Let's take a look at Oracle's love and hate relationship with open source software

All companies use open source now, but some, such as Oracle, have never been completely comfortable with it. Back in 2009, I followed Oracle's acquisition of Sun as closely as a tick on a dog's neck. I doubted very much that it would work out well. I thought Sun would have been better off with IBM. In the end, it was a mixed …

[sarusa]

'love and hate'

I'd say less 'love and hate' and more 'abusive wife beater who wonders why his slag doesn't have his pint ready yet so he clocks her a few times to show her who's head of household, then next morning vaguely feels he might have done something wrong but him being wrong is just not possible, so he does it again. And maybe next week he splashes his flash cash (which he's taken from the previous woman) around and brings home another tart, rinse and repeat'. But yes, 'love and hate' is certainly shorter.

[chasil]

aspects of dedication

Oracle does a lot for specific open-source projects, that are of great benefit to the industry as a whole. Yes, there are a lot of people who have negative experiences with Oracle as a company, but that doesn't diminish the good that is done.

Oracle employs an XFS maintainer. People use XFS because it's fast, and Oracle's improvements have addressed problems and are bringing extensive new functionality. As a rising tide lifts all ships, a rising filesystem lifts all databases.

https://blogs.oracle.com/authors/darrick-wong

Oracle really holds the Linux filesystem landscape in its hands, via their influence on XFS, btrfs, and ZFS. I don't agree on their direction with this (and a lot of people have a problem with it), but IBM certainly didn't do this.

"Chris Mason, an engineer working on ReiserFS for SUSE at the time, joined Oracle later that year and began work on a new file system based on these B-trees."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs

Oracle has done a lot with NFS over ONC RPC, one result being RFC-9289.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9289.txt

In summary, there is a lot going on with Oracle contributions (and their lack). It's not as simple as some might assert.

[CowHorseFrog]

All businesses use open source NOW ?

Shouldnt that mean HAVE ALWAYS ?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Oracle Binary Code License (BCL) for Java

“The Oracle Binary Code License (BCL) is primarily a non-exclusive, non-transferable, limited license provided by Oracle.” ref

November 2006: Sun begins releasing Java under the GPL

[John Geek]

I've always said, Oracle treats open source as a weapon to use against its competition.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm no fan of Oracle, but not sure the projects you mention here really paint the full picture. They currently maintain nearly 300 open source projects on https://github.com/oracle.

[seven of five]

Hey Larry: Fuck off, Larry.

[Anonymous Coward]

Genuine question - is there any good reason for choosing MySQL (or MariaDB, etc) over PostgreSQL for a new project today? I ask this as someone with a long-standing (20 years!) project in prod that was built on MySQL and moved to MariaDB. It was to be easy to get up and running with low resource requirements. I remember that the LAMP stack also made it very popular for pet projects, but it was always a compromise. I remember for quite some time it didn't even support foreign keys and they used to put out laughable articles about why foreign keys were a bad thing. Until InnoDB arrived then foreign keys became a good thing. It wasn't fully ANSI SQL compliant - e.g. Inline views didn't work properly (limited to one level maybe?), Maybe they do now. We had to create loads of named views needed in only one query. It was basically a bit crap compared to serious DBs such as Oracle, DB2 and PostgreSQL. They've probably fixed some of this stuff over the years but I don't see a reason to waste time considering it when I can download and run a PostgreSQL container in moments. An I Missing something?

[dbdemon]

"Am I missing something?"

In a word - yes. Both MySQL and especially MariaDB have come a long way since the early days you talk about. Indeed, so has Postgres, but Postgres is still a "one connection = one process" database, and of course you still has all the fun of vacuuming. And Postgres also doesn't replicate DDL statements, which is a bit ridiculous.

[adamr001]

"Sun's hardware portfolio is no longer available..."

They might have killed off some hardware (RIP Sun Ray), but you can still get servers and storage from Oracle.

[Bill Bickle]

The only open source they actively work on is one where they are a copycat/clone...

The only open source product that they actively work on and yell about is one that rips of Red Hat's brand name and brand equity.

Classic Oracle behavior - call Red Hat a bad citizen. Come on, get a life. If you want to do your own Linux, do it like AWS does and stop with Red Hat as your Daddy that you try to say is an abusive father.