Ask HN: Is Oracle that much more evil than other big companies?

Oracle is “most evil” because they maximise the harm they can do legally and have mastered the art of lock-in and rent seeking.

Often they will even acquire companies to expand the rent seeking empire.

Their flagship product has strict legal requirements that you are never allowed to publish benchmarks of comparable systems and believe me they have the legal force on staff to pursue you indefinitely.

They very much deserve the reputation they have.

Google, Microsoft et al. throw the community a bone with loss leaders and generate good will by not being especially litigious.

Netflix is basically not evil in any definable way.

Apple is divisive; their biggest issue is that they are awful to work for and have mastered the art of audience segmentation which is why they can charge $400 for 8G of RAM. Which to many feels evil.

Oracle is easily the worst of these.

Unsurprisingly -- and as happens almost reflexively on any HN post involving Oracle -- my talk from LISA 2011[0] has already been cited here. I expanded on that in my OSCON 2015 talk[1], to which I would add this: thinking about Oracle as "evil" is really the wrong way of thinking about them; to think of them as diabolical is to infuse the place with a kind of humanity (if crooked) that it doesn't necessarily contain. Oracle is soulless, which may or may not be worse than other companies, but it is decidedly different: however deluded they might be, Meta thinks that they are making the world a better place; Oracle not only doesn't harbor any such delusions, they are further genuinely confused why anyone would care about a higher purpose or calling.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc#t=33m2s

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpnncakrelk#t=14m32s

Few years ago I was having a "let's get to know each other" lunch with an account executive . He was very successful in sales in the company we both worked at the time and quite clearly prior to it. So I asked him about his career history. [It is important for this story to note here that this guy is extremely handsome, and knows it] He describing starting as a shoe salesman in women's shoes in Bellevue Nordstrom, as he put it "flirting with all the mothers coming to buy shoes". Checks out. He progresses and a decade and a half later he's an Oracle rep. Eventually, he said, the money was good but he "got tired of being the most hated man in the room".

If you're an IC at an Oracle customer and you have to interact with their products, you may have a very valid reason to hate them.

The people who make purchasing decisions love them. As long as you pay the ransom, Oracle loves you back. The lawyers can be very friendly if you know to stay on their good side.

Oracle is known for being very aggressive with litigation and legal threats, exceptionally so even vs the other tech giants.

On the other hand, I know an oracle dev that suffered a horrible accident and took two years to rehabilitate. Oracle kept him on paid leave that whole time despite it being unrelated to the workplace and past their usual policy.

So based on that my understanding of them now is that they're more than a bit hostile/malignant to those outside the mothership, but not necessarily evil to each other inside it.

Probably a bit worse. Most everything they make is true garbage, and no one really cares. Letting their software into your business is definitely cancer-like.

However when I worked there it was extremely comfy, so as an employer I would rate it very highly. Very remote friendly too!

As an Oracle DBA, I just complain about Oracle wherever I can. Is it to subconsciously lead people away from the high paying DBA jobs and leave them for myself? The software is garbage for sure, but after a while everything is garbage and idk what to work with anymore. PeopleSoft can burn in hell for the rest of forever though. I would quit my job if they tried to move me to that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=1980s is the canonical reference

My 2 cents as a sysadmin who has worked with countless systems and databases: there has never been a more unintuitive database system than Oracle (atleast from the administrative side).

Anecdote: Back when I was just an apprentice, I was tasked to duplicate an Oracle database (the Oracle guy just left the company). It took me over 3 hours to figure that one out (exp vs expdp, FULL=Y and OWNER=FOO come to mind).

And don't even get me started on PDBs and usernames starting with "C##"!

Oracle? The law firm with an IT department?

Sad how Microsoft doesn't get the reactions it deserves anymore. Probably the single most harmful entity to computing.

Oracle has always had predatory pricing and treat their customers like indentured servants. However they don't generate the ink of the tech giants because they aren't one. By market cap they are medium sized at best.

Oracle doesn't have products the general public would use on the scale of a Microsoft, Amazon, or Google. So these larger companies are scrutinized far more.

More than other big tech companies: ye. Oracle's deception machine begins with the claim that it's a tech company. It is not. It's a litigation company, not dissimilar to what we now call "patent trolls". Their business model is to infiltrate themselves into a company by any means necessary, then hold it hostage using their law department tentacles.

Have you ever noticed how their products never - ever - improve over time? Thy don't have to innovate. If they fall too much behind on a segment, they just buy some new product. To me, that's their most evil aspect. I don't care if some corporation gets held hostage by some other corporation. Let the billionaires fight to death, I don't care. The sad externality of it is the death of innovation.

My perception of the stereotype is not that Oracle is more evil, it’s that it’s lamer.

I'm guessing it depends on who you are. If you're small potatoes (a desktop user) then you literally don't exist to them. At least, I haven't heard any stories about them raking old grandmas over the coal for using the vb extention pack in their knitting group or whatever.

You do see that reaction to Microsoft -and it's justified. Moreover Microsoft does tend to impact the end user but even that aside...it's a rare comment section that doesn't mention things like "Embrace, extend, extinquish" or the AARD code or the Halloween Documents when the story involves MS.

Now, if you're a part of the demographic that Oracle targets; that's a different story, and probably a worse one at that.

as ex-Oracle, likely no more evil than the FAANG (or whatever they're calling themselves), but those who hate it, really hate it

I don't think that it's more "evil" than the other big "evil" companies (and there are a few companies that are at least an order of magnitude more evil), but that it became such well before most of the others. OG evil, so to speak.

Oracle has also spent decades picking fights with large parts of the dev community, and so has built up a lot more resentment than many other companies.

My experience is that, at my first job out of college, I found out while learning SQL on the corp dev sandbox (specifically allocated for prototyping and learning SQL) that one of the functions I'd invoked had been part of some special function that we hadn't purchased. Not having purchased it didn't mean that the function was removed or deactivated or paywalled - instead, it meant that it would work and increment the "number of times this feature has been used" flag that the Oracle auditors could have used to charge my company millions and millions of extra dollars because we were using the feature.

It's a pretty good place to work for a time. Don't let folk who b!tch that they're the devil tell you that they are unless you experience the company yourself. Lots of folk leave disgruntled because Oracle doesn't give in to their financial demands.

I think it only exists to launder some government contract money. It provides no other discernable service.

probably was probably isn't anymore

today I would say Microsoft holds the crone again

partially because they got so good at tricking people temporary into believing they are not

through that is looking at the western world, if you look beyond but using wester values like privacy then the crone probably gets passed to ByteDance

yes

yup.