Comment by Iwan-Zotow
2 days ago
Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle
From "Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of Illumos" by Bryan Cantrill at LISA'11 [1]. Utterly amazing talk and I almost feel like it is given a disservice by everyone simply quoting that (albeit great) line.
[1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc
Thank you for sharing the attribution and link. Quote begins around 38m28s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2308s
He's a 4A: An Asshole Amongst Assholes. That's how Oracle and Microsoft made their fortunes: unrestrained greed.
More like "lack of effective competition."
I actually think that it does a disservice to not go to Nazi allegory, because if I don't use Nazi allegory when referring to Oracle there is some critical understanding that I have left on the table; there is an element of the story that you can't possibly understand.
In fact, as I have said before and I emphatically believe, if you had to explain the Nazis to somebody who had never heard of WWII but was an Oracle customer, there's a very good chance that you actually explain the Nazis in Oracle allegory.
So, it's like: "Really, wow, a whole country?"; "Yes, Larry Ellison has an entire country"; "Oh my god, the humanity! The License Audits!"; "Yeah, you should talk to Poland about it, it was bad. Bad, it was a blitzkrieg license audit."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fvDDPaIoY&t=1459s
The actual Nazis went with IBM though. Oracle wasn't born yet.
There is a lineage argument as Java built on IBM's CORBA.
It's like that with sarcasm, nobody on the internet understands what an analogy is either.