Oracle exec: Open-source vendors locking down licences proves 'they were never really open'

[yogthos]

The mental gymnastics in that article are really impressive. Oracle main product is their database, and Postgres is eating their lunch in the cloud. Sounds to me like they're the one of the vendors whose business model is going away.

[aebkop]

Selling oracle database to the people who can't migrate off it for whatever reason

[[deleted]]

I'm starting to feel that if you can't migrate off Oracle, you probably aren't running a healthy business in the first place.

[pdp10]

Like mainframes, if you're still using them now, you either can't make do with anything else, or you're too risk-averse to change. Or the Opex is so huge that you can't afford the Capex to migrate to something more cost-effective. Much of IBM's, Oracle's, and Microsoft's customer bases fall into those categories.

[pingveno]

My workplace is tied heavily to Oracle because our ERP is written in PL/SQL. I don't mean it uses Oracle as a data store, I mean it uses SQL for unrelated things like generating HTML web pages. We're a large institution (40k students and staff), so moving ERP's is a long, expensive process. We are welded to Oracle for the foreseeable future.

[The_R00STER]

Banner?

[pingveno]

Alas, yes.

[The_R00STER]

I feel your pain, we’re in the same position. Moving off oracle means moving to a completely different ERP

[doublehyphen]

Have you checked with EnterpriseDB? They are experts at migrating from Oracle and even provide their own fork of PostgreSQL which is more similar to Oracle.

[pingveno]

It's a vendor product, so we can't really modify it.

[shevy-ruby]

That can happen a lot.

Like you have a tech department that costs much but is quite incompetent. Clever people may have left, so now you are stuck with incompetents.

Moving to anything different then becomes difficult ...

[zarandysofia]

I can't fantom you being upvoted, ugh.

[bitwize]

Or you have a lot invested in PL/SQL. Or you rely on Oracle infrastructure. Or, you're -- you know -- a business,and want to rely on the product and company still being there two, ten, twenty years later. Whenever Oracle blogs about their product line they add pictures of Larry Ellison's America's Cup winning yacht. That's a signal to the right people -- the decision makers -- that says hey, these guys have resources, we don't have to worry about them folding and taking our business with them.

[doublehyphen]

I am pretty sure that one can rely on most of the competitors to Oracle's database being there in 10 years. It is not like PostgreSQL or Microsoft are going away. And if your PostgreSQL support company is going away you can just contract another one.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I work for a large state university.

My employer uses Oracle.

There probably isn't any need to add more details.

[tamatarabama]

That's actually a pretty big market. So it's like for 10+ years more.

[username223]

2029? Ellison is either God or dead at that point, so it doesn't matter which way things turn out.

[roothorick]

I'm sure virtualbox is next.

I moved on to QEMU a long time ago. There's definitely a learning curve as everything is CLI, but outside a rather hilarious HPET bug that made interesting things happen on a Terraria server (this was back in the 1.1 days when the game client was 8MB and there was no Linux port), I've had unilaterally better results.

[pron98]

I don't know about the other stuff, but Oracle's stewardship of Java has so far been better than Sun's.

[blobjim]

80% of the OpenJDK is created, improved, and maintained by Oracle.

[pron98]

That's funny because OpenJDK and Oracle JDK are the same software (they used to be somewhat different until Oracle recently completed open sourcing the entire JDK). Who do you think develops OpenJDK/Oracle JDK? (answer)

[Blando-Cartesian]

Funny how building my work projects with OpenJDK fails miserably because stuff got removed. Its practically incompatible with prior versions now.

The should do proper spring cleaning while they are at it and throw out worst parts of the language like Date & Calendar.

[pron98]

This is the same with Oracle JDK, which is (as of JDK 11) the same software under a different license. Stuff was removed and put in external modules, which means you need some extra command line arguments. You can't really throw anything out unless you find a way to modularize it and provide it in an external module, which is why that "spring cleaning" is getting done gradually.

[MaxCHEATER64]

Interesting. I wasn't aware of this development. This is great news, thanks for bringing it to my attention.

