
Oracle directors give blessing to shareholder lawsuit against Larry Ellison - wstrange
https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/22/oracle-directors-give-blessing-to-shareholder-lawsuit-against-larry-ellison-and-safra-catz/
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markonen
Top 60 Licensing Pitfalls For Oracle Databases And Oracle Technology Products:
[http://omtco.eu/references/oracle/top-60-licensing-
pitfalls-...](http://omtco.eu/references/oracle/top-60-licensing-pitfalls-for-
oracle-databases-and-oracle-technology-products/)

I saw this document linked on Twitter yesterday and it's just amazing. I
always knew that Larry Ellison's mug was in the dictionary next to the
definition of "customer hostility", but man, it's another thing altogether to
read the _top 60_ ways Oracle will screw you.

My favorite is how you can't use Oracle Technology Network (OTN DEV) licenses
for testing. They're only for development, which is something you do without
testing.

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thesausageking
Queue Bryan Cantrill's (DTrace, Joyent) USENIX talk on Oracle and Larry
Ellison:

[https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2034](https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2034)

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techntoke
I really don't want to watch a long video. Is there a link that lays out his
thoughts in text?

~~~
andyjohnson0
Quote:

"As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these
generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well,
except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer
than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less
complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has
seen that complexity for my entire life, it’s very hard to get used to that
idea. It’s like, ‘surely this is more complicated!’ but it’s like: Wow, this
is really simple! This company is very straightforward, in its defense. This
company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon
humanity — that’s it! …Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off,
screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah… you talk to
Oracle, it’s like, ‘no, we don’t fucking make dreams happen — we make money!’
…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. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that
trap about Oracle."

Source:
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246)

~~~
scarface74
How is this different from VC tech companies with no foreseeable path to
profitable where the VC backers only hope is an acquisition or pawning their
money losing investments off to the public market?

~~~
CharlesColeman
Those are small, and we haven't all used their products or been affected by
them in some way or another.

~~~
scarface74
I don’t think Uber or Lyft could be considered small products that most of us
haven’t used st one point.

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adonnjohn
Sorry, I don't really understand from the article: how exactly did the accused
supposedly break fiduciary obligations? Does it solely have to do with Larry's
previous involvement in NetSuite?

~~~
yellowapple
Per the Reuters article [0], it sounds like Ellison had a vested interest (of
the financial variety) in Oracle acquiring NetSuite at a premium unreasonably
higher than NetSuite's actual value, so that's why the shareholders are suing
him.

[0]: [https://www.reuters.com/article/otc-oracle-
idUSKCN1V91UJ](https://www.reuters.com/article/otc-oracle-idUSKCN1V91UJ)

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
How much WeWork pays the owner for his properties would look bad through this
same lens.

~~~
lern_too_spel
WeWork's investors are free to sue. That would probably derail the IPO to make
it net negative for them.

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nyolfen
it’s a brilliant scheme. he also squatted domains and a trademark prior to
renaming and hasn’t faced consequences for the same reason

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H8crilA
Hasn't faced yet. Let's see how this unfolds, as they say - in a bull market
everyone feels like a genius.

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Zaheer
Can anyone explain how / why the Firemen's retirement system is involved in
this?

> As Frankel wrote in her article, the lawsuit, which was originally filed by
> the Firemen’s Retirement System of St. Louis, could be worth billions:

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redwood
Pension funds typically are some of the largest institutional owners of major
public companies.

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adw
You can connect the SV housing bubble fairly directly to pension funds piling
money into tech stocks and venture capital after the late-00s global financial
crisis (because bond yields were in the gutter and they're more or less
obliged to seek returns _somewhere_ , and they weren't available in less risky
instruments).

Same kind of problem Berkshire Hathaway has; once you're big enough, available
returns are limited by how much you yourself distort the market. Pension funds
used to be able to buy almost limitless bonds in order to lock in annuity
returns, but a) a bunch of them are a long way underwater and b) the effective
rate of interest on bonds was below zero so they were forced to seek riskier
assets, bidding up the price on those, which... etc etc etc.

Capital concentration – huge pension schemes, enormous corporations, big
university endowments – has weird effects and it happens in all kinds of
places.

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pm90
I wonder what would be a good way to deploy that concentrated capital.
Essentially, it’s the combined labor of a large pool of people, hoping that
their capital will be deployed in places where it will earn great returns.
What happens when these pockets of wealth don’t have anywhere to go?

Related: pensions are out of fashion in the US. Where is the wealth of young
Americans going nowadays?

~~~
hermitdev
I'm 38 and have a pretty good salary. About 50% after tax goes to rent, 25%
goes to paying down debt inherited from getting married and medical bills
(previous employer had shit insurance). The last 25% is what we live on for
essentials (insurance, gas and tolls to go to work, utilities, food, etc). My
wife and I have long ago paid off out student loan debt. We have 10s of
thousands in high interest, unsecured debt. Debt, that in theory we could pay
off tomorrow from savings. However, since most of my savings (my wife has
none) is spread across 2 401ks, a Roth IRA, a traditional IRA and a taxed
investment account, and I work for an investment fund, I'm subject to all
sorts of lockups, retention requirements and blacklists on trades on
securities held by my employer. Tl;Dr; I have savings to cover my debts, but
cant legally access most of it.

I'm not unhappy that I got married, but I didn't consider the financial
repercussions before I went through with it.

~~~
prawn
With debt from marriage, are you talking about the costs of a wedding, or
taking on debt from your wife or something else?

