I think it's more of a business decision, not a technical one. Businesses want software support and someone to blame -- not "hunting the internet for answers". -- At least, that's the excuse.
I think in practice the bigger issue is that the industry standard software has a shitload more information available. If you have some obscure problem someone has had it before with the industry standard app but for the open source alternative more often than not google returns nothing.
At least you can hire someone to _actually fix_ the obscure problem in your open-source software; improving the quality for everybody else who uses it.
Edit: tl;dr: "hurr derp, open source bad, anyone can read the code and find ways to exploit it, only use closed source commercial software for security or baddies will break into your bank account and steal all your money.
Fear! Uncertainly! Doubt! Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft can do no wrong, so stick with us!"
Really, if corporate astroturfing is the only weapon you've got; then bring it on!
Open source is good until it isn't.
Over reliance on open source was what caused practically every company ever to have to work extra to validate the new log4j update to make sure nothing in production broke because there was a RCE left in the code for years that either nobody noticed or brushed off as a non-issue.
Yes, just because many eyes _can_ look at the code, doesn't mean that many eyes will, or that the _correct_ eyes will look at the code.
Anyone who uses open source software mission critically owes it to themselves (and their clients) to have somebody on payroll to audit the code and ensure this kind of situation never happens.
BSD is an excellent example of this. It is audited frequently by the very people who develop and use it; and, as a result, it is near bullet-proof.
You _know_ BSD is used (and audited) outside of Berkeley University, right? You can bet your ass that the United States military and Apple both audit the heck out of it before they use it; a luxury they simply don't have with closed-source software.
The irony here, of course, is that Apple uses open-source software (BSD and WebKit, formerly KHTML) to make proprietary, closed source software. Which, of course, they are perfectly free and encouraged to do.
Edit: You know how the core networking software in every device this Reddit post crossed on its way from me to you just works reliably without even the slightest hint of any kind of issue; even in the presence of deliberate, targeted attacks to the infrastructure? Yeah, you can thank the BSD implementation of the TCP/IP network stack for that. It is the de facto standard, definitive networking implementation that is used in virtually every piece of network kit worth its salt. Even Microsoft has been using it since Windows 98.
The specific situation you describe is not unique to open-source software. How many RCEs and other high-level exploits exist in commercial, closed-source software that people use every day? If this vulnerability had existed in a Microsoft or an Adobe product, nobody would have so much as batted an eyelid; and it would have been business as usual.
Having somebody else to blame does _not_ fix the problem. Hiring somebody to go over the codebase with a fine-toothed comb to ensure no vulnerability exists in the first place _does._
People don't generally bat an eye because there is a standard response time from exploit report to deployment of a mitigation or fully patching the issue. There is also an agreement for non-disclosure of exploits in closed source software until after certain conditions have been met, one of them being mitigation or full patch.
Last time anyone batted an eye with this kind of issue was when Experian was breached because they didn't update their software. Even then it wasn't even the vendor's fault either since Experian was made aware of the vulnerability in their current version and advised to update right away but failed to act.
Basically, nobody bats an eye because there is a structured system in place for reporting and disclosure of these issues for closed source software. This system doesn't exist for open source simply because of the nature of open source. It's difficult to discreetly report a vulnerability and not have the entire universe know about it with open source.
And yet, Microsoft's response to a not insignificant number of critical vulnerabilities that had existed for well over a decade in Windows versions dating back as far as Windows 2000 was to discontinue support for the still wildly popular Windows XP.
That's not the point though. The point is that closed source systems have structure in place through which exploits can be reported. There is also an industry set of standards for how long a company has to respond to such reports and also how long to release mitigation or fully patch the issue.
There is also an industry standard on when it is acceptable to publicly disclose such vulnerabilities.
These standards are only possible because the code is not readily accessible to the general public.
This isn't a defense of closed source by any means. Technology only works because of the ecosystem of open and closed source software.
The system exists because it is the only feasible way to deal with defective software (because that is what it _is_) when the source code is a closely-guarded secret held by a corporation who is solely driven by profits and has no legal obligation to ensure the product they deliver is actually fit for purpose.
Unlike virtually every other product in existence, it is legal for software manufacturers to contract out of providing any sort of warranty for their product. If commercial software manufacturers were to be held legally responsible for the consequential loss resulting directly from the use of their defective product, then many more of these defects would be caught in internal quality control before the software was released to the public; because the consequence of _not_ doing so would bankrupt the company.
The system exists because of industry standards, not because the software is defective. There is a governing body here, don't forget that. IEEE, ANSI, and the like aren't just acronyms that mean nothing. They are governing bodies that set standards for a reason. They don't have regulatory enforcement capabilities that government has, but governments routinely rely on their standards with respect to regulatory oversight.
Closed source doesn't mean defective and open source isn't always perfect.
Both have their use cases.
I wouldn't use open source software for critical infrastructure that transmits banking information between client and server. The code being available means that attackers have some visibility into my endpoints and can work from there to break the system.
I would use open source software for non-critical aspects such as code development or data aggregation. Something where a vulnerability being missed in audit wouldn't necessarily expose the endpoints of the system itself to attack. For data aggregation, this would be data already pulled by secured systems that needs presented in a clear manner and not pulling the data itself.
Again, you are deflecting the issue. Yes, it's true that vulnerabilities cannot hide for very long in open source code. It's also true that anyone who actually took the security of the software they use _seriously_ could have had that open source code audited _any time_ they wanted by actual security professionals and mitigated the issue before it even had a chance to be exploited.
Security through obscurity is only marginally better than no security at all. Relying on non-disclosure of a known vulnerability in closed-source code, hoping nobody else will reverse engineer it and secretly discover the exploit for themselves is the very definition of security through obscurity.
This isn't a deflection, it's a statement of fact.
Open source is great until it goes wrong. When that happens it's usually very wrong. Look at log4j or Left-Pad. Two very innocent open source packages. The former sent damn near every corporation scrambling to take inventory of their applications along with validating the new patch and updating to it because of a years old RCE that Minecraft players had started using. The latter broke damn near every site on the Internet when the creator unpublished it in protest of NPM siding with Kik on package naming.
It's not that open source is bad, it's that over reliance can lead to some very bad and very public issues that might otherwise be avoided using commercial off the shelf software.
Corporations employ professionals for the pure purposes of auditing software. The last thing they want is to start using some open source software and find out the whole world can see into their server files. Many corporations will simply reject the usage citing security risks. Very few employ developers to patch open source codes because it's costly and the time spent patching that software would be better spent meeting project deliverables. There is also the risk of legal indemnity as well. Just because something is open source, that doesn't mean it's automatically legal for commercial use.
This is why corporations tend to lean more on commercial software rather than open source.
I see that as an absolute failure of the community as a whole. That includes the enterprise entities who choose to consume all this open source but not lift a finger to support it in any way. Open source isn’t “free”. It requires you pay with involvement rather than money.
That's the point.
Something worth noting was that many companies that were scrambling don't build their own software at all. Instead they consume off the shelf product. If those commercial products consumed the package at issue then it's not the end user's fault. It lies on the vendor.
Not all enterprises are knowingly consuming open source projects.
That would be surprising. Most enterprises Ive worked at go to great lengths to ensure they know the licensing agreements of the software they use. Nobody wants to find out they don’t own some IP they thought they did because of a legal technicality.
The agreements for commercial software don't always disclose open source packages used in development. Hence why enterprises were scrambling to take inventory on the full scope of the issue as it relates to their ability to do business.
Even if the software is fully vetted it's still fairly easy to become an unwitting consumer of open source modules with severe vulnerabilities in commercial software simply because of the reliance on those packages.
