Sometimes, I admire Oracle more than the supposed do-gooders at Google.
Oracle is a for-profit entity, they will take any legal or tactical advantage they can get (e.g., lawsuit over Java in Android), and they make no bones about it.
I don't like everything they do, but you know what you get with them.
Google says "don't be evil", yet they back off that principle when it's inconvenient (e.g., caving in to Chinese censorship demands, deal with Verizon over net neutrality, etc.).
So, if we make a Corporate entity as person analogy, you like someone who is unabashedly horrible and perfectly honest about it, rather than someone who tries to be good and is a dick sometimes.
If I were you, I think I would die from cynicism toxicity shock.
Well, either that or you think that all industry should be destroyed because all corporations should invariably end up being perfectly evil.
Let's test the theory: do you watch the TV show "House"?
If not, ask someone who does.
It's selling points are that 1) House is not quite, but almost always a total dickhead. Everyone else on the show are more normal doctors (which is to say, they're dicks, but they aren't as dedicated to being so). 2) House almost always figures out what's happening (but of course never right away, 'cause it's a TV show) because as much of a dedicated dickhead he is, he's also dedicated to being right - he's a caricature of the "I'd rather be right than liked" adage.
House is far and away the most popular character on the show, because, while he is an unpleasant, malicious, manipulative sod, he wants to figure out the cure to the disease, and make the patient feel good by being well.
Well, he's also popular because he's Hugh FREAKING Laurie, but that's another story...
The problem with "Don't be evil" is that it's subjective. Google isn't a hardcore idealist because people that refuse to cooperate unless all of their demands are met never really get anywhere (see RMS). Compromise is a fact of life for everyone. Principles shouldn't be compromised, and you have to draw the line, but you also have to cooperate with people who have a different perspective than yourself.
I don't see either censorship in China or the net neutrality proposal (which I don't know much about) as bonafide "evil". You may disagree, but it's hard to say that they are evil or done with evil intent.
Oracle, on the other hand, is pretty easy to call evil because they act out of cruel self-interest practically exclusively. Oracle is always taking cheap shots.
>because people that refuse to cooperate unless all of their demands are met never really get anywhere (see RMS).
RMS would be a clear counterexample. (See Linux, GNU utils, the recent GPLv3 release of Castle Wolfenstein, and many many other victories.) It's a curious sort of logic that says a hardline stance is ineffective because 100% of his goals aren't meant.
Not that moderates don't also serve a purpose, but the radicals are an absolute necessity.
I agree that radicals are important and that RMS particularly is useful because he pushes the dialogue forward and keeps new ideas on the table. It's a good goalpost.
But nobody takes RMS's advice as practical. It's just too extreme. Most people don't believe as RMS stated in his recent Reddit interview that the only way to ethically use a pacemaker or other life-saving device that relies on proprietary software would be to start developing an open-source replacement.
RMS has been somewhat successful, but I think much less than he would have been if he hadn't poured so many resources into the silly points that should have easily been let go, like "GNU/Linux".
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw
Most of Oracle's moves are short term plays. Growing the Java and Unix industries would allow them to sell boxes. These do the opposite, in favor of making cash now.
It's a long-term strategy and Sun ran out of juice. The strategy doesn't work by itself; you do the kinds of things Sun was doing to keep the ecosystem active and healthy, and then you release and aggressively promote a commercial Java IDE and make a ton of cash, and build other products on top of the ecosystem that you sustain.
In my opinion Sun's downfall was a serious overestimation of SPARC's performance. They needed to move and get something else out there.
So I should take away from this post that Oracle has given you more than Google did?
Because that's what it sounds like to me. Personally I admire companies that are giving me value.
> yet they back off that principle when it's inconvenient
Regarding both net neutrality and Chinese censorship, Google did what nobody else did.
So I really don't get this line of reasoning.
Personally I take away from this that my company shouldn't give a crap about anything other than money, because all you're achievements don't mean squat in the end apparently.
So I should take away from this post that Oracle has given you more than Google did?