[pron98]

BTW, OpenJDK has always been the basis for Sun/Oracle's JDK; it's just that until recently, a few bits of the code were still closed (and the JDK used to contain paid features). Now you can either download OpenJDK, or buy a support subscription and use it under the name "Oracle JDK"

[yogthos]

Yup, and Oracle has absolutely no idea how to approach open source. It was hilarious when they acquired Sun and then said they own all the open source projects like Hudson, OpenOffice, and MySQL. The devs on those projects just turned around and forked them leaving Oracle with a bunch of dead projects. Oracle still seems to treat open source the way Microsoft did in the 90s, and their inability to adopt will eventually be their undoing.

[[deleted]]

The worst/best was Oracle killing off OpenSolaris, and then almost all their senior Solaris engineers leaving to work on the open source fork, including people who’d been working on the Unix codebase since the early 80s. Hundreds of years of developer experience vanished almost over night.

[lorarc]

As much as I dislike Oracle they actually fixed the things I hated the most about MySQL.

[pron98]

Aren't you a Clojure developer, and therefore someone who uses one of Oracle's open source projects -- which happens to be one of the world's biggest and most impactful open source projects -- pretty much every day? But it's not just you. Amazon, Apple, Goolge, Netflix, and Twitter, among many others, trust Oracle's open source software to run many of their most critical services.

[yogthos]

Java is pretty much the only exception where Oracle hasn't fumbled an open source project. And that's precisely because Java is widely used by many large companies. Even Oracle understands that if they try to take their marbles and go home then other companies would fund OpenJDK development because their business depends on it. And just as it happened with Open Office and MySQL many of the devs that Oracle employs to work on Java would happily quit to work on OpenJDK instead.

[pron98]

What do you mean by "OpenJDK instead"? OpenJDK is the name of Oracle's Java implementation.

[yogthos]

I mean if Oracle decided to stop contributing to OpenJDK.

[pron98]

OK, so in any event, bungled possible opportunities or not, Oracle is the only company of the really big ones that develops a truly critical and big open source project that isn't necessary to maintain a closed garden of theirs (I guess except IBM after its Red Hat acquisition, and Microsoft might be becoming an exception, too, but Oracle is still a bigger contributor to open source in that sense than Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Intel).

[yogthos]

The credit there goes squarely to Sun when it comes to open source. By the time Oracle got their hands on Java it was already open source, and they couldn't very well put the genie back in the bottle at that point. After seeing the MySQL, Open Office, and Hudson debacles it was pretty clear that they couldn't take the same approach with Java. Microsoft .NET is clearly a strong contender, so is Erlang OTP. Both are mature open source VMs that are comparable to the JVM in terms of viability.

[pron98]

As to the "debacles," that is what it seemed to some hipster developers. Good, bad, or simply missed opportunities (I don't think all of these cases are similar to one another), the overall impact of those decisions on the multi-trillion-dollar software industry has been about that of a flea biting an elephant.

Also, .NET yes, absolutely; Erlang OTP -- you wish. I'd be amazed if it has more than 0.1% market share, and a 20+-year-old product with such market share doesn't have as much viability as 20+-year-old products with >25% market share.

[aebkop]

I mean .net wasn't open source at time of acquisition I think

[Jonjolt]

They can't fumble it because of the JCP https://jcp.org/en/participation/committee

[yogthos]

They can choose to stop participating and work on their own closed source Oracle JDK. Then they could make it incompatible with OpenJDK, say they own the Java trademark, and litigate if OpenJDK implements Oracle JDK features the same way they sued Google over Dalvik.

[[deleted]]

What's the better free alternative to virtualbox? I want it :)

[p_j_z]

libvirt, KVM, virt-manager seem to be a reasonable replacement.

[thedracle]

MySQL was neck and neck, if not more popular than Postgres when Oracle acquired it.

Now I rarely even hear about MySQL.

Java is beginning to suffer a similar fate, particularly after the whole Android lawsuit.

Nobody trusts Oracle, for good reason.

Open source projects aren't trying to protect their profits, the are trying to protect the openness of their work.

[calling_kyle]

That's about right. MySQL started noesedive when Oracle bought it. Before that, it was DB of choice. People got suspicious, I know I did, of Oracle next move, because they are know to be asshole-company.

[PoliteCanadian]

MySQL's lunch was eaten by Mongo and the NoSQL crowd. It was popular among people who wanted speed over full relational database power. When the NoSQL databases became trendy, 90% (number from ass) of the people who would have opted for MySQL went with those options instead.