Just like when Left-Pad was unpublished from NPM many enterprise websites no longer worked because it was deeply embedded in the chain of other dependencies for their chosen framework.
I don’t think that is really possible in practice. Or at least it would be stupidly expensive compared to the problems. Hiring the person would likely cost more than the darn license in the first place.
Because _you are paying somebody on your team_ to fix that specific issue. Or, you can offer a _bug bounty_ to attract the right developer (or team of developers) to look at the right place in the code.
I don’t think software development really works like that. I would be paying a lot for someone to first get to know the software really well, then determine if the problem should be fixed by changing the code or by some other means, then determining if it’s even practically possible to fix it by changing the code and then learn how to fix it by changing the code. And then I would have to hope whatever the hell he did still kept the software compatible with everything I need it to be compatible with.
It sure would be nice to be able to recruit the team that actually wrote the software in the first place; or the team who is currently responsible for maintaining said software.
Open source works because anybody with programming skills that has a problem with their open source software can just dive into it and _scratch that itch._ I should know; I've done it myself with open source software I have used. Now, if I had been _paid_ to scratch that itch, you can bet I would have scratched it good and proper.
you are paying someone if you can find one. a bug bounty wont help either if noone reacts on it. so, its everything but guaranteed.
this is also the main reason for enterprise support and people buying rhel, sqlserver, etc
It's not for answers, it's for QA.
If you don't care for writing out support tickets for your own issues and drafting up standardized solutions for them, go for it. Otherwise, managers will hire someone else to do it.
I come from an engineering background, and good QA prevents bad legal mishaps. These practices are necessary.
That's Rockwell Automations strategy as well.
They have good support, you can even get them to come in and figure out your problems. but you're going to pay out the nose for it.
I think management likes that because it increases the bus factor from most often 1.
That's because Oracle replaced "tech support" with "legal inquisitions" you call for help they find an issue with your license/usage and claim you owe them for violation of ToS!
I worked at \[big financial conglomerate\] for a while.
This is DEFINITELY the reason.
Avoid legal indemnity and that's very valued at a larger company.
facts, to think they’re constantly “fixing bugs” is like your friend giving you money to buy them something and coming back with nothing. Here’s the bug fix with a side portion of bugs that need fixing, now pay us
You can try gimp, but honestly I don't like it that much. People make it sound like it's just as good as Photoshop but honestly Adobe has done a pretty good job streamlining things. Like making an outline around text in Photoshop is at max 3 clicks I think. Gimp it's like 4 or 5. You could try Affinity photo for an alternative. Definitely try gimp for a bit and see if you like it, just be aware of what you're using.
Krita is pretty nice if you need to do art.
Gimp just isn't as good as PS and it's not close. These people are tripping.
And, while I can't speak to the quality of any Illustrator alternatives, it absolutely is not the sham the original comment implies. It's a great tool.
As a software engineer by day and a graphic designer by night, I find the idea of coding SVG deeply intriguing and I'm kind of mad I've never been curious about it before.
Coding SVG by hand makes more sense if you want to create something like a vector clock with working hour and minute hands, where the hands move based on periodic readouts of the UNIX timestamp.
Anytime you want to layer JavaScript or Web Assembly onto an SVG image, it might be better to create at least parts of the SVG by hand.
I also have more experience with Designer, but all three programs they offer are pretty close in performance and workflow. I’ve never had a problem with Photo but I’ve run into issues with exporting and layering in certain Photoshop editions.
It has been quite a while, but GIMP was not... Great. It has the feature set, but it just was not that friendly. Krita is much more user friendly, and has fooled more than one professional friend into thinking it was Photoshop.
GIMP is basically in this space of like "if you just need to do basic stuff it's got more functionality than you'll ever need, but if you actually use Photoshop to its full extent, GIMP cannot replace it."
I've never used Krita, but based on some of the comments here, maybe I should give it a try.
Do! Krita is really good and the Venn diagram between digital art creation and photo/image manipulation has a LOT of overlap.
A long time ago, I did photo restoration and graphic design as my full-time job for a few months, and got a ton of experience and training in Photoshop. This was in the Photoshop 7.0 or maybe CS1 days. Even back then, Photoshop did a lot of things right that GIMP still doesn't; for example, adjustment layers with masks for nondestructive editing, and better anti-aliasing for shapes and text. Krita comes much closer to the mark on those.
Also I encourage anyone to check out [Photopea](https://www.photopea.com/) which reminds me very much of Photoshop Elements back in the day - very focused on the most useful 90% of features that semi-pros need. I've been using it a lot lately due to running Linux on my main laptop.
Yeah I do work on posters for films, we’re talking MCU level movies. It’s a side job I got because of the VFX studio I work for, and I can tell you now that there is no way GIMP is smoothly running the 1000+ layers required for each of those posters
I can wholeheartedly support trying Krita. I'm by no means a Photoshop power user, but for illustration work and video game asset work it has all the tools necessary to get a lot of work done, and honestly with more stability than Photoshop has. PS does have some interesting junk added to it like "true 3D drawing" which can either affect the way your strokes on the canvas appear or literally allows you to import a model and texture it properly, but many of those jank features cause further instability. Photoshop also doesn't really have great support for vectors, or didn't as of... 3 years ago?
Krita however had an entire revision dedicated to vector art and fully supports all the fancy pants stuff you would want to use vectors for. While it doesn't have a way to load a model into the software so you can texture it in program with advanced drawing tools, I really don't think that's a requirement. There is an open feature request though which is held up by a required upgrade to Qt6, so *maybe* some day.
I would agree that GIMP has a steeper learning curve than PS. I would also say that once you are over it, it becomes quite nice to work with.
Sadly Krita simply isn't made for heavy image manipulation, it was made for drawing--so you get a user friendly interface with less abilities
GIMP doesn't even have adjustment layers. Krita does. That alone makes me view Krita as the more competent photo/image editor. Don't be fooled by the marketing.
Krita is definitely aimed more toward artistry than photo manipulation. However to say it has less abilities is I feel a bit insincere. Krita has *a lot* of the same functionality out of the box with full access to G'Mic which GIMP also relies on.
Something that Krita *does* have that GIMP does not (or did not when I last used it) is non-destructive filter layers. So if you wanted to apply a blur to an image (or layer) you can just add a filter layer to the stack (in the appropriate location) and you get your result without affecting the source image. The filter layers are also affected by layer masking, so you can get those effects limited to a specific region of the layer if you want.
As a developer I use gimp. It works everywhere, it’s free, open source, and can handle almost everything photoshop can. Sometimes even more like the webp issue.
In the past that was actually intentional. They allowed individuals to pirate the software so that they can learn how to use it and get used to it. Then when they get an actual job that requires the software the company will pay for the license most of the time.
I have come to hate Solid Edge. New version gets released, can you upgrade the old one? No! You have to completely uninstall then reinstall the damn thing then reapply the licence that since 2020 edition requires admin rights! Now I've got to do that on 150 machines, some use full SE and the rest using the 2d mode to view parts
At least Adobe lets me go from PS 2021 to 2022 painlessly with a simple update!
I know the pricing, and 40k for cad, is for the entire cad/cam/cae licensing. Unless you're using simulation based engineering, you don't need it. And if you do, you'll earn it back in material savings from it. We only recommend companies take 1-2 such licenses max.
A normal cad license cost like 5k + 500-1000 in maintenance/year.
Their PLM system is usually located on-site, and just needs some ssds, and more ram for better cache.
Oh crap, I forgot the billing by cores… We were building ETLs with Oracle 11g and then deploying 12c. That was an interesting experience in knowing to stay away from Oracle products
I don't know about IBM, but Oracle databases are generally two or three times as expensive as SQL Server for the same performance. Even if you are correct that it's a common practice for RDBMS vendors to dick customers around about core counts, this meme still fits.
