> 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. — Brian Cantrill (https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s)
And
> I actually think that it does a dis-service to not go to Nazi allegory because if I don't use Nazi allegory when referring to Oracle there's some critical understanding that I have left on the table […] in fact as I have said before I emphatically believe that if you have to explain the Nazis to someone who had never heard of World War 2 but was an Oracle customer there's a very good chance that you would explain the Nazis in Oracle allegory. — also Brian Cantrill (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fvDDPaIoY&t=24m)
https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1217
This has effectively dissuaded me from trying to perform benchmarks of Coverity and other commercial tools using LAVA [1], so I can attest to its chilling effect.
[1] https://seclab.ccs.neu.edu/static/publications/sp2016lava.pd...
Really, without the metaphor, what's going on is that Larry Ellison has modified himself to hold the values that a corporation holds, in order to more efficiently drive said corporation toward optimizing on its corporate goals (i.e. increase share value, etc.) Where human values and corporate values are in conflict, Ellison has chosen to forget about his human values and, effectively, become the avatar of the corporation's interests. He's the "ideal CEO", in about the same way as Locutus of Borg is an ideal CEO.
A better analogy for this effect, for those who understand it, would be to compare Ellison to a https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer, but that's not really that well-known a meme.
I don't know enough to validate this perspective, but it's something for all of us to consider:
https://blog.valerieaurora.org/2016/10/22/why-i-wont-be-atte...
Edit: here https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2mhpwp/postgre...
I've pointed this:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/11/congress-passes-...
out to my employer's lawyers, who responded with "well, yes, but we'd still get sued, by Oracle, so... no."
http://www.acmebenchmarking.com/2015/11/benchmarking-cloud-p...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Database#Releases_and...
It not only changed my perspective of the man but also the company. One can know a lot about a company's practices from the way it was founded. Now there is nothing about Oracle which surprises me any more.
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/indexes/downloads/index.ht...
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/licenses/standard-license-...
Of course there's the anti-benchmarking clause, but other than that, they offer the downloads free (as in beer).
It could be worse though. Cisco pressed criminal charges against this guy[0] for wanting to 3rd-party-service their equipment.
Happy 2017, peasants!
[0-0] http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Cisco+deceived+Canadian+cou...
[0-1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2507735/cybercrime-hac...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition#Idealizing...
"In economics, a free market is an idealized system in which the prices for goods and services are determined by the open market and consumers, in which the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government, price-setting monopoly, or other authority." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market
The requirement is for individual trades to occurs without duress or manipulation outside of the trade. Also, prohibiting information exchange by government regulation is not allowed as that interferes with the market.
While the consumer review protection law concerns individuals not companies (check the "form contract" definition), the license agreement seems to explicitly allow for individuals ("or as an individual"). There might be further license agreements after the download, but for that I'd agree to the terms of the license...
IANAL.
I'm not convinced that's generally true. The form contracts language [1] clearly talks about individuals, but at least one of the DB vendor license agreements allows for individuals. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15888236
If an individual were to decide to do such a benchmark, I don't immediately see how the DeWitt clause would be still valid. Not many people are going to risk that obviously.
> hese DeWitt clauses should be illegal in the United States on First Amendment ground
I agree that they shouldn't be allowed, I however fail to see how 1A applies. You willingly enter into a contract with a private entity. That contract has rules, and there are some consequences for breaking them.
I think the government has an important, and imo somewhat neglected, role in providing rules around valid contracts, but that's not 1A.
As a fun aside, here's an example of one of the few fully anonymous papers I know of:
But since the proprietary software has a "no benchmarking" clause, open source projects cannot respond to the whitepaper by performing their own benchmarking. They would need the permission of the proprietary vendor!
For example, here is an IBM blog post comparing the performance of IBM MQ and Apache ActiveMQ (https://webspherecompetition.wordpress.com/2015/03/12/ibm-mq...). I've tried to find a copy of the IBM MQ EULA to link, but cannot find one anywhere. But last time I reviewed it (several years ago) I believe it also had a "no benchmark" clause.
Between them you have : http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.201...
1 A market that is free from government interference, prices rising and falling in accordance with supply and demand.
2 A security that is widely traded on a stock exchange, there being sufficient stock on offer for the price to be uninfluenced by availability.
3 A foreign-exchange market that is free from influence on rates by governments, rates being free to rise and fall in accordance with supply and demand.
So, I can see why that was used, but it's not definitive.
https://d0.awsstatic.com/product-marketing/Aurora/RDS_Aurora...
With Oracle going all in on cloud, this mindset of Larry surely doesn't bode well?
You can find all the benchmarks you want here http://www.tpc.org/default.asp including Oracle.
The thing is, a skilled DBA, given two databases and told which one should be the winner, can easily construct a benchmark that seems perfectly plausible, but favours one over the other. The MongoDB guys did it very blatantly e.g. by comparing Postgres writing to disk with them writing to memory, but that's because they don't know anything about databases and lacked the skill to do it subtly, e.g. by finding pathological edge cases in query optimizers. That's what the commercial vendors are most worried about.
And I don't think government does everything inefficiently, at least in our country (cz).
So what do libertarians represent really? Quick search for "libertarian manifesto" shows https://mises.org/library/new-liberty-libertarian-manifesto which talks about abolishing nation state and such. That is hard to reconcile with your PoV.
I think smaller government is often more responsive. The Czech Republic is closer in population to some of the US states.
>...So what do libertarians represent really? Quick search for "libertarian manifesto" shows https://mises.org/library/new-liberty-libertarian-manifesto which talks about abolishing nation state and such.
I think Rothbard is probably promoting anarcho-capitalism there. Many libertarians would probably consider themselves closer to classic liberals. For example, here is a quote from a professor at NYU:
"...I consider myself both a libertarian and a classical liberal. … So there are important differences among liberals and libertarians but I view these are differences along a spectrum. Some are principled (“Never, ever, initiate the use of force”) and some are empirical (“Many public goods can be provided privately”) and some are hard to classify (“The NSA should not collect masses of meta data”). Some people will want to take these differences and harden them into different political philosophies with different names and so forth. But I suggest that libertarians and classical liberals have too much in common for any divorce."
https://thinkmarkets.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/libertarianism...
More practical ideas can be found in the works of groups like the Reason Foundation. As I mentioned in a different reply, at reason.org and you can probably find hundreds of pages of commentary, practical solutions, reviews, etc. The top story on the site looks like it is on the details of the current state of the air traffic control system. You can read the digital version of their magazine for free and in fact every issue they have ever published for close to 40 years. Another group is the The Institute for Justice (ij.org). IJ is a libertarian non-profit law firm that in their words:
>...Since 1991, IJ has come to the aid of individuals who want to do the simple things every American has the right to do—including own property, start and grow a business, speak freely about commerce or politics, and provide their children with a good education—but can’t because they find the government in their way.
IJ have brought 5 cases to the US Supreme Court, winning four. The case they lost was the Kelo case but there was a big enough outrage on that decision, that a number of states put in protections to their eminent domain laws.