Thread

Oracle on the hook to pay data centre investors even if site has no electricity

158 points · 154 comments · Betelbuddy

gchamonlive · 1790335420 · focus · HN ↗
A too-big-to-fail about to fail certain it'll be bailed out? Another comment* raised a question about investments in fuel cells that could have been just for show. Are they doing max damage to leech as much cash as possible before implosion or it's just... I mean, it's oracle it's a mystery to me how they make so much money with selling crapware, so it might just be business as usual?
*<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49842884">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49842884
1. philipallstar · 1790336197 · focus · HN ↗
  I don't love Oracle, but they made so much money selling the best relational database on the planet for 40 years.
  1. jiggawatts · 1790337165 · focus · HN ↗
    "The best", but you'll be sued if you publish benchmarks: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_DeWitt#DeWitt_Clause" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_DeWitt#DeWitt_Clause
    Every time I use Oracle, I regret it.
    Just this month, I tried to hook it up to a modern .NET app with the latest Oracle client and discovered that if you cancel a transaction, the connection enters a broken state and is returned to the connection pool, "infecting it". After a half a dozen of those, the whole app server just dies with endless cancellation related exceptions. This isn't even the only such bug, apparently there's a whole family of pool-corruption bugs that have workaround config settings and everything!
    This was with version 23.26.301 which suggests that they've had a lot of major releases, bug fixes, etc... but basic functionality like "connect successfully to the database server every time" is totally broken and has been for many years.
    The issue tracker forums have tumbleweeds rolling through them and play the sound of wolves howling in the distance to provide just the right kind of "what are you still doing here?" ambiance.
    hobo123 · 1790338207 · focus · HN ↗
    That should just be illegal. The right to measure or to publish things is not about their software, it's a personal right, so Obstacle shouldn't be able to remove your right in their license agreement.
    rswail · 1790347701 · focus · HN ↗
    The copyright that Oracle has entitles it to offer a license with the conditions it wants. They've had that condition in their license for decades.
    You are not forced to accept them.
    Back in the late 90s, Oracle RDBMS was the "won't get fired for buying" RDBMS. It's been downhill ever since. Once Postgres got partitions, it was over.
    Oracle still had a market for high availability clusters for a while, but the increasing performance of single servers and SANs and finally cloud services made that redundant.
    So Oracle have spent the last 20 years being bastards about licensing, squeezing their existing customers while the customers do their best to migrate somewhere else.
    hobo123 · 1790412591 · focus · HN ↗
    My point was it aught to be illegal to put stuff in a license that tells you what to do with your life that doesn't affect the software.
    That's like selling or renting you a car and disallowing you from saying bad things about it, or to tell others the horsepower or max speed.

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