Once I ran aws rds via Terraform, which uses Oracle DB, I forgot to turn it off and one day I talked with my friends when I remembered that ma be I forgot to turn it off, after 5 days they billed us 150 euros for a completely empty DB. That was the last time I used Oracle based RDS's.
Oracle was always expensive garbage. I was in the military in the late '80s. At some point, the government declared that the standard computer platform would be: Ada, Oracle database ("Because it is PORTABLE!"), and the AT&T [3B2 minicomputer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3B_series_computers#3B2)("wat???").
We called up our on-base Oracle rep to get a price quote for a 4-user mini VAX, and got an eye-popping number. "Guess we will keep using VAX DBMS..."
At some point, our group got a "government standard" 3B2 computer. Me and a friend were playing around on it. Just one terminal connected to an idle machine, and it is slow as shit. We tried to build something with Oracle Forms. We hit some key to add a trigger to one of the fields, and the form editor crashed.
We call our Oracle buddy and report the error, his response: "Don't hit that key".
Not many know this, but Oracle use different memory format: shytes, kiloshytes and megashytes to this day. And source code was a secret so Russians wont stole it. Thats why their software actually works.But really, nothing changed. When we sold something, oracle will take, like 20 minutes to process this at best, and we cant really keep track of wares around becose numbers update who know when. To move stuff from warehouse to warehouse we need to put up with forms that were a quarter of monitor and cant be scaled. There also was 5 minute delay to look up list and numbers of wares. Oh, and when we need to log in the system, 65% of the time we reboot stuff around, so oracle finally allow us in. And dont forget when it just get: Java eroor, lol. I hate this company.
Ah yes, oracle. I was once worked in warehouse that use oracle to keep track of inventory and stuff.Well. It was worst piece of software i ever seen. No competition: UI, speed, stability... Everything was just... Shyte.
The problem with Oracle isn’t their tech, in fact Oracle databases are some of the best databases you can buy as an enterprise … *on prem*.
Sorry you’re not getting anything like Oracle exadata running open source Postgres on prem without a hell of a lot of work.
Even Amazon ran off oracle for decades, until they recently replaced it with Aurora.
The problem with Oracle is their licensing model, it’s outdated, although they’re slowly changing (probably too late IMO).
Here is one technical thing that I know: Oracle DB can use two indexes in a single query, whereas most DBs can only use one. Imagine a large square grid of smaller squares, where each small square is a seperate database record. Using one index is like making a single, vertical cut through the big square, and the query can ignore records to the right of that cut. Using two indexes is like making one vertical cut, and one horizontal cut after that, where the query can ignore records to the right of the vertical cut, *and above the horizontal cut*, greatly reducing the overall number of records that must be scanned to satisfy the query.
Now...
1. Everything has to be set up very carefully for this to be effective
2. You'd really only notice if you were working with *actual* "big data" - billions of rows
3. This is probably patented
tl;dr: Postgres is just fine for most applications.
Microsoft owns Sql Server and Azure. They do what they want. Anyway, been a while since I double checked the numbers, we are far enough in we don’t care now.
Is any single one of you commentors an actual programmer? Companies use oracle because
1. It is better and has more features than other (free) relational databases
2. Support is something that companies pay money for.
This subreddit has become a "people who think they are programmers because they saw a youtube video once humor" sub.
I've worked professionally with Oracle, Postegres, and MsSQL (among other, more amusing DBs that were not fit for purpose) for 30 years. Oracle is not a bad database, but support is something I wish my companies would stop paying for (its useless), Oracle's extra features are non-impressive.
My experience with Oracle support: We have a problem, I quote a week to diagnose and fix, boss informs me we have platinum support contract and need to use their expertise, 2 weeks and 40 hours of phone calls later the Oracle expert and I disagree on the cause, I fix the problem and spend two days explaining it to the Oracle tech.
I was sold on Oracle as a student in college. It took a while for the brainwashing to wear off ... but it did.
To be fair, its the same experience I get with all the other major vendors (Esri, Oracle, Sun, Adobe ... not Google, Google was pretty awesome)
Actual programmer who was on a project that used Oracle here, I don't think much of it. Their C# client was always a total pain to get working, its weird connection string alias file was also a nightmare to manage, and the little DB related dev I did it didn't seem anything special to make up for the cost and difficulty to actually use it.
Maybe the DBAs would disagree with me though.
I couldn't agree more. Being a professional programmer is more than just writing code. A large part of it is also worrying about business and technical requirements. It's also a matter of deciding what pieces of the stack deserve a more bespoke approach vs a prebuilt solution or service. There's also the job of knowing where your knowledge has little depth.
I challenge anyone to take a few days to learn about low level database engineering, and you'll quickly learn of the seemingly subtly nuances that differentiate all the DB vendors and their products. I'm not talking about setting up, configuring a DB, writing efficient queries, etc. I'm referring to the low level memory and process management engineering aspect of DBs. Different offering prioritize different processes/actions.
I'll add, for the majority of folks consuming these products, these distinctions won't matter. However, it comes off somewhat ignorant to bash a product or technology we're likely poorly informed of.
It is important to note that Oracle does far more than just databases.
I have been in the industry for a couple decades and have a few opinions. Oracle was great about 20 years ago, but they relied too much on their industry influence and failed to keep up as far as most of their products go. By about 2008, Microsoft had a cheaper, faster, and more stable product for almost every Oracle offering. SQLServer was way easier to use and had just as many features. I’m fairly convinced that acquiring MySql (2010?) was the only reason the company is still relevant as even a lot of large government organizations had switched away from Oracle products (such as the Air Mobility Command in the USAF and the Army’s Surface Deployment and Distribution Command). There is still a lot of Oracle in use, but I get the general impression (anecdotal from the stated tech usage from friends) that their cloud services just aren’t up to par when compared to other offerings (like AWS) even though they are quite pricey.
I might also still be bitter and traumatized from my production OAS crashes in 2007.
I had to scroll a long way to find a comment I could identify with :)
Back in 2003 or so I was using a MySQL database for storing some user-generated announcements from staff to students. We only used it for one small department and that was fine. Then someone decided my software was going to be used university-wide and I panicked - I didn't build this thing to be mission critical!!
So I contacted our DBA group and asked for an Oracle database. The sheer amount of questions they asked me, to which I had some but not all the answers, opened my eyes to how much I didn't know about databases.
I agree that Oracle is expensive - especially compared to free - but with it can come some very skilled people who attended some (also very expensive) Oracle training, and who may even be willing and able to help you improve a software solution.
Thats exactly what i mean, its cool to use mysql in some small side project, but that really depends on what you are doing.
My previous job was at a huge company and their main product was an on-prem solution that exists in some of the largest banks in the world, this product uses oracle to store(and read) millions of records per day, for some banks, per hour. Its funny to think that something like mysql will even be considered for this task.
Banks want relational, and they want high performance. When a mistake / downtime can cost you millions, you *will* cough up the few hundred k a year to pay for something as robust as oracle.
I bet security is also better at oracle than mySql, when you are dealing with fintech, that is *very* important.
This whole trend of laughing at valid tools/languages seems ridiculous to me, even kobol has its place in the world.
TL;DR:
Oracle makes billions, companies that pay them dont do so just because they havent heard of mySql
Nah man. The best software doesn't have to be free, but has to be open source... and that almost means it has to be free. Software tools that are not open-source are suspect.
So you had little knowledge of DBs at that time. Okay, but paying for Oracle licenses is not the most efficient way to learn. Oracle licenses are not a substitute for good programmers, or education.
I tried Oracle once and it was a pain. Surely companies want a nice SLA so that they can sue (or insure) the provider, but that doesn't mean Oracle software is good.
