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Inside Oracle's Cloak-and-dagger Political War With Google (recode.net)
schwit1 shares a Recode report: The story that appeared in Quartz this November seemed shocking enough on its own: Google had quietly tracked the location of its Android users, even those who had turned off such monitoring on their smartphones. But missing from the news site's report was another eyebrow-raising detail: Some of its evidence, while accurate, appears to have been furnished by one of Google's fiercest foes: Oracle. For the past year, the software and cloud computing giant has mounted a cloak-and-dagger, take-no-prisoners lobbying campaign against Google, perhaps hoping to cause the company intense political and financial pain at a time when the two tech giants are also warring in federal court over allegations of stolen computer code. Since 2010, Oracle has accused Google of copying Java and using key portions of it in the making of Android. Google, for its part, has fought those claims vigorously. More recently, though, their standoff has intensified. And as a sign of the worsening rift between them, this summer Oracle tried to sell reporters on a story about the privacy pitfalls of Android, two sources confirmed to Recode.
campaign against Google, perhaps hoping to cause the company intense political and financial pain
Unlike Google and many other Silicon Valley monsters, Larry Ellison hasn't made himself an enemy of Republicans in Washington. He supports (R) PACs and has backed Rubio and others with generous funding.
Many other Valley companies are paying a price for indulging their left wing politics. They've got no time for any (R)s so when the political winds shift and someone like Ajit Pai ends up running the FCC they're out in the cold; no fucks are given. The telecoms have a much longer legacy and more wisdom in dealing with the powers that be; they know better than to alienate one side or the other, and that is paying off in a big way now. After next week all the Valley Virtues Inc. outfits are going to be faced with negotiating peering with hostile telecoms and learning just how much rent they'll be paying to continue operating.
One can only hope Google et. al grow up at some point. Eventually their investors, seeing the self inflicted damage caused by la-la land political myopia, will correct the problem.
Hopefully this three-way battle between Google, Amazon and Oracle will result in an opening a new mobile competitor can squeeze into. Android desperately needs some legitimate competition.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
All Google has to do is invest R&D into PostgreSQL (including UI's and documentation), and maybe some marketing. It could trigger a big drop in new Oracle sales, and knock the company into a panicky death spiral as investors flee. Novell redux.
Table-ized A.I.