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hermitdev
Taking on debt from my wife, cost of the rings, wedding was cheap, we just did
a justice of the peace wedding. Also, furniture for our new place (needed more
than my 1-bedroom + den apartment). Lots of little things that just kept
adding on.

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yellowapple
Ironic; even Oracle execs ain't immune to being sued by Oracle.

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NikkiA
Calling Larry an 'exec' is seriously downplaying his role in Oracle though, he
is, after all, co-founder, chairman and ex-CEO of the company.

~~~
yellowapple
The current CEO is also a target of said lawsuit-blessing, so "execs" is a
reasonable description that encompasses both (without something wordier like
"current and former Oracle CEOs").

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poseva
It seems that Oracle is like a cradle of corruption: [https://emerging-
europe.com/news/oracle-romania-boss-accused...](https://emerging-
europe.com/news/oracle-romania-boss-accused-of-taking-870000-euros-in-bribes/)

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microtherion
I expect that some former SolarCity shareholders will be watching this lawsuit
closely.

~~~
joelx
You mean Tesla. SolarCity was bankrupt and worthless nearly when Musk overpaid
for it.

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data4lyfe
I need the simple English version on what exactly this lawsuit is about.

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bob1029
Larry Ellison owned 40% of NetSuite when it was purchased at a very high
price. He effectively ran both sides of the deal (between oracle and NetSuite)
and funneled shareholder money into his own pockets via the transaction.
Allegedly.

~~~
lonelappde
Sold for $10B (3 years ago). 40% of that is $4B, of Ellison's $65B financial
networth.

The amount Ellison profited from scheming (the premium over actual value,
discounted by the fact that Ellison owns much of money being spent on the
purchase) seems...not big enough to matter? But his greed is unbridled?

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rosybox
I don't really understand when you already have billions of dollars why having
more billions of dollars even matters anymore. How is more billions going to
change your standard of living? You can buy two islands instead of just one?
When you have so much money, how is getting more money a motivation?

~~~
hannasanarion
Larry Ellison is a particularly greedy bastard. You could make a James Bond
movie with him as the villain and nobody would notice.

He owns an island in Hawaii where the locals work for him as de facto serfs.

He has donated to two charities in his life: one to Stanford in exchange for
not admitting fault in an options backdating scandal, and one to set up a
charitable foundation to research ways to extend his own life.

The mission statements and internal marching orders at Oracle and his various
other companies is "make lots of money for Larry". Nothing else matters, they
will screw the users, screw the customers, screw the product, screw the
employees, screw the open source community, screw the legal system, as long as
there's revenue for Larry, the bosses are happy bacause that's all that the
company exists for.

~~~
a_imho
What else should for profit companies exist for?

~~~
t-writescode
For profit companies should exist for whatever they want to exist for, as long
as they can stay alive.

Public companies, on the other hand, apparently have a legal obligation to
make as much money as possible, a feature I find despicable.

~~~
chalst
The idea that company directors have a fiduciary duty to maximise shareholder
value is mostly a myth: it is one of those ideas that many economists like
that seem to simplify things but actually can't be made to work. James Kwak
has a nice article (Medium, sorry) on this

[https://medium.com/bull-market/there-is-no-effective-
fiducia...](https://medium.com/bull-market/there-is-no-effective-fiduciary-
duty-to-maximize-profits-939ae50d0572)

> The specific fiduciary duties of corporate directors...are common law: legal
> principles that have been established by courts in the process of
> adjudicating cases over the years. As it turns out, in Delaware, which is
> the state that matters—not only because most large corporations are
> incorporated there, but because courts in other states tend to look to
> Delaware law when dealing with new issues of corporate law—there are exactly
> two fiduciary duties: the duty of loyalty and the duty of care.

> They duty of care is basically the duty to pay attention to your job: in
> essence, to make decisions on the basis of reasonably adequate information.
> There is an academic controversy—fueled by careless uses of language by the
> courts—about whether the standard of conduct is negligence or gross
> negligence. But the point here is that the duty of care isn’t a duty to do
> any particular thing, such as maximize profits.

> The duty of loyalty is marginally more complicated. This duty (like the duty
> of care) existed in agency law—the law governing the relationship between
> agents, such as employees, and principals, such as companies—before
> corporations became widespread in the nineteenth century. There, the duty of
> loyalty essentially meant that you couldn’t use your position as an agent to
> make a personal profit—by stealing directly from the principal, via a
> transaction with the principal, or, in the famous case of Reading v. Regem,
> by using your British Army uniform to help smugglers during your off hours.

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totaldude87
Good luck fighting Oracle's elite lawyers ..

Suits. Season 11 awaits

~~~
onetimemanytime
There are other elite lawyers in the country...just give them a chance to sue
a rich, greedy person and they'll do it. For bragging rights. And money

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codesternews
What is current Oracle DB alternative which can fully replace it? Do we have
any option in market which can fully replace Oracle DB?

~~~
Bartweiss
What's hard to replace about it?

That's not meant as a dismissal, I'm just not very familiar with Oracle DB and
I haven't heard about it dominating on query performance or language features.
That might imply it wins at scales I haven't ever needed, but I could imagine
some other reasons.

Are the standing advantages support and scaling, basic features, or something
else?

~~~
Can_Not
I have heard rumors that Oracle DB is the best, but I've heard too many bad
things about the parent company to ever look outside of postgres/mariadb.

