I worked at Oracle until very recently.<p>They are a rent-seeking, lawsuit-heavy cancer upon this Earth.<p>Oracle routinely sues its own employees.<p>Oracle routinely moves to stamp out innovation.<p>Oracle's stock price has increased over the past decade, but only from acquisition and price-gouging large corporations and agencies.<p>It is a racket. Working at Oracle is the antithesis of creating fun and useful software for everyone's gain.
I'm curious why the mods changed the title from "Java Creator James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle (2010)" to "Why I Quit Oracle (2010)"<p>The fact that it is James Gosling saying this instead of a random employee seems important.
As another Oracle anecdote, a family member worked for IBM (this was about 15 years ago) as a software engineer and then as (what is now called) a sales engineer/technical consultant, where he'd travel to client sites and demo IBM products, answer technical questions, etc.<p>He said Oracle was without a doubt the most unethical competitor they ever had. IBM had internal guidelines on acceptable limits for gifts, meals etc you could give to clients, but Oracle sales people had no such qualms and would sometimes essentially bribe VPs/whoever had the power to make the purchasing decision.<p>IBM was certainly no saint (this family member ended up leaving a few years later), but he was astounded by how ethically untethered Oracle as a company was.
An anecdote from the article which really speaks volumes.<p>> <i>Making his point about the "creepiness," not only with Ellison but with Oracle's power structure, Gosling said he sparked a notion to try to improve morale amongst the Sun faithful who endured the Oracle acquisition. He said the company decided to rent out the Great America amusement park in Santa Clara, Calif., and allow the Sun folks to have a day of fun. Scott McNealy and Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz signed off on the project that came in well under budget and all systems were go, Gosling said. Except a few days before the event was to occur, Oracle Co-President Safra Catz got wind of it and put the kibosh on the thing.</i><p>> <i>"Safra found out and had a fit," Gosling said. "The word came down that Oracle does not do employee appreciation events. So she forced the thing to be cancelled. But they didn't save any money because the money had been spent - so we ended up giving the tickets to charities. We were forced to give it up because it wasn't the -Oracle Way.' On the other hand, Oracle sponsors this sailboat for about $200 million."</i>
I knew Gosling when he resided in Calgary. A very bright guy but he was also extremely possessive of Java. Even during the Sun days it was clear it was his baby, and nobody else’s.<p>I can imagine him being very frustrated at oracle and google where motivations are different enough to not cause his ego to be fed.<p>And as much of a scourge Oracle is they have moved java forward much fast and further versus Sun. All with gosling being sidelined. Perhaps that is part of his motivation for this article. Someone raised his baby better than he could.
I got the chance to talk to Gosling at a discussion about adding closures to Java a while back. You could tell immediately that he was an amazing and incredibly friendly guy. I have a ton of respect for him.<p>That being said, this is a really boring article. If there was anything meaty, he said he couldn't really say. The rest of it is that Oracle didn't pay him well and effectively demoted him. I feel like that is really unsurprising given Oracle's stance with Java and Sun stuff. They bought it strategically, not because they liked Java. Same for them with MySQL. They don't care, it's just another line item on their corporate acquisitions. The fact that they aren't taking the people they acquired seriously, even a fantastic guy like Gosling, is just another day at a mega corp.<p>Edit - grammar.
Alright, let's have the periodic bout of Oracle bashing, we all know it is well-deserved.<p>But allow me a bit of devil's advocate playacting.<p>There are some incontrovertible facts: as fun as it could have been for employees to work there, Sun wasn't making enough money, so it died; and as shit as Oracle can be for employees (and boy do I know that as an ex-O), they are still there squeezing out cash for Larry (and for Wall Street) on command.<p>Oracle is the ugly side of the market, but you'll never have a market without an ugly side. It takes skills to walk the tightrope between hard realities and "being fun geeks", and sometimes there is a lot of hypocrisy involved. Oracle just don't care, they are out for the dollar and they don't really hide it. At least with them you know where you stand from day 1.
Pretty much all you need to know about working at Oracle:<p><i>Making his point about the "creepiness," not only with Ellison but with Oracle's power structure, Gosling said he sparked a notion to try to improve morale amongst the Sun faithful who endured the Oracle acquisition. He said the company decided to rent out the Great America amusement park in Santa Clara, Calif., and allow the Sun folks to have a day of fun. Scott McNealy and Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz signed off on the project that came in well under budget and all systems were go, Gosling said. Except a few days before the event was to occur, Oracle Co-President Safra Catz got wind of it and put the kibosh on the thing.</i><p><i>"Safra found out and had a fit," Gosling said." The word came down that Oracle does not do employee appreciation events. So she forced the thing to be cancelled. But they didn't save any money because the money had been spent - so we ended up giving the tickets to charities. We were forced to give it up because it wasn't the -Oracle Way.' On the other hand, Oracle sponsors this sailboat for about $200 million."</i>
It makes me sad that organizations like the BC Gov't bend and over and take whatever crap Oracle decides to throw at them. The amount of money and developer effort that is spent on Oracle is staggering. All because 'no one gets fired for choosing Oracle'. They are blight on the industry.
> And the micromanagement Gosling says he felt may have been less of an issue at IBM. Specifically, Gosling says he felt the hand of Larry Ellison in nearly all the decisions affecting Java. Certainly IBM Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano would not personally get his hands into the goings on with an acquisition, even a key one like Sun. But then IBM is not the house that Sam built like Oracle is Ellison's creation. There is a major difference in that.<p>Why the fuck has Larry Ellison sidelined the creator of Java in the development of Java in favor of himself making the key decisions? What qualifications does Ellison have to make these decisions? That's just colossally egocentric and incompetent.
Discussion at the time: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1716731" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1716731</a>