On Wed, 5 Feb 2020, Ben Koenig wrote:
On Wed, Feb 5, 2020 at 8:02 AM Paul Heinlein <[email protected]> wrote:
On Tue, 4 Feb 2020, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
Sigh. Shoulda left after the Oracle takeover.
Oracle, like the House of the Rising Sun, has been the ruin of many a
poor, er, software.
Back in the day, we used a nice little shared calendar program called
CorporateTime. It had Windows, Mac, and X11 clients -- so all our
users had supported native access. The server portion (a Windows
application) required relatively few resources and could run on just
about any capable machine.
Then Oracle bought it. You only get one guess as to what happened:
bloat, expense, dropped X11 support, tie-ins with the Oracle RDBMS
system, ...
Every buyer needs a willing seller. Assuming that nothing illegal is going
on, I find it hard to get upset over the actions of Oracle, when smaller
companies that keep selling out. It seems like we are still stuck in this
societal craze of starting a software company, finishing a single product
or service, and then immediately whoring yourself out to the highest
bidder. I'm no economist, but my understanding is that there is no inherent
requirement to accept an "offer" made by another individual or business
entity.
Do you think we should blame Oracle for making an offer that others can
refuse?
I'm not sure where in my note I critiqued the economics of the Oracle
purchase. I don't think I said anything about the market economy
whatsoever.
I noted that Oracle took a product that met our needs and turned it
into something that did not. Oracle offered fewer native clients, tied
it to their large and exceedingly expensive RDBMS, and raised
considerably the system resources needed to run the server daemon.
Those are all fairly objective assessments of Oracle's treatment of
the product, not of the transaction by which Oracle bought it.
You're welcome to call out those critical of capitalist markets, but
please don't set me up a straw man. PLUG deserves better than that.
--
Paul Heinlein
[email protected]
45°38' N, 122°6' W
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