
Ask HN: Why do so many people have a problem with Oracle? - apacheCamel
A couple threads on HN have repeated criticism towards Oracle (almost always negative) but never really fully explain where it all came from. I have been hearing it on here for a quite but never really knew the reason behind it. Why is the HN crowd so against Oracle?
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hacktember
I think it's because they are perceived to be focused on marketing, keeping
special interest groups happy at the expense of others, and patent trolling
and not so much on creating truly good products, IHMO. I can't objectively
measure how much of that perception is actually true, but their subscription
model for Java, their systemic underpayment of their women employees, and
their frivolous lawsuit against Google didn't help.

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davismwfl
To be fair, Oracle at one time had what was probably the most stable system to
handle large RDBMS loads on the market. That was a long time ago, but they did
deserve their status as a tech giant that had good products at one time.

Oracle of the last say ~20 years has turned into a coward of a company in that
they do not really invent but instead "copy", purchase (to remove from market)
and spend large amounts of money trying to discredit other good technology.
When they do buy things, they generally move it into the realm of the Oracle
sphere which means they over price everything, remove as much as possible from
the open market and require you pay for services to try and configure and
install it. They try to paywall everything possible to extract every penny
possible. You do have to hand it to them in one way, they have created a cash
machine, even if many of us think it should crumble. I am not against them
making money from things the create or purchase, but I am against the
unscrupulous ways in which they do it.

When I was running my consulting firm we had a large Fortune 500 client where
we were brought in to modernize their supply chain and backend systems. It
took us around a year and a half total and we touched almost every system in
their business. That timeframe includes closing the deal, documentation etc.
It was a very very large system overall, of which we provided the core
components and helped other integration people along as well as some of their
own staff (so not easy). Well about 6-7 months before we were hired to do that
major project, the company had brought in Oracle Financials to replace their
accounting and financial modeling, reporting & compliance tools. When we
wrapped up and left, Oracle STILL hadn't deployed a complete and successful,
working solution beyond some small components after 2 years of efforts. Yes,
the database was installed, yea the software was mostly installed, but the
client couldn't use it to run their business and there were talks of legal
getting involved every day. All the while Oracle kept charging more and more
in consulting fees and increasing license costs.

That is one instance of a pattern I have seen over 20+ years from Oracle. They
are just not a good company, they work to trap clients in relatively one sided
agreements with lofty promises but then fail to deliver in almost every case.

I do know quite a few engineers that work (or have worked) at Oracle and at
least of the ones I know they are highly intelligent and very capable people
(that generally are paid handsomely, e.g. golden handcuffs of sort). IMO
Oracle's product problems are not because of a lack of talent or capability
but one of the business intentionally complicating things (with bureaucracy
and poor planning) to the point that no one can deliver on the promises made.

