Oracle, surprising and little-known facts

What they don't know about one of the most hated IT companies.

Big IT companies, in addition, they are all adherents of the double Irish sandwich (double Irish arrangement), a kind of tax transfer that allows them not to pay taxes, do not back down before any bad blows to annoy competitors and increase profits. Here we will see some little-known and surprising facts about Oracle, which has enriched itself by providing database managers. The least noticeable is that in 2013 she is trying to make APIs copyrighted, which will turn the developer profession into a legal profession.

Oracle Headquarters in California

The current database symbol is a disk stack. This is what Oracle's Redwood Shores headquarters looks like. But it turns out that this also looks like a bunch of coins.
In 1983, Larry Ellison was very unhappy with a benchmark performed by a professor at the University of Wisconsin, which showed that the Oracle database was slower than other databases widely used at that time. He asked the university to fire that professor, Mr. DeWitt, which he did not receive. For the sake of this revenge, Allison decided not to hire any more engineers who graduated from this university. The Oracle DB license agreement from this time contains the following clause, which is called the "DeWitt clause":
You cannot release the results of any benchmark program without Oracle's prior written permission.
Oracle is used to hiring his detractors and opponents to become his supporters. This is the case of John Ashcroft, who as Minister of Justice opposed the Oracle getting a contract, but after his departure was hired by the Oracle and helped him get the same contract. This also applies to blogger Florian Muller, who, after attacking Oracle in his articles, was hired by the firm and has since become its most ardent defender, as well as Apple. See the stack of money above.
Trashgate. In 2000, when Microsoft, an Oracle competitor, was under investigation for a monopoly, Oracle hired detectives to search the trash cans of Microsoft's allied companies and find evidence against its competitor. When Larry Ellison was asked about this by the CEO, he retorted:
"Well, we'll send our trash to Microsoft and they'll deal with it."
Competing commercial Oracle software is SQL server. Informix from IBM and the third is Sybase, the source code of which was shared by Microsoft, which made it SQL Server, but continued on its way and was bought out by SAP. But Oracle DB also has a free competitor: PostgreSQL .
Here's ScaleGrid's ranking of the most popular databases of 2019. Oracle accounts for only 1.8% of the total. But the company is catching up on the price of licenses

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Popularity of databases in 2019 from ScaleGrid

Oracle offers a free version of its database called Oracle Express, which is limited to 4 GB of data and one processor. Microsoft offers the equivalent of SQL Server Express with a limit of 10 GB per base.
None of the major websites like Twitter, Facebook or any other use Oracle Database. Most use MySQL, open source software supplemented by HBase and Redis. Wikipedia uses MariaDB. See Web site databases.
Some analysts believe Oracle's technology is outdated. This was the case with Michael Stonebreaker, creator of Ingres and PostgreSQL. Because Oracle technology is entirely hard disk based (with or without cache), the size of the RAM allows the database to be fully utilized in memory. Even more, this will concern new persistent memories like 3D XPoint. New database managers are emerging to use this new hardware: SAP's Hana and VoltDB. Their performance is unmatched in Oracle, IBM or Microsoft products
Oracle and HP, both enemies. The two are suing after a trial. When Oracle decides to no longer support HP's Itanium processors with its software, and replace them with those from Sun that it bought in 2010, HP is suing him because there was a contract between the two companies.
In June 2016, HP received $3 billion in damages. Oracle is often described as a company with more lawyers than programmers. They are also not the best lawyers, which was confirmed by their defeat at Google.
Oracle sued Google in 2012 and demanded $6 billion on the grounds that the Dalvik virtual machine violates its patents and the qur Android code copies Java code. The judge found that not a single patent was infringed and found that only nine lines of code (out of 15 million) were copied to Android. They were actually written by a programmer at Google and shared with the community, which caused them to be copyrighted by Oracle. To save face, Oracle then sued Google for using its APIs, the class names of the Java library.
APIs are not copyrighted, so we were able to mimic IBM BIOS and create compatible PCs. But Oracle, stubbornly wanting to get something from Google, is suing it for its APIs. While the appeal is underway, 32 IT specialists have written an open letter to oppose this action.
The Court of Appeals justified to Oracle the fact that the APIs were copyrighted, resulting in Google replacing the Java API with OpenJDK under a free license with the same effect. At the second trial, the jury found that there is honest use in using the Java API, so there is always zero dollars for Oracle. The decision was then upheld by the Supreme Court.
The Google Transparency Project is a group whose sole purpose is to uncover lobbying efforts not made by Google. Guess who the chief financier is? The Oracle Who Publicly Acknowledged It
«Don 't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison».
Trad: "Don't make the mistake of doing anthropomorphism when Larry Ellison ."
This is a quote from Brian Cantrill, who would not want the head of Oracle to be compared to a person.
On March 13, 2017, Oracle writes to the FCC, the telecommunications regulator, congratulating them for abandoning all goals of the previous leadership that Donald Trump succeeded. They are congratulated for abandoning network neutrality, banned from using personal boxes to replace expensive operator boxes. What does Oracle have to do with the boxes Americans use to watch TV? Nothing but these independent boxes run Android!.
One thing's for sure: This company really doesn't care that it's hated by consumers who aren't its direct customers.
the court defeat (a shame for a company that has almost more lawyers than programmers), which considered the "correct use" of Google's Java, Oracle has not taken off and has made Google its new enemy after HP. Oracle does not have an online store, but when Yelp, News Corp and others complained about Google to the European Union, Oracle rushed to join them. The company went as far as passing a privacy law in the U.S. only to harass Google. (Source Vox).
In August 2018, a group of investors filed a lawsuit against Oracle for deception. Oracle allegedly assured them the year before last that customers were massively switching to its cloud services, but in fact Oracle no longer even dares to publish its sales statistics in this area. The complaint explicitly described bullying tactics and threats to customers to force them to switch to their cloud services. To which they are in no hurry, as competitors, AWS, Azure or Google Cloud are more interesting. And not so alarming!
Bloomberg source.
IAP, Internet Accountability Project, is an association founded to counter the threats of large Internet companies. She backed Oracle in her lawsuit against Google, which poses a threat to the company as well as Microsoft. These are actually its only two targets, and they are Oracle's direct competitors in the cloud or software. IAP still refused to name its donors, but in February 2020, Oracle admitted that it paid the association $125,000 (Source Bloomberg.com).
According to The Intercept, Oracle sells software to spy on and help suppress protests to China and other authoritarian countries. That's the quality of this software, saying they've been tested in the US, some of them with the help of the CIA. Which thereby helps hostile US regimes. One such software is called Endeca and helps police monitor social media. An Oracle document confirms the contents of this report.
Oracle had to pay a $23 million fine in September 2022 to the SEC for giving bribes to foreign members of the government, for the purchase of its products. Oracle announces that this practice is contrary to its values and is going to conduct an investigation to find the culprit. It's easy to find.

See also: Oracle v. Google, cynical lawsuit.