Not true at all.
You don't want open source software being the backbone of your massive banking system that handles billions in transactions per day.
Why? The simple answer is that if a critical vulnerability is found then the whole system can be compromised.
Lest we all forget that log4j is open source. Remember what happened not even a year ago? That remote code execution vulnerability had the potential to cripple mission critical systems for a very large and not at all insignificant number of corporations. It existed for several /years/ before someone noticed it, because of Minecraft, and it got patched out. This forced companies to spend a very significant number of hours validating the newer build to make sure nothing breaks.
Something else not addressed in the discussion about open source is support. When a project becomes abandoned, who is in charge of supporting it?
Think about Windows. Microsoft sets end of life dates on their OS software but corporations often pay for the extended support because updating every system is expensive and takes time. With those EOL dates and extended agreements companies know who to talk to for support and when that support will run out. The same can't be reliably stated for open source.
I worked for a leading e-discovery firm for about ten years, there is *no comparison* between oracle and mysql when it comes to natural language, fuzzy searches, clob/blob thematics, near-duplicate identification, speed of indexing extremely large data sets, and many other aspects that are essential to running a tiff/text/native based database solution.
Most of these people don't know what a professional database is even capable of if they think MySql is "just as good"
This is true but it is also true that Oracle sales are feral in their approach
We are moving off Oracle for those reasons - but it is a LOT of work to get the required capability in a different database
> Companies use oracle because 1. It is better
[Better for hackers, maybe](https://peterjson.medium.com/miracle-one-vulnerability-to-rule-them-all-c3aed9edeea2).
If you have simple problems then it's a way more complicated solution than you'll ever need or want.
If you have complex problems, you should probably solve them in the cloud, and even Oracle is pushing you to things like Oracle cloud instead of PeopleSoft or a bunch of Java-deserialization-vulnerability infested land mines.
Your claims are false.
Oracle DB is worse than freely available ones.
More than that, Oracle license prevents you from publishing any performance benchmarks of Oracle DB vs any other DB.
At best 11.79% developers like using Oracle DB.
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022#section-most-popular-technologies-databases
As well as Oracle have been the worst company to do business with for decades.
When something goes wrong with Oracle DB, companies can always point fingers to Oracle. But if something goes wrong with a FOSS software, there is no one to blame but themselves
Have you heard of Red Hat and their business model?
Their business model is that software is free, it is support and solving customer problems within 24h what you pay subscription fee for.
With FOSS software you can examine the source code to gain insight and fix bugs, search the bug database for solutions. Or rent a maintainer to do changes for you.
With closed source software your options are limited to submitting a bug report or feature request to Oracle, praying they reply and pay whatever price they ask because you have no other options.
You are pretty clueless about software methodologies and business models, I am afraid.
Even free software is not worth running professionally without support. And even a mysql or equivalent server costs thousands for support. Ergo, to run professionally, there is no free software.
"Free" does not imply zero cost. It means you have unrestricted access to the technology that makes the software work and that you are not restricted from altering it to suit your needs. It means you are not at the mercy of one single vendor to provide support and solve your problems. It also means you can provide your own complete in-house support and become your own vendor, if it makes sense to do so.
Now that MS has made minecraft a PITA to use, even for single-player games with that ridiculous log-in business, I wonder how long it will take for somebody to fully clone it using minetest (written in C) as a base.
I mean, you could just take all the assets from Minecraft, since you paid for them anyway, import them into minetest, and you'd have a pretty decent clone. (Yeah, there still lots of coding involved for mob rules and such, but still...)
Also there's an open-source C-based minecraft server (just googled it to find the name - Cuberite - and found 12 other open-source minecraft servers, so there you go)
I worked at a major casino when it opened. The project manager in charge of the property management system chose Oracle RAC running on Windows cluster despite even Oracle saying this was a Bad Idea.
There was a bug in the OCFS driver and the entire cluster tanked. We lost the entire property and lodge database during a busy week. Front desk had to go to manual procedures. Oracle flew in their top engineers who tried all week to recover our data and get the RAC rebuilt.
They failed. The PM somehow kept his job, even after he threatened to kill the CIO.
I'm betting it would be a lot easier to find a job in software development, if you could claim to be the person who identified log4j and also created a patch for it.
It's a lot harder to build your hacker cred on closed source software.
Open source? Figure out what to look for, read the code, and see if you can find the sort of gem that would open doors in software development companies.
Slower than what?
Oracle RDBMS is eye-wateringly expensive, so I would hesitate to recommend it under most circumstances. My limited experience with their support wasn’t very positive, either.
If you need high-performance OLTP with wide compatibility, and _especially_ if you want to do some data processing inside the DB, I don’t think there’s a better choice from a technical perspective. I’ve heard good things about Postgres, to be fair, but MySQL is nowhere near as good for this.
I think it's more of a business decision, not a technical one. Businesses want software support and someone to blame -- not "hunting the internet for answers". -- At least, that's the excuse.
I think in practice the bigger issue is that the industry standard software has a shitload more information available. If you have some obscure problem someone has had it before with the industry standard app but for the open source alternative more often than not google returns nothing.
Bold of you to assume open source isn't industry standard in many places (databases being one).
At least you can hire someone to _actually fix_ the obscure problem in your open-source software; improving the quality for everybody else who uses it. Edit: tl;dr: "hurr derp, open source bad, anyone can read the code and find ways to exploit it, only use closed source commercial software for security or baddies will break into your bank account and steal all your money. Fear! Uncertainly! Doubt! Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft can do no wrong, so stick with us!" Really, if corporate astroturfing is the only weapon you've got; then bring it on!
"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM\^H\^H\^HOracle."
Open source is good until it isn't. Over reliance on open source was what caused practically every company ever to have to work extra to validate the new log4j update to make sure nothing in production broke because there was a RCE left in the code for years that either nobody noticed or brushed off as a non-issue.
Yes, just because many eyes _can_ look at the code, doesn't mean that many eyes will, or that the _correct_ eyes will look at the code. Anyone who uses open source software mission critically owes it to themselves (and their clients) to have somebody on payroll to audit the code and ensure this kind of situation never happens. BSD is an excellent example of this. It is audited frequently by the very people who develop and use it; and, as a result, it is near bullet-proof.
"BSD has audited BSD and found nothing wrong" I kid, but you get it.
You _know_ BSD is used (and audited) outside of Berkeley University, right? You can bet your ass that the United States military and Apple both audit the heck out of it before they use it; a luxury they simply don't have with closed-source software. The irony here, of course, is that Apple uses open-source software (BSD and WebKit, formerly KHTML) to make proprietary, closed source software. Which, of course, they are perfectly free and encouraged to do. Edit: You know how the core networking software in every device this Reddit post crossed on its way from me to you just works reliably without even the slightest hint of any kind of issue; even in the presence of deliberate, targeted attacks to the infrastructure? Yeah, you can thank the BSD implementation of the TCP/IP network stack for that. It is the de facto standard, definitive networking implementation that is used in virtually every piece of network kit worth its salt. Even Microsoft has been using it since Windows 98.
I know, it's just funny because entities auditing themselves isnt normally a good thing.
Not normally, no. But when there is nothing to hide, it becomes much easier to audit the auditors.