Neither has given me anything that I didn't pay for, either directly or indirectly.
Regarding both net neutrality and Chinese censorship, Google did what nobody else did.
Which is what, exactly?
When push came to shove, they acted no differently than any other large corporation.
Personally I take away from this that my company shouldn't give a crap about anything other than money, because all you're [sic] achievements don't mean squat in the end apparently.
I don't understand your emotional attachment to Google.
mechanical_fish said it better than I could, so I'll just quote part of his reply here:
It would be refreshing if people stopped pretending that these inter-corporate battles had anything to do with either morality or the public good.
Neither has given me anything that I didn't pay for, either directly or indirectly.
That's not strictly true. I would argue that Google provides a greater amount of consumer surplus than Oracle. Consumer surplus pretty much amounts to value you obtain from a product or service that the producer can't capture in the price.
I am not exactly a starry-eyed admirer of the Gordon Gekkos of the world, but I tend to agree. It would be refreshing if people stopped pretending that these inter-corporate battles had anything to do with either morality or the public good.
I think that's a very shortsighted and dimwitted way of looking at things. The nebulous things like ideals are what guide people to their longer-term self-interest, their enlightened self-interest, rather than short-termism which hurts them in the longer term.
Google isn't always non-evil, but they're consistently less evil than all of the other large companies in technology.
Also, Oracle has never created anything really significant (in my opinion) other than their overpriced "enterprise" databases. Now it seems that they're hell bent on taking everything good that came out of Sun and destroying it.
So wait, you're saying that you admire Oracle because they're evil and greedy and admit it, and that you admire Google much less because they have a "don't be evil" slogan but sometimes make missteps?
That sounds a bit shortsighted to me. I suppose it's ok to find Oracle's forthright greed refreshing, but... admirable? I find it awful.
I never thought of "don't be evil" as an end-all be-all promise to always do the right thing, no matter what. It's a guiding principle, one that has to take the back seat in the face of more practical considerations sometimes. We may not agree with all of those "sometimes," but that doesn't make those decisions automatically wrong. Google isn't perfect, but at least it seems like they try to have a social conscience.
Or maybe they've just done a good job of brainwashing me into thinking they do.
>Oracle is a for-profit entity, they will take any legal or tactical advantage they can get (e.g., lawsuit over Java in Android), and they make no bones about it.
This has become a bit of a meme lately, and it's pretty tenuous.
Google makes lots of money by not being evil. People have given Google tremendous data that no other could get because they have a general trust that it will be used responsibly. In all of the fawning over the just released voice recognition in Android, almost no one noted that it means that much more of your interactions with your device will be sent to Google, which is something that few companies could get away with.
So seriously, people need to shitcan the "they're a public company" or "they're out to make money therefore they are evil" noise. It's dumb. Oracle is essentially pissing on all of the Sun assets that they acquired for a short term game because there is no long game in it -- Solaris is on the way outs, and even Java is almost dead in the mobile space (not counting Android...), and in the Enterprise space despite all of the rhetoric on here, it's dying and is largely the domain of legacy projects. Oracle is cashing in while they can like a standard troll.
Google, however, is in for the long haul, and their entire strategy depends upon a lot of trust by consumers. In other words they MAKE MONEY, fulfilling their public mandate, by not being evil. Strange, isn't that?
This argument would be just as ridiculous saying "Sometimes I admire [some shitty brand] more than the supposed high quality Apple. [Some shitty brand] is a for-profit entity, they will take any cost cutting measure they can get (flimsy materials, shoddy electronics), and they make no bones about it. Apple is just faking making a good product because, you know, they're out to make a buck"
Oracle is a for-profit entity, they will take any legal or tactical advantage they can get (e.g., lawsuit over Java in Android), and they make no bones about it.
I don't like everything they do, but you know what you get with them.
Google says "don't be evil", yet they back off that principle when it's inconvenient (e.g., caving in to Chinese censorship demands, deal with Verizon over net neutrality, etc.).