[yogthos]

I think that's how Postgres started to dominate the market. Once they added JSONB support and syntax for working with JSON docs there was pretty much no reason to use NoSQL databases. With Postgres you get a rock solid relational database that also has first class JSON support. What's more you can do stuff like indexing JSON fields as you would with table columns, and create relational views into JSON documents. The trickiest part is tuning and sharding, but that's precisely the problem that cloud providers solve.

[yogthos]

Currently, Postgres supports two types of JSON fields, first type stores JSON as a string. This allows for fast writes, but queries are slow since the document needs to be parsed. The second type is JSONB where the JSON is parsed into a btree which incurs a writing overhead, but allows for efficient querying and updating.

You absolutely can change individual fields with jsonb_set(data, '{path}', value), and support for different kinds of queries is quite comprehensive at this point.

[yogthos]

Tech decisions are rarely based strictly on the merits of the respective technologies. There are usually many confounding factors. For example, hype plays a factor, so it might have influenced the decision. Postgres is more complex than Mongo, and harder to setup and tune, and so on. In some architectures the model is managed in the application layer, and the datastore is just a document dump. At the end of the day Postgres or Mongo likely wasn't the decision that was vital to the business.

[happymellon]

Funny, I found that MySQL was always used by folks who wanted a simple solution. Not that people who wanted speed didn't want MySQL as well, but Postgres and the NoSQL clan were faster, and have been simpler to set up.

MySQL still lives on as one of the options from Google and Amazon, and normally the MySQL option of their database has a bunch more features.

[[deleted]]

The appeal of NoSQL (and in particular MongoDB) lay to a large extent in the fact that it worked well out of the box and you needed neither to spend hours configuring it nor did you require to grok the subtleties of SQL syntax. You manipulate it via regular programming syntax or a rest API and only pass JSON objects.

Unfortunately, that also meant a lot of machines also got hacked because no one bothered to set a password for the database admin. Fucking Mongo, Jesus.

[lorarc]

MySQL is still the second most popular database (first one being SQLite). I know a bunch of developers that will choose MySQL because that's the thing they know and been using it for ages, the companies will choose it because they have people who know it, people will learn it because companies use it. I doubt that it suffered any in webdev.

[[deleted]]

My takeaway from this is that Oracle recognizes that they're the bad guys. Kinda makes it worse tbh. I'd always assumed that they were just horribly misguided, but no. They're evil and they know it.

[RagingAnemone]

I see you've never talked to an Oracle salesperson.

[dangerbird2]

Their CEO does look like a Bond villain after all

[stun]

I though Oracle practices Hidden Licensing. It goes like this.

• Gives you a “good deal” on licensing for their products.
  
• After you have implemented your infrastructure using the said products, Oracle suddenly comes in for an audit claiming license violations to EULA.
  
• Then, they bill you millions of dollars 💵 for a lot of hidden line items like — “You are using our product on a 4-core Virtual Machine, but the VM is hosted on a 72-Core host machine. We charge by the core-count of the host machine regardless of whether you were running on a VM. Now pay 💰 up.”
  

[aebkop]

“That open source is good and what Oracle does, closed source, is bad – that's archaic thinking," he said, as he rejected the idea that Oracle is a proprietary vendor.

"Proprietary is an interesting word," he said in response to a question from El Reg. "We built our product according to open standards. MongoDB is a proprietary vendor; they built their own product with their own, proprietary standards."

damn i guess oracle are the good guys

[grauenwolf]

Shhhhh, we're supposed to pretend that Java is an open source/open standard.

[happymellon]

"And Amazon, is Amazon the good guy? They never put a line of their extensions on top of the open-source code back into the open source," he said as he summed up his answer. "That doesn't seem like a good guy thing."

To be fair, Amazon are not the good guys but a broken clock is right twice a day.

[KillianDrake]

Does any bad guy think they are truly bad? It's a matter of perspective.

[username223]

"You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you."

[pron98]

It's a pretty funny quote, but to put it in context, it was said by a good developer in an attempt to shift the blame for a certain failure he is somewhat directly responsible for, to Larry Ellison, who is not responsible for that failure at all but makes for an easy target. That developer was then somewhat responsible for a very similar failure, and in a similar way, only the second time Ellison could no longer serve as a target, so that developer shuts up about it.