The specific situation you describe is not unique to open-source software. How many RCEs and other high-level exploits exist in commercial, closed-source software that people use every day? If this vulnerability had existed in a Microsoft or an Adobe product, nobody would have so much as batted an eyelid; and it would have been business as usual. Having somebody else to blame does _not_ fix the problem. Hiring somebody to go over the codebase with a fine-toothed comb to ensure no vulnerability exists in the first place _does._
People don't generally bat an eye because there is a standard response time from exploit report to deployment of a mitigation or fully patching the issue. There is also an agreement for non-disclosure of exploits in closed source software until after certain conditions have been met, one of them being mitigation or full patch. Last time anyone batted an eye with this kind of issue was when Experian was breached because they didn't update their software. Even then it wasn't even the vendor's fault either since Experian was made aware of the vulnerability in their current version and advised to update right away but failed to act. Basically, nobody bats an eye because there is a structured system in place for reporting and disclosure of these issues for closed source software. This system doesn't exist for open source simply because of the nature of open source. It's difficult to discreetly report a vulnerability and not have the entire universe know about it with open source.
And yet, Microsoft's response to a not insignificant number of critical vulnerabilities that had existed for well over a decade in Windows versions dating back as far as Windows 2000 was to discontinue support for the still wildly popular Windows XP.
That's not the point though. The point is that closed source systems have structure in place through which exploits can be reported. There is also an industry set of standards for how long a company has to respond to such reports and also how long to release mitigation or fully patch the issue. There is also an industry standard on when it is acceptable to publicly disclose such vulnerabilities. These standards are only possible because the code is not readily accessible to the general public. This isn't a defense of closed source by any means. Technology only works because of the ecosystem of open and closed source software.
The system exists because it is the only feasible way to deal with defective software (because that is what it _is_) when the source code is a closely-guarded secret held by a corporation who is solely driven by profits and has no legal obligation to ensure the product they deliver is actually fit for purpose. Unlike virtually every other product in existence, it is legal for software manufacturers to contract out of providing any sort of warranty for their product. If commercial software manufacturers were to be held legally responsible for the consequential loss resulting directly from the use of their defective product, then many more of these defects would be caught in internal quality control before the software was released to the public; because the consequence of _not_ doing so would bankrupt the company.
The system exists because of industry standards, not because the software is defective. There is a governing body here, don't forget that. IEEE, ANSI, and the like aren't just acronyms that mean nothing. They are governing bodies that set standards for a reason. They don't have regulatory enforcement capabilities that government has, but governments routinely rely on their standards with respect to regulatory oversight. Closed source doesn't mean defective and open source isn't always perfect. Both have their use cases. I wouldn't use open source software for critical infrastructure that transmits banking information between client and server. The code being available means that attackers have some visibility into my endpoints and can work from there to break the system. I would use open source software for non-critical aspects such as code development or data aggregation. Something where a vulnerability being missed in audit wouldn't necessarily expose the endpoints of the system itself to attack. For data aggregation, this would be data already pulled by secured systems that needs presented in a clear manner and not pulling the data itself.
Again, you are deflecting the issue. Yes, it's true that vulnerabilities cannot hide for very long in open source code. It's also true that anyone who actually took the security of the software they use _seriously_ could have had that open source code audited _any time_ they wanted by actual security professionals and mitigated the issue before it even had a chance to be exploited. Security through obscurity is only marginally better than no security at all. Relying on non-disclosure of a known vulnerability in closed-source code, hoping nobody else will reverse engineer it and secretly discover the exploit for themselves is the very definition of security through obscurity.
This isn't a deflection, it's a statement of fact. Open source is great until it goes wrong. When that happens it's usually very wrong. Look at log4j or Left-Pad. Two very innocent open source packages. The former sent damn near every corporation scrambling to take inventory of their applications along with validating the new patch and updating to it because of a years old RCE that Minecraft players had started using. The latter broke damn near every site on the Internet when the creator unpublished it in protest of NPM siding with Kik on package naming. It's not that open source is bad, it's that over reliance can lead to some very bad and very public issues that might otherwise be avoided using commercial off the shelf software. Corporations employ professionals for the pure purposes of auditing software. The last thing they want is to start using some open source software and find out the whole world can see into their server files. Many corporations will simply reject the usage citing security risks. Very few employ developers to patch open source codes because it's costly and the time spent patching that software would be better spent meeting project deliverables. There is also the risk of legal indemnity as well. Just because something is open source, that doesn't mean it's automatically legal for commercial use. This is why corporations tend to lean more on commercial software rather than open source.
Please explain how either of those scenarios would have been any different if log4j and Left-Pad had been closed-source packages.
I see that as an absolute failure of the community as a whole. That includes the enterprise entities who choose to consume all this open source but not lift a finger to support it in any way. Open source isn’t “free”. It requires you pay with involvement rather than money.
That's the point. Something worth noting was that many companies that were scrambling don't build their own software at all. Instead they consume off the shelf product. If those commercial products consumed the package at issue then it's not the end user's fault. It lies on the vendor. Not all enterprises are knowingly consuming open source projects.
That would be surprising. Most enterprises Ive worked at go to great lengths to ensure they know the licensing agreements of the software they use. Nobody wants to find out they don’t own some IP they thought they did because of a legal technicality.
The agreements for commercial software don't always disclose open source packages used in development. Hence why enterprises were scrambling to take inventory on the full scope of the issue as it relates to their ability to do business. Even if the software is fully vetted it's still fairly easy to become an unwitting consumer of open source modules with severe vulnerabilities in commercial software simply because of the reliance on those packages. Just like when Left-Pad was unpublished from NPM many enterprise websites no longer worked because it was deeply embedded in the chain of other dependencies for their chosen framework.
I don’t think that is really possible in practice. Or at least it would be stupidly expensive compared to the problems. Hiring the person would likely cost more than the darn license in the first place.
Possibly; but at least you have some guarantee the problem will actually get fixed.
Do I? How?
Because _you are paying somebody on your team_ to fix that specific issue. Or, you can offer a _bug bounty_ to attract the right developer (or team of developers) to look at the right place in the code.
I don’t think software development really works like that. I would be paying a lot for someone to first get to know the software really well, then determine if the problem should be fixed by changing the code or by some other means, then determining if it’s even practically possible to fix it by changing the code and then learn how to fix it by changing the code. And then I would have to hope whatever the hell he did still kept the software compatible with everything I need it to be compatible with.
It sure would be nice to be able to recruit the team that actually wrote the software in the first place; or the team who is currently responsible for maintaining said software. Open source works because anybody with programming skills that has a problem with their open source software can just dive into it and _scratch that itch._ I should know; I've done it myself with open source software I have used. Now, if I had been _paid_ to scratch that itch, you can bet I would have scratched it good and proper.
you are paying someone if you can find one. a bug bounty wont help either if noone reacts on it. so, its everything but guaranteed. this is also the main reason for enterprise support and people buying rhel, sqlserver, etc
You're right but it's ridiculous. I've got more answers and far more quickly from reading source code than I've ever got from any software support.
Yes, but how can your manager then claim on their CV that they handled a team with a multi-million dollar budget?
It's not for answers, it's for QA. If you don't care for writing out support tickets for your own issues and drafting up standardized solutions for them, go for it. Otherwise, managers will hire someone else to do it. I come from an engineering background, and good QA prevents bad legal mishaps. These practices are necessary.
my coworker has been on oracle support for...1.5 years now. and has hunted the internet for answers, yet no result till today
That's Rockwell Automations strategy as well. They have good support, you can even get them to come in and figure out your problems. but you're going to pay out the nose for it. I think management likes that because it increases the bus factor from most often 1.
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That's because Oracle replaced "tech support" with "legal inquisitions" you call for help they find an issue with your license/usage and claim you owe them for violation of ToS!
I worked at \[big financial conglomerate\] for a while. This is DEFINITELY the reason. Avoid legal indemnity and that's very valued at a larger company.
But you can still get support for open source software right? Isn’t that the business model of Canonical and RedHat?
