The Trouble With Oracle

My first impression of Oracle, back in the 1990s, came when the web and Java were new. They were already talking up the idea of replacing the general-purpose personal computer with a thin client and setting up what we now call software as a service. As I got more involved in actually working with computers and client-server applications, I became aware of their flagship database software, which always struck me as overcomplicated.

And they keep buying things I like or use, and messing them up.

You can imagine how thrilled I wasn’t when they bought Sun in order to take over MySQL. That same acquisition brought them OpenOffice, Solaris, and Java. They squandered OpenOffice so badly that by the time they handed it off to Apache, most Linux distributions had already switched to the brand-new fork LibreOffice…and to MariaDB, an equally new fork of MySQL. (MySQL still has the name recognition, but it’s not what gets bundled with Linux distros anymore.) They also squandered Solaris, but it’s technically still around, and it’s not as if AIX or HP-UX or any of the other commercial Unixes have done better.

Don’t even get me started on Java licensing, or their copyright lawsuit against Google over programming APIs. (On the plus side, a decade later we finally got a Supreme Court ruling that programming to match an API is fair use, because that’s what APIs are for.)

There’s the poor usability of their website. The security alerts that consist of essentially “there’s a security alert, now go log into your account so you can find out if you’re using anything affected.” It’s one of those B2B companies that does some consumer business as almost an afterthought, like Broadcom. Their cloud service has multiple complaints of them arbitrarily canceling accounts in their free tier.

And then there’s Larry Ellison, who bought an entire Hawaiian island to be his personal resort. (OK, technically he “only” bought 98% of Lānaʻi, but I couldn’t help think of it when reading Invasive.) And who bought CBS/Paramount (and now Warner Bros/Discovery) to give his son something to do and, judging by its editorial interference, to suppress news coverage critical of the Trump administration.

Sure, they’re hardly the only tech company that’s on board with undermining democracy if it helps them turn a bigger profit, but even Google and Microsoft have some redeeming qualities.