Every tech entrepreneur dreams of having their company bought by one of the tech giants who swoop in everyday and give some lucky startup an opportunity to change the world on a much larger stage. If Oracle has ever been apart of that dream for you might want to adjust your dreams.
At LISA Boston in December, former Sun and Oracle Distinguished Engineer Bryan Cantrill(now with Joyent) gave a passionate talk about the history of Sun Microsystems, open source, and other things that went way over my head in a presentation called Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos. Bryan goes into a hilarious and deeply revealing look at how a lot of top engineers think about Oracle's mission and business philosophy. Most of it revolves around it's CEO. The video is embedded below.
Bryan says:
What you think of Oracle is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entitiy in human history with less complexity than Oracle. Wow this company is very straight forward in it's defense. This company is about one man, his alter ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity. That's it.
Instead of kick butt, have fun, and change computing forever, It's more like 'ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our a---- off, screw our customers, and make a whole s--- load of money.' Not to put too sharp a point on this, oh yeah I'm holding back.
Bryan speaks faster than any human being I've ever heard and reading the text does not do him any justice. Make sure to watch the full clip starting at 32:30. At the 37:30 mark he talks about the only two philanthropic organizations that Larry Elision has been involved in. One was $300MM to Stanford in exchange for not admitting wrong doing in a options back dating scandal. The other is a group he's funded is dedicated to finding ways to prolong life - "namely his" Bryan jokes. Watch the whole presentation below.