
Anti-Google research group in Washington is funded by Oracle - shawndumas
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/anti-google-research-group-in-washington-is-funded-by-oracle/
======
madaxe_again
A friend did a stint at oracle, before quitting in disgust. He'd been sold the
position as working on innovation in their cloud division. It turned out to be
more like industrial espionage, constantly changing tack to follow Google,
never actually shipping anything, or pursuing any particular strategy other
than "me too!". Under the hood their cloud is a broken pile of limping goshu
that they barely understand themselves, as the guys who threw it together a
few years back have also churned out. Their main cloud customer is.... Oracle!

Unless they start running their own race and stop looking at what the guy in
the other lane is doing, they're going zombie.

~~~
totalcrepe
Destroying the sun grid group and bad mouthing cloud wasn't the smartest way
to handle the buyout of Sun, in retrospect.

Solaris engineers know quite a bit about their stack and what it can and cant
do.. the trouble is trying to make a standard consortium by relying on garbage
code that sort of works on Linux. Anything you do better than Linux will just
be a problem for achieving ultimate bland.

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current_call
Engineering manager at Google posts story where whistle blowers that target
Google are called anti-Google researchers. The original article references
another article that calls the group a shadowy project that's attacking
Google. By the way, when's Google finishing the Wedding Crashers trilogy? I
need to see how great moving to California is again.

~~~
andybak
Who is an engineering manager at Google?

~~~
GranPC
shawndumas, the guy who posted the link.

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lossolo
They are doing this because people have very good opinion about Google and
imagine Oracle as some evil corporation that want to attack their favorite
sites (google, gmail, youtube etc). They would never win any lawsuit with jury
because of that - this is their motivation, change people emotions towards
Google.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
It's incredible to me how much people look the other way for Google. Talk
about privacy invasive features in Microsoft's products, everyone loses their
minds. Talk about privacy invasive features in Google products, people think
you're being paranoid.

~~~
dijit
Nobody thinks you're being paranoid by thinking google is selling your data,
that's known.

But Microsoft previously did not do this, and you're paying for the operating
system. To my knowledge you don't pay for google products. (excluding the
business apps suites, which are still cheap for what they are).

~~~
Oletros
Nor Google nor Microsoft sell any data

~~~
unfunco
One is an advertising company and the other also has an advertising division,
your data is used to target those advertisements, they're both absolutely
selling your data.

~~~
bobdole1234
Google can match you with an advertiser based on your data without selling or
disclosing that data to the advertiser.

If an advertiser wants people who have searched for things related to cars in
the last month, Google can send them impressions to bid on without any
information about you changing hands at all.

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adrianratnapala
Ok, I understand SV giants slinging IP lawsuits at each other. But do any of
them really gain from slinging mud at each other? Put another way: is this a
profit-maximising buisness move, or just Larry Ellison's personality shining
through.

The irony is that this sort of rough-and-tumble accountability is a good
thing. So the only actual effect of this funding might be to make the world a
better place, whether Larry likes it or not.

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goombastic
Oracle should probably invest that money in doing actual R&D for itself. It
hasn't been doing well of late in the ERP market. Have oracle's cloud moves
failed?

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johnnydoebk
>> Anti-Google research group in Washington is funded by Oracle

Does it matter? Research is either legit or BS. That's all that matters,
doesn't it?

~~~
sigsergv
Depends what one calls BS. Quick look at GTP-generated news gives impression
that all covered topics are quite legal, but presentation looks FUDish. Like:
“Google employees have enjoyed revolving door during Obama administration” [1]

[1]: [http://watchdog.org/265844/google-obama-revolving-
door/](http://watchdog.org/265844/google-obama-revolving-door/)

~~~
adrianratnapala
FUDish as it might be, it gave people -- including us here at HN -- an
opportunity to discuss the pros and cons of such things.

This is what democracy looks like.

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56k
Your enemy's enemy is your friend