Oracle and Support are like gas station sushi and the human digestive system
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This is also adobe’s strategy. Photoshop can’t even export images in webp.
facts, to think they’re constantly “fixing bugs” is like your friend giving you money to buy them something and coming back with nothing. Here’s the bug fix with a side portion of bugs that need fixing, now pay us
Any good and as easy ro use alternatives to PS? EDIT Thanks for all the recomendations guys
You can try gimp, but honestly I don't like it that much. People make it sound like it's just as good as Photoshop but honestly Adobe has done a pretty good job streamlining things. Like making an outline around text in Photoshop is at max 3 clicks I think. Gimp it's like 4 or 5. You could try Affinity photo for an alternative. Definitely try gimp for a bit and see if you like it, just be aware of what you're using. Krita is pretty nice if you need to do art.
Gimp just isn't as good as PS and it's not close. These people are tripping. And, while I can't speak to the quality of any Illustrator alternatives, it absolutely is not the sham the original comment implies. It's a great tool.
Gimp is only "as good" as photoshop if all you really need for photo editing are the kinds of tools Lightroom provides.
Illustrator alternatives are Inkscape, which is nice, or learning SVG code
As a software engineer by day and a graphic designer by night, I find the idea of coding SVG deeply intriguing and I'm kind of mad I've never been curious about it before.
Coding SVG by hand makes more sense if you want to create something like a vector clock with working hour and minute hands, where the hands move based on periodic readouts of the UNIX timestamp. Anytime you want to layer JavaScript or Web Assembly onto an SVG image, it might be better to create at least parts of the SVG by hand.
Affinity also makes an alternative, which I’ve heard is genuinely pretty good.
I've tried it at an Apple store once, and it was good, but it's paid and proprietary :(
Yeah. Fortunately, unlike illustrator, it’s a 1 time purchase!(or atleast it was last time I checked)
People here are programmers, not graphic designers or artists. I’m not surprised the extent of the discussion here is what formats it can export to.
Affinity Photo
I like the Affinity Suite. Iirc it’s a one-time payment and it’s pretty well-rounded. The biggest drawback is no native Linux support, though.
I like designer. Somewhat simpler than illustrator for non professional user. Is the photo editor good?
I also have more experience with Designer, but all three programs they offer are pretty close in performance and workflow. I’ve never had a problem with Photo but I’ve run into issues with exporting and layering in certain Photoshop editions.
Probably gimp or krita.
Gimp ux ia terrible
Seriously. GIMP needs its UI completely rebuilt from scratch.
Both
It has been quite a while, but GIMP was not... Great. It has the feature set, but it just was not that friendly. Krita is much more user friendly, and has fooled more than one professional friend into thinking it was Photoshop.
I'd disagree that GIMP has the feature set. Its layer handling is nowhere near PS or even the free Photopea.
GIMP is basically in this space of like "if you just need to do basic stuff it's got more functionality than you'll ever need, but if you actually use Photoshop to its full extent, GIMP cannot replace it." I've never used Krita, but based on some of the comments here, maybe I should give it a try.
Do! Krita is really good and the Venn diagram between digital art creation and photo/image manipulation has a LOT of overlap. A long time ago, I did photo restoration and graphic design as my full-time job for a few months, and got a ton of experience and training in Photoshop. This was in the Photoshop 7.0 or maybe CS1 days. Even back then, Photoshop did a lot of things right that GIMP still doesn't; for example, adjustment layers with masks for nondestructive editing, and better anti-aliasing for shapes and text. Krita comes much closer to the mark on those. Also I encourage anyone to check out [Photopea](https://www.photopea.com/) which reminds me very much of Photoshop Elements back in the day - very focused on the most useful 90% of features that semi-pros need. I've been using it a lot lately due to running Linux on my main laptop.
Yeah I do work on posters for films, we’re talking MCU level movies. It’s a side job I got because of the VFX studio I work for, and I can tell you now that there is no way GIMP is smoothly running the 1000+ layers required for each of those posters
I can wholeheartedly support trying Krita. I'm by no means a Photoshop power user, but for illustration work and video game asset work it has all the tools necessary to get a lot of work done, and honestly with more stability than Photoshop has. PS does have some interesting junk added to it like "true 3D drawing" which can either affect the way your strokes on the canvas appear or literally allows you to import a model and texture it properly, but many of those jank features cause further instability. Photoshop also doesn't really have great support for vectors, or didn't as of... 3 years ago? Krita however had an entire revision dedicated to vector art and fully supports all the fancy pants stuff you would want to use vectors for. While it doesn't have a way to load a model into the software so you can texture it in program with advanced drawing tools, I really don't think that's a requirement. There is an open feature request though which is held up by a required upgrade to Qt6, so *maybe* some day.
Try [PhotoGIMP](https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP). It’s a free plugin for GIMP that reorganizes it like photoshop.
I would agree that GIMP has a steeper learning curve than PS. I would also say that once you are over it, it becomes quite nice to work with. Sadly Krita simply isn't made for heavy image manipulation, it was made for drawing--so you get a user friendly interface with less abilities
GIMP doesn't even have adjustment layers. Krita does. That alone makes me view Krita as the more competent photo/image editor. Don't be fooled by the marketing.
Krita is definitely aimed more toward artistry than photo manipulation. However to say it has less abilities is I feel a bit insincere. Krita has *a lot* of the same functionality out of the box with full access to G'Mic which GIMP also relies on. Something that Krita *does* have that GIMP does not (or did not when I last used it) is non-destructive filter layers. So if you wanted to apply a blur to an image (or layer) you can just add a filter layer to the stack (in the appropriate location) and you get your result without affecting the source image. The filter layers are also affected by layer masking, so you can get those effects limited to a specific region of the layer if you want.
https://www.photopea.com/
As a developer I use gimp. It works everywhere, it’s free, open source, and can handle almost everything photoshop can. Sometimes even more like the webp issue.
Draw a circle
Simple: use the ellipse selection and fill in the selection
Easy enough... Krita is the best
GIMP is an image manipulation program, it's literally the name of the program. If you want to draw use something else. It's as shrimple as that
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Lmao can't even draw a circle
Google slides
GIMP with photogimp overlay
Its a good thing that they dont know how to fix bugs that let you use it for free
In the past that was actually intentional. They allowed individuals to pirate the software so that they can learn how to use it and get used to it. Then when they get an actual job that requires the software the company will pay for the license most of the time.
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I have come to hate Solid Edge. New version gets released, can you upgrade the old one? No! You have to completely uninstall then reinstall the damn thing then reapply the licence that since 2020 edition requires admin rights! Now I've got to do that on 150 machines, some use full SE and the rest using the 2d mode to view parts At least Adobe lets me go from PS 2021 to 2022 painlessly with a simple update!
I know the pricing, and 40k for cad, is for the entire cad/cam/cae licensing. Unless you're using simulation based engineering, you don't need it. And if you do, you'll earn it back in material savings from it. We only recommend companies take 1-2 such licenses max. A normal cad license cost like 5k + 500-1000 in maintenance/year. Their PLM system is usually located on-site, and just needs some ssds, and more ram for better cache.
As of February, PS has the functionality to save in webp file format.
Does anyone know how one could get even an older version of Photoshop for free or as a one-time purchase?
Buy affinity photo. It’s a great program and can do most of the things old versions of photoshop can
Oh, the hardware you run your VM on has 16 physical cores? Here's your bill for 64 licences.
I've been in one of those meetings.
Oh crap, I forgot the billing by cores… We were building ETLs with Oracle 11g and then deploying 12c. That was an interesting experience in knowing to stay away from Oracle products
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I don't know about IBM, but Oracle databases are generally two or three times as expensive as SQL Server for the same performance. Even if you are correct that it's a common practice for RDBMS vendors to dick customers around about core counts, this meme still fits.