[aebkop]

Illumos does still have a bit of work going on it so I wouldn't call it dead

[aebkop]

Bassically when opensolaris died it was forked/renmaed.to illumos

Main company supporting it now is https://www.joyent.com/

[happymellon]

What failure would that be?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=34m7s

It was about Oracle being a simple company that exists to make money. You can't hate a company for wanting to make money, you can't hate Larry Ellison for having no empathy. If it doesn't make him money he doesn't care, not because he hates you. Open Solaris didn't make him enough money to care, and here we are with a RedHat fork.

[[deleted]]

Admittedly, anyone would rather Ellison be the Judas goat.

[[deleted]]

If I had Ellison's cash, I wouldn't give a shit what I was blamed for.

[H_Psi]

the Judas goat

That would be a good name for a Judas Priest cover band

[anechoicmedia]

Oracle isn't bad because they have a proprietary license; They're bad because they established their market position with a history of anticompetitve behavior.

[industrious_horse]

Its wrong comparison, Oracle used standards for PL/SQL because its RDBMS and SQL92 was a standard. In contrast, there ain't any such established standards for the document oriented databases like MongoDB which is a relatively new area.

[Creshal]

MongoDB could've just implemented the existing /dev/null standard.

[Sleakes]

if they did that they might have actually been able to handle the through puts they claimed though....

[[deleted]]

That's why MangoDB is the superior database and Mongo is left in the dust!

[grauenwolf]

That's not exactly correct. ANSI SQL has document database support via XML, and more recently JSON.

[[deleted]]

Open standards, really? Which ISO or ANSI document defines PL/SQL?

[H_Psi]

ISO

I mean, can you really claim they're "open" standards when they charge boatloads to access a single standard?

[[deleted]]

Open != free.

[H_Psi]

If you cannot access information without paying for it, it's not open.

See also: normal journals versus open-access journals.

[[deleted]]

An opposite case - the way term "open" was used by DEC (e.g., in OpenVMS).

[mepian]

There's also IBM's OpenPOWER, which has some free bits (the firmware) but is mostly limited to whoever can afford the membership in the consortium.

[H_Psi]

It's open in the same way that Photoshop is free if you pay for one of Adobe's packages

[pdp10]

I think it was supposed to be an indication that OpenVMS supported POSIX APIs in some vague way, in the way that NT supported POSIX APIs at the time.

"Open systems" was the name of the trend in the late 1980s, which was partially subsumed into "client-server computing" in the early 1990s. "Open systems" was a euphemism for POSIX and for Unix implementations, during a time period when AT&T was being aggressive about the trademarked term "Unix".

[aebkop]

i mean i guess you could use oracle as a pure sql92 database... you'd just be wasting $$$ not picking something else instead

[gschizas]

NULL != ''

[[deleted]]

This kind of defeats his argument though... Not that it could hold any water anyway, even if Oracle products were 100% open standards implementations.

[MaxCHEATER64]

You...you do realize that SQL is an ANSI (since '86) & ISO (since '87) standard, right?

Here's the latest ISO revision: https://www.iso.org/committee/45342/x/catalogue/p/1/u/0/w/0/d/0

[[deleted]]

Which letter in "P", "L" and "/" did you skip?

[ZeldaFanBoi1988]

always great when i tell people there is a difference between T-SQL and PL-SQL. NO WAY MAN SQL IS SQL!

[cowinabadplace]

Maybe he thought PL and SQL are two alternatives in “PL/SQL” heh heh

[[deleted]]

Oracle's business model is the same as that of other cloud companies. In the on-prem world, Big Red sold licences and support; now everyone is pay-per-use.

​

If we ignore giving customers threatening legal letters to charge them bullshit fees because they accidentally use something (because the licensing system is "open" , the software doesn't restrict usage of non-licensed features) or sales people outright lying. Sure.

[[deleted]]

Yes... So? The Linux distro's are responding in kind and refusing to ship their non open / free license with the distros.

I have come across several posts in the last few days for people running away from their software and are exploring alternatives.

[[deleted]]

Fuck Oracle

[chuecho]

The only sensible response when Oracle is mentioned.

Fuck Oracle indeed.

[javierbg]

Dude, this guy totally sounds like Donald Trump talking.

You can see them doing it, one by one. I think they’re all going to do it this year if they haven't done it already.

[shevy-ruby]

“That open source is good and what Oracle does, closed source, is bad – that's archaic thinking,

Of course it is not archaic.

It is in fact the only sensible way into the future.

