130 points

Oracle is a law firm with a large IT department.

They’ve been giving us shit because they “see downloads from our IP addresses”. It’s an absolute shake-down operation. They let anybody download their poisoned jvm for free and then tell your company that they now owe them a fortune.

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44 points

It’s time for corporate IT to block that download

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19 points

We’d love to but we do have some legitimate needs for it since Oracle software requires their jvm. It’s a massive pain in the ass.

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7 points
*

Openjdk: https://openjdk.org/

Or for people that use jre or want installers: https://adoptopenjdk.net/releases.html

We just went through all of this and we just switched to openjdk without issues.

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1 point

What’s hilarious is that the AdoptOpenJDK project (now called Adoptium) managed to create a better UI than Oracle ever had for downloads.

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124 points

It feels like actual innovation in all sectors has slowed to a crawl, and corporations – especially the ones run by MBA parasites – are concentrating more and more on just squeezing money out of people with various bullshit tactics, while at the same time thinning their workforce (naturally the MBAs are never under threat, though)

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68 points

Oracle was never really innovative on a technical level , it’s first and foremost a company focused on selling licenses, and they’re really innovative in that regard but if you fall for that as a company, I have no pity, this is their whole schtick.

Big companies in general are often rather conservative in nature while innovation happens on smaller scale and later expands.

The big problem is rather that a lot of innovation has been absorbed by the big companies via buyouts, especially when money was cheap to borrow. Innovation bears risk, buying an established solution and milking existing users much less so.

I don’t think the users are without blame. A lot of people ignore the red flags when a solution is just convenient enough (we need the commercial support / this exactly covers our use case so we don’t have to hire someone to adapt it / …) and the vendor then cashes out when moving away from his solution would be really expensive.

I think there’s still a lot of innovation lately, but a lot people are just looking for the next big thing that does everything it feels like.

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39 points
*

I was a developer at Oracle. We got handed down sales goals. ??? It was a running joke in our org that oracle is a sales company and we just scramble to make what they’re selling. When I left half our org had been laid off or left. Only got two raises in the 5 years I was there. Not worth.

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10 points

The big problem is rather that a lot of innovation has been absorbed by the big companies via buyouts

Which ultimately does seem to lead to innovation slowing down. The big players buy out any potential smaller competitors, and very often just outright kill the products / services they inherited in the acquisition.

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5 points

oracle did not develop java. it was developed at sun, which oracle then bought

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5 points

Alright, not that I wrote or implied that anywhere… In fact Java was probably the whole reason Oracle bought Sun to gain leverage over Android. Which fits very much into what I wrote - one company innovates, another one buys them to squeeze users (Google wasn’t a customer of Sun, they used their own implementation which wasn’t exactly Java but also not exactly anything else). Just that Sun by all means wasn’t a small company, I mean they controlled almost a full stack with their own processors (SPARC), workstations and servers (Blade was somewhat famous), an operating system with Solaris (and if you want to count it even JavaOS) and Java on top of those, and they contributed a lot of technology like NFS, ZFS (license discussions aside). On the other hand, when they bought someone, the product wasn’t just milked to death, but actually integrated into their stack and continued to be developed in the open.

Shame it turned out that way, I guess Sun was a bit overleveraged with how much they did vs. how much they made from it. And to think that Oracle paid less than a fifth than what Twitter sold for later for all of that technology to go to waste, just for a chance to sue Google… But we long as suits continue to license their stuff because they have cool advertisements at airports, this will keep going.

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2 points

Oracle was never really innovative on a technical level

Even their RDBMS and SQL was copied from ideas that came from IBM. And I recall either E. F. Codd or one of the SQL guys making a remark about Oracle’s less-than-saviour sales tactics, even back in the 90s.

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16 points

We’re at the end-times for western capitalism, where rent-seeking has become the primary driver of markets. It’s happening all around us.

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9 points
*

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4 points

corporations – especially the ones run by MBA parasites

Is that not all of them right now?

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0 points

Probably the majority

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103 points
*

Lol brb gonna share this with the CFO and watch them go into a panic. Going to bet they’ll freak out and by the end of 2024, no more Java for us.

This is the golden ticket I’ve been waiting for.

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58 points

You will just switch to one of the openjdk implementations

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36 points

Obviously OpenJDK is superior to dealing with Oracle’s bull. But even more superior (IMO) is simply not using Java. My life has been noticeably more pleasant since I started refusing to touch Java.

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22 points

No offense but I have never seen a good developer complain about java.

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16 points
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Did you stop programming altogether? /s

I think you can potentially get stuck with worse when you stop Java.

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5 points

This isn’t Java it’s the jvm. Other languages run on it as well.

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9 points

I’ve only seen this switch go really well. The odds are good .

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14 points

Good luck

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79 points
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Oracle quoted us 30K because a small handful of our users needed to use a .jnlp application a couple times per year. It took me a couple of days but I got it working with Corretto and a program called OpenWebStart.

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1 point
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idrac console? I tried open web start, no joy

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73 points

One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison

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15 points

Not going to lie, that is the only way I remember how to spell the company name now.

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9 points

Wired name for a lawn mower.

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3 points

Are lawn mower names normally wireless?

Anti Commercial-AI license

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7 points

Oracle Ruined America’s Cup (Larry Ellison)

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