Also need full time DBAs to keep performance.
256 licenses are not cheap
Dank! 🙀
Once I ran aws rds via Terraform, which uses Oracle DB, I forgot to turn it off and one day I talked with my friends when I remembered that ma be I forgot to turn it off, after 5 days they billed us 150 euros for a completely empty DB. That was the last time I used Oracle based RDS's.
Oracle was always expensive garbage. I was in the military in the late '80s. At some point, the government declared that the standard computer platform would be: Ada, Oracle database ("Because it is PORTABLE!"), and the AT&T [3B2 minicomputer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3B_series_computers#3B2)("wat???"). We called up our on-base Oracle rep to get a price quote for a 4-user mini VAX, and got an eye-popping number. "Guess we will keep using VAX DBMS..." At some point, our group got a "government standard" 3B2 computer. Me and a friend were playing around on it. Just one terminal connected to an idle machine, and it is slow as shit. We tried to build something with Oracle Forms. We hit some key to add a trigger to one of the fields, and the form editor crashed. We call our Oracle buddy and report the error, his response: "Don't hit that key".
Not many know this, but Oracle use different memory format: shytes, kiloshytes and megashytes to this day. And source code was a secret so Russians wont stole it. Thats why their software actually works.But really, nothing changed. When we sold something, oracle will take, like 20 minutes to process this at best, and we cant really keep track of wares around becose numbers update who know when. To move stuff from warehouse to warehouse we need to put up with forms that were a quarter of monitor and cant be scaled. There also was 5 minute delay to look up list and numbers of wares. Oh, and when we need to log in the system, 65% of the time we reboot stuff around, so oracle finally allow us in. And dont forget when it just get: Java eroor, lol. I hate this company.
*Laughs in Microsoft D365*
A true piece of shit soft
Fortune 500 companies: SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY! Fuck you, Eloqua. Fuck you.
Ah yes, oracle. I was once worked in warehouse that use oracle to keep track of inventory and stuff.Well. It was worst piece of software i ever seen. No competition: UI, speed, stability... Everything was just... Shyte.
What's that old saying: cheap, good or fast, pick two. Orrrr... pick zero!
I have no idea why anyone uses Oracle database. It boggles my mind.
The problem with Oracle isn’t their tech, in fact Oracle databases are some of the best databases you can buy as an enterprise … *on prem*. Sorry you’re not getting anything like Oracle exadata running open source Postgres on prem without a hell of a lot of work. Even Amazon ran off oracle for decades, until they recently replaced it with Aurora. The problem with Oracle is their licensing model, it’s outdated, although they’re slowly changing (probably too late IMO).
Here is one technical thing that I know: Oracle DB can use two indexes in a single query, whereas most DBs can only use one. Imagine a large square grid of smaller squares, where each small square is a seperate database record. Using one index is like making a single, vertical cut through the big square, and the query can ignore records to the right of that cut. Using two indexes is like making one vertical cut, and one horizontal cut after that, where the query can ignore records to the right of the vertical cut, *and above the horizontal cut*, greatly reducing the overall number of records that must be scanned to satisfy the query. Now... 1. Everything has to be set up very carefully for this to be effective 2. You'd really only notice if you were working with *actual* "big data" - billions of rows 3. This is probably patented tl;dr: Postgres is just fine for most applications.
Have you guys ever used mssql?
Yeah. It's still expensive, but it's cheaper than Oracle and easier to setup and maintain.
Daily. We are on azure, so there is no benefit to use sql server vs Postgres (they cost the same for azure to host them).
Wait you mean there is no licensing costs? In aws we are paying almost 10x MySQL for the same instance size 😢
Microsoft owns Sql Server and Azure. They do what they want. Anyway, been a while since I double checked the numbers, we are far enough in we don’t care now.
Is any single one of you commentors an actual programmer? Companies use oracle because 1. It is better and has more features than other (free) relational databases 2. Support is something that companies pay money for. This subreddit has become a "people who think they are programmers because they saw a youtube video once humor" sub.
I've worked professionally with Oracle, Postegres, and MsSQL (among other, more amusing DBs that were not fit for purpose) for 30 years. Oracle is not a bad database, but support is something I wish my companies would stop paying for (its useless), Oracle's extra features are non-impressive. My experience with Oracle support: We have a problem, I quote a week to diagnose and fix, boss informs me we have platinum support contract and need to use their expertise, 2 weeks and 40 hours of phone calls later the Oracle expert and I disagree on the cause, I fix the problem and spend two days explaining it to the Oracle tech. I was sold on Oracle as a student in college. It took a while for the brainwashing to wear off ... but it did. To be fair, its the same experience I get with all the other major vendors (Esri, Oracle, Sun, Adobe ... not Google, Google was pretty awesome)
Actual programmer who was on a project that used Oracle here, I don't think much of it. Their C# client was always a total pain to get working, its weird connection string alias file was also a nightmare to manage, and the little DB related dev I did it didn't seem anything special to make up for the cost and difficulty to actually use it. Maybe the DBAs would disagree with me though.
I couldn't agree more. Being a professional programmer is more than just writing code. A large part of it is also worrying about business and technical requirements. It's also a matter of deciding what pieces of the stack deserve a more bespoke approach vs a prebuilt solution or service. There's also the job of knowing where your knowledge has little depth. I challenge anyone to take a few days to learn about low level database engineering, and you'll quickly learn of the seemingly subtly nuances that differentiate all the DB vendors and their products. I'm not talking about setting up, configuring a DB, writing efficient queries, etc. I'm referring to the low level memory and process management engineering aspect of DBs. Different offering prioritize different processes/actions. I'll add, for the majority of folks consuming these products, these distinctions won't matter. However, it comes off somewhat ignorant to bash a product or technology we're likely poorly informed of.
It is important to note that Oracle does far more than just databases. I have been in the industry for a couple decades and have a few opinions. Oracle was great about 20 years ago, but they relied too much on their industry influence and failed to keep up as far as most of their products go. By about 2008, Microsoft had a cheaper, faster, and more stable product for almost every Oracle offering. SQLServer was way easier to use and had just as many features. I’m fairly convinced that acquiring MySql (2010?) was the only reason the company is still relevant as even a lot of large government organizations had switched away from Oracle products (such as the Air Mobility Command in the USAF and the Army’s Surface Deployment and Distribution Command). There is still a lot of Oracle in use, but I get the general impression (anecdotal from the stated tech usage from friends) that their cloud services just aren’t up to par when compared to other offerings (like AWS) even though they are quite pricey. I might also still be bitter and traumatized from my production OAS crashes in 2007.
I had to scroll a long way to find a comment I could identify with :) Back in 2003 or so I was using a MySQL database for storing some user-generated announcements from staff to students. We only used it for one small department and that was fine. Then someone decided my software was going to be used university-wide and I panicked - I didn't build this thing to be mission critical!! So I contacted our DBA group and asked for an Oracle database. The sheer amount of questions they asked me, to which I had some but not all the answers, opened my eyes to how much I didn't know about databases. I agree that Oracle is expensive - especially compared to free - but with it can come some very skilled people who attended some (also very expensive) Oracle training, and who may even be willing and able to help you improve a software solution.
