As an older tech person, it's legit heartwarming watching the TikTok generation discover why we all hate Oracle.
in reply to John Bull

Every once in a while, an Oracle-related salesperson emails me asking to schedule a meeting, usually to pitch me something from a subsidiary. I reply:

"I know better than to become an Oracle customer."

The older salespeople just silently remove me from their list, but I've also had younger salespeople ask me to explain. I always do. Each time I've genuinely been the first person who's explained why someone might specifically wish to _not_ have a business relationship with Oracle.

in reply to Will Glynn

This goes the other way too: Oracle bought Dyn Inc and we immediately prioritized a migration away. Our account rep couldn't understand: "nothing changed!" "We've been a happy Dyn customer for years, but I can't risk doing business with Oracle. It's time to go."

We left on our terms, and of course then they killed the platform and laid everyone off, because Oracle's gonna Oracle.

in reply to John Bull

Everyone in the IT industry has at least one Oracle story. Mine is that Sun Microsystems won an intranet contract with us using their Portal and app-server. Right after this Oracle bought them and killed both products. The Sun rep recommended we switch to Liferay (which also supported Java portlets) but that did not scale at all… Some of the other Sun products escaped into Forgerock (OpenIDM, OpenAM and OpenDS) luckily.

reshared this

in reply to John Bull

And their flagship database is an enormous pile of Crap. Many people feed their families by knowing its quirks and difficulties, but I'd rather be productive.

To give you just one example: Oracle SQL HAS NO BOOLEAN DATA TYPE. The official recommendation is to use a 1 char field. What goes into that? Well, who knows? "Y/N" ? "y/n"? "O/N" if you're french? "1/0"?

In many shops, the result is supposedly boolean fields that contain 3, 5, even 7 different values. Yikes.

in reply to John Bull

A product my employer used for a decade was bought out by oracle through another acquisition. Luckily the product was already sunset and there was only a six month overlap between EOL and the acquisition. Two years later we are still fighting bills incurred after EOL date. Sales order vs opportunities something or other. Trying to explain to CFO how Oracle is a money machine not a tech company made me sound like a crazy person. I think he is starting to get it now.
in reply to John Bull

Aside from the solarcide, I didn’t really have much ire towards Oracle. They were awful towards their customers but their products were so expensive that anyone who was an Oracle customer could have easily afforded to not be an Oracle customer. In contrast, a load of other big tech companies were abusive to people who weren’t their customers, or to people who were their customers only because they had no other choice.
in reply to Maho 🦝🍻

@mapache That's what I came here trying to find out, too! From reading through, it looks like it's just that Oracle bought TikTok, I guess? (And so I guess it's really that the younger generation is*about to* discover, etc., etc., not that they're doing so yet?)

I'd be happy to get more information, if there is any.

in reply to John Bull

Oracle has always been terrible even before the current controversies; see what they did to OpenSolaris for an example, bastards killed a project that was only a year old at the time.

Granted OpenSolaris is lived on by Illumos/OpenIndiana, which is both a hard fork of and a spiritual successor to OpenSolaris, but still, Oracle killed an infant project when they bought out Sun; that's horrible no matter how you slice it.

OpenSolaris didn't even get to graduate from its proverbial crawling stage ffs.