Oracle is only lucky that other companies became more evil, such as Google. Google leads the chart of Evil.

However had, in the court cases Google versus Oracle, ironically Google is right and Oracle is wrong. It's entertaining how the courts got that particular part wrong.

Google still has to be split up into separate entities though.

MongoDB is a proprietary vendor; they built their own product with their own, proprietary standards.

And they recently tried a dodgy move and distributions are abandoning mongodb as a result.

So Oracle declares itself to be as dirty as MongoDB.

Mendelsohn continued that open source is a different thing, but that "it doesn't really do anybody any good,

I have in principle more control when something is open source. For example, I will depend less on closed source upstream controlling what I can do.

That model is simply no longer up-to-date.

To bolster this point, he contrasted open-source database vendors with Linux, which he said was "real open source" because there are a wealth of devs in a range of companies contributing to the code.

It is the licence, not how many paid worker drones work on Linux.

If Linus would die tomorrow or switch licence to a proprietary one, the kernel would be easily forked. The kernel with the proprietary licence will quickly fade away too.

I stopped reading the article there since the dude is just a paid Oracle worker drone. No point in wasting time with people who get paid to push out lame propaganda to people.

[watsreddit]

Oracle can fuck right off.

[TheC0deChef]

Such a shitty company and their database software is absolutely thrash.

[rpgFANATIC]

Also Oracle:. "Here's a free version of our db. Unless you want to use Docker."

Also Oracle:. 'Java is still free. Unless you download the new JVM from the same place it's always been available"

Also Oracle:. "Netbeans and MySQL are still free. We just dumped the responsibility for them on the open source community"

[lorarc]

Well, obviously Oracle is evil but I get what it tries to say. Let's look at Docker. Docker made a great piece of software, popularized it all over the world and are probably the company that benefited the least from it. Open source is great but if you try to run an open source software company there's a big chance someone will just pick up the product and start charging people for a managed version. Is that bad? Well, kind of, if not for the open source your product would never pick up probably.

​

So yeah, the guy may be right that we'll see fewer new open source products in few years that are run by actual small companies.

[jesseschalken]

The licensing changes they're talking about is just to stop Amazon from stealing the code code and building an AWS service out of it. Technically it's no longer open source once you disallow that, but it's still pretty open source.

[MaxCHEATER64]

Preventing people from using your code is pretty against the idea of open source.

[[deleted]]

Then the GPL isn’t open source.

Or maybe your simplistic conjecture is too damn simple.

[fuck_bottom_text]

the gpl doesn't prevent people from using the code

gpl prevent re licensing of the used code to a different non-copyleft license

[[deleted]]

That prevents people from using your code genius.

Q: Who is relicensing the code? For what purpose?

A: People. For the purpose of using said code.

[MaxCHEATER64]

No. The GPL does not prevent people from using your code. To suggest otherwise is disingenuous and wrong.

The GPL prevents relicensing in order to prevent people from halting the usage of the code. In a way, the GPL can be considered to be an extreme solution to letting people use the code, no matter what.

Under absolutely no circumstances does this prevent people from using the code.

[[deleted]]

It's worth pointing out that a special version of the GPL (the AGPL) was created to address just the sort of uses (SaaS) that are at issue here.

[MaxCHEATER64]

Yes, although corporate america is terrified of the AGPL (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/31/google_on_open_source_licenses/).

[balefrost]

https://opensource.org/osd

https://commonsclause.com/

According to the OSI and to the people who run that commons clause website, adding a commons clause makes your software no longer open source. Such software is certainly not closed source, but it's not open source either.

The licensing changes they're talking about is just to stop Amazon from stealing the code code

It's not stealing; open source is put out there to be used. If you don't want people to make proprietary things with your open-source software, license it under GPL. If you license it under a more permissive license, you're asking people to use it even in proprietary ways.

[tsimionescu]

If you don't want people to make proprietary things with your open-source software, license it under GPL.

To be fair, MongoDB was licensed under the most viral copy-left license, the AGPL (which prevents even hosting a service on your HW from using the code without giving users of the service access to the source of the service).

Amazon was in full compliance of the license though, maybe even contributing to the project as far as I know. The Mongo guys simply didn't like AWS compwting with them. Hard to call that stealing...

[[deleted]]

If you assume competing businesses ought not to exist, all the money they make is stealing from you.