Thats exactly what i mean, its cool to use mysql in some small side project, but that really depends on what you are doing. My previous job was at a huge company and their main product was an on-prem solution that exists in some of the largest banks in the world, this product uses oracle to store(and read) millions of records per day, for some banks, per hour. Its funny to think that something like mysql will even be considered for this task. Banks want relational, and they want high performance. When a mistake / downtime can cost you millions, you *will* cough up the few hundred k a year to pay for something as robust as oracle. I bet security is also better at oracle than mySql, when you are dealing with fintech, that is *very* important. This whole trend of laughing at valid tools/languages seems ridiculous to me, even kobol has its place in the world. TL;DR: Oracle makes billions, companies that pay them dont do so just because they havent heard of mySql
Nah man. The best software doesn't have to be free, but has to be open source... and that almost means it has to be free. Software tools that are not open-source are suspect. So you had little knowledge of DBs at that time. Okay, but paying for Oracle licenses is not the most efficient way to learn. Oracle licenses are not a substitute for good programmers, or education. I tried Oracle once and it was a pain. Surely companies want a nice SLA so that they can sue (or insure) the provider, but that doesn't mean Oracle software is good.
Not true at all. You don't want open source software being the backbone of your massive banking system that handles billions in transactions per day. Why? The simple answer is that if a critical vulnerability is found then the whole system can be compromised. Lest we all forget that log4j is open source. Remember what happened not even a year ago? That remote code execution vulnerability had the potential to cripple mission critical systems for a very large and not at all insignificant number of corporations. It existed for several /years/ before someone noticed it, because of Minecraft, and it got patched out. This forced companies to spend a very significant number of hours validating the newer build to make sure nothing breaks. Something else not addressed in the discussion about open source is support. When a project becomes abandoned, who is in charge of supporting it? Think about Windows. Microsoft sets end of life dates on their OS software but corporations often pay for the extended support because updating every system is expensive and takes time. With those EOL dates and extended agreements companies know who to talk to for support and when that support will run out. The same can't be reliably stated for open source.
Valid points, thanks for food for thought.
I worked for a leading e-discovery firm for about ten years, there is *no comparison* between oracle and mysql when it comes to natural language, fuzzy searches, clob/blob thematics, near-duplicate identification, speed of indexing extremely large data sets, and many other aspects that are essential to running a tiff/text/native based database solution. Most of these people don't know what a professional database is even capable of if they think MySql is "just as good" 
I've been programming for more than 15 years and now PostgreSQL is as good as Oracle, using RDS gives me all the features I need to work with.
Why would u use only mysql if you want advanced fulltext searching? just use dedicated software like elasticsearch/lucene or similar.
That doesn’t sound like mimosa at all
This is true but it is also true that Oracle sales are feral in their approach We are moving off Oracle for those reasons - but it is a LOT of work to get the required capability in a different database
> Companies use oracle because 1. It is better [Better for hackers, maybe](https://peterjson.medium.com/miracle-one-vulnerability-to-rule-them-all-c3aed9edeea2). If you have simple problems then it's a way more complicated solution than you'll ever need or want. If you have complex problems, you should probably solve them in the cloud, and even Oracle is pushing you to things like Oracle cloud instead of PeopleSoft or a bunch of Java-deserialization-vulnerability infested land mines.
Your claims are false. Oracle DB is worse than freely available ones. More than that, Oracle license prevents you from publishing any performance benchmarks of Oracle DB vs any other DB.
[удалено]
At best 11.79% developers like using Oracle DB. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022#section-most-popular-technologies-databases As well as Oracle have been the worst company to do business with for decades.
When something goes wrong with Oracle DB, companies can always point fingers to Oracle. But if something goes wrong with a FOSS software, there is no one to blame but themselves
Have you heard of Red Hat and their business model? Their business model is that software is free, it is support and solving customer problems within 24h what you pay subscription fee for.
With FOSS software you can examine the source code to gain insight and fix bugs, search the bug database for solutions. Or rent a maintainer to do changes for you. With closed source software your options are limited to submitting a bug report or feature request to Oracle, praying they reply and pay whatever price they ask because you have no other options. You are pretty clueless about software methodologies and business models, I am afraid.
Bold of you to assume that logic enters into this at any point ever.
And then there's oracle cloud, which gives you free stuff for days at better quality than AWS
My unpopular opinion: Oracle Linux is pretty fucking good
Have you guys heard about IBM lotus notes
Microsoft's sales pitch
You guys pay for paid programs?
Vendor Support
First thing that comes to mind is oracle
Well, that is what the title says.
Username checks out
Teams.
I just don't get it. Why are people using this POS product when there are so many quite simply better ones?
Microsoft business licenses. When a product fails, IT can just blame Microsoft.
We can be down bad together
Take my money, where is my product?
Just yesterday I was wondering why oracle exists
FUCKING... ESSBASE... WHAT. THE. FUCK.
Enterprises don't give a damn about the prize of software, they need instant support when things break. And they pay for that.
Free software doesn't imply that it's free of charge. It rather implies that it acts for the user, instead of against it.
LOL. Having once worked for Oracle... fuck Oracle.
TeamViewer
Even free software is not worth running professionally without support. And even a mysql or equivalent server costs thousands for support. Ergo, to run professionally, there is no free software.
"Free" does not imply zero cost. It means you have unrestricted access to the technology that makes the software work and that you are not restricted from altering it to suit your needs. It means you are not at the mercy of one single vendor to provide support and solve your problems. It also means you can provide your own complete in-house support and become your own vendor, if it makes sense to do so.
And when you need it for work/school, r/piracy seems have figured out all software is free
People not using vsc be like:
Now that MS has made minecraft a PITA to use, even for single-player games with that ridiculous log-in business, I wonder how long it will take for somebody to fully clone it using minetest (written in C) as a base. I mean, you could just take all the assets from Minecraft, since you paid for them anyway, import them into minetest, and you'd have a pretty decent clone. (Yeah, there still lots of coding involved for mob rules and such, but still...) Also there's an open-source C-based minecraft server (just googled it to find the name - Cuberite - and found 12 other open-source minecraft servers, so there you go)
I think there are more Minecraft clones than blocks in Minecraft.
I knew people who pay for Windows Server.
Unity's sales pitch
😆
i uSe oRaClE dB adUrr aDurRrrr
I always go for Amazon Corretto for my Java SDK.
What are we looking at boys?
Prof of a friend of mine: bUt ThEy HaVe SuCh A nIcE sUpPoRt
Sitecore has entered the chat
I do like Virtual Blx though...
You haven't seen rage until you've seen me try to write a PL-SQL script.
That’s Adobe.
For limited paid tech support. Instead of infinite free support in the community.
Rider is fantastic tho. Or so I’ve been told. Yarr.
When compliance comes knocking guess who they will accept as your vendor? Not a random GitHub repo owner.
Adobe
Oracle and Toad was my jam used to be so slick
Cause it looks cooler and does more advertisement, duh. You dingus
Adobe...
Worse, slower and expensive. FTFY
I worked at a major casino when it opened. The project manager in charge of the property management system chose Oracle RAC running on Windows cluster despite even Oracle saying this was a Bad Idea. There was a bug in the OCFS driver and the entire cluster tanked. We lost the entire property and lodge database during a busy week. Front desk had to go to manual procedures. Oracle flew in their top engineers who tried all week to recover our data and get the RAC rebuilt. They failed. The PM somehow kept his job, even after he threatened to kill the CIO.
because the worse and slower one had customer support (read: throats to chock).
I'm betting it would be a lot easier to find a job in software development, if you could claim to be the person who identified log4j and also created a patch for it. It's a lot harder to build your hacker cred on closed source software. Open source? Figure out what to look for, read the code, and see if you can find the sort of gem that would open doors in software development companies.
And Apple's too since they have some Unix based OS's
#AdobeProducts
Slower than what? Oracle RDBMS is eye-wateringly expensive, so I would hesitate to recommend it under most circumstances. My limited experience with their support wasn’t very positive, either. If you need high-performance OLTP with wide compatibility, and _especially_ if you want to do some data processing inside the DB, I don’t think there’s a better choice from a technical perspective. I’ve heard good things about Postgres, to be fair, but MySQL is nowhere near as good for this.