL the flak it gets. Just to make it clear - I work for them as an engineer, so I may come with a certain bias, but I also have more actual insight than most on /.
Firstly, I don't think anybody can deny that Oracle RDBMS is top notch; I have worked with many other databases - MS SQL Server, Informix, DB2, MySQL, and I still prefer Oracle. The documentation is better than what you get from the competition. DB2 is the only one that comes close. Plus, you can legally download even Oracle Enterprise Edition for free and use it for development and testing. I think it is excellent.
Secondly, Oracle was amongst the first of the big companies to come out in support of Linux with version 8 of their database. I think that was before IBM came out with an official port of Linux to their mainframe. To me that counts for a lot in terms of street cred.
Thirdly, in my experience Oracle is a very decent company to work for. They are not hugely generous, but they have some good benefits and I feel valued as an employee. I don't whether Larry Ellison is good or bad; I don't expect to find out for myself, but so far I have no complaints.