On Wed, Feb 5, 2020 at 9:13 AM Paul Heinlein <heinl...@madboa.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Feb 2020, Ben Koenig wrote: > > > On Wed, Feb 5, 2020 at 8:02 AM Paul Heinlein <heinl...@madboa.com> > wrote: > > > >> On Tue, 4 Feb 2020, Keith Lofstrom wrote: > >> > >>> Sigh. Shoulda left after the Oracle takeover. > >> > >> Oracle, like the House of the Rising Sun, has been the ruin of many a > >> poor, er, software. > >> > >> Back in the day, we used a nice little shared calendar program called > >> CorporateTime. It had Windows, Mac, and X11 clients -- so all our > >> users had supported native access. The server portion (a Windows > >> application) required relatively few resources and could run on just > >> about any capable machine. > >> > >> Then Oracle bought it. You only get one guess as to what happened: > >> bloat, expense, dropped X11 support, tie-ins with the Oracle RDBMS > >> system, ... > >> > > > > Every buyer needs a willing seller. Assuming that nothing illegal is > going > > on, I find it hard to get upset over the actions of Oracle, when smaller > > companies that keep selling out. It seems like we are still stuck in this > > societal craze of starting a software company, finishing a single product > > or service, and then immediately whoring yourself out to the highest > > bidder. I'm no economist, but my understanding is that there is no > inherent > > requirement to accept an "offer" made by another individual or business > > entity. > > > > Do you think we should blame Oracle for making an offer that others can > > refuse? > > I'm not sure where in my note I critiqued the economics of the Oracle > purchase. I don't think I said anything about the market economy > whatsoever. > > I noted that Oracle took a product that met our needs and turned it > into something that did not. Oracle offered fewer native clients, tied > it to their large and exceedingly expensive RDBMS, and raised > considerably the system resources needed to run the server daemon. > Those are all fairly objective assessments of Oracle's treatment of > the product, not of the transaction by which Oracle bought it. > > You're welcome to call out those critical of capitalist markets, but > please don't set me up a straw man. PLUG deserves better than that. > > That wasn't my intent, nor was it my intent to suggest that anything you said was inherently wrong, incorrect, or cause for a political debate. That said, you DID critique the activities of Oracle. You painted them in a negative light and suggested that they have taken actions in the past that are both similar, and contrary to your interests. So my question was simply as follows: When a piece of software is bought and ultimately changed for the worse, should we be critical of those who made the purchase or those that agreed to the sale? I'm solution oriented, I care about features and functionality, and I run into this loss of functionality on a regular basis so I'm simply asking for an opinion since my own experience is limited. If you wish to read further into it, by all means go ahead. -Ben _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
