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Oracle's Chief Security Officer, Mary Ann Davidson, took to her blog to demand that users stop hunting for bugs in Oracle's software, because, among other things, it violates the user license.
The blog entry got deleted quickly, but is archived here:
Now is a good time to reiterate that I'm not beating people up over this merely because of the license agreement. More like, "I do not need you to analyze the code since we already do that, it's our job to do that, we are pretty good at it, we can – unlike a third party or a tool – actually analyze the code to determine what's happening and at any rate most of these tools have a close to 100% false positive rate so please do not waste our time on reporting little green men in our code." I am not running away from our responsibilities to customers, merely trying to avoid a painful, annoying, and mutually-time wasting exercise.
Please, Oracle users, don't worry your little heads - just stop violating the license agreement.
takyon: #oraclefanfic on Twitter
And an update from Ars:
Oracle Executive Vice President and Chief Corporate Architect Edward Screven made a statement distributed by e-mail to the press on the post:
The security of our products and services has always been critically important to Oracle. Oracle has a robust program of product security assurance and works with third party researchers and customers to jointly ensure that applications built with Oracle technology are secure. We removed the post as it does not reflect our beliefs or our relationship with our customers.
Just how Oracle's chief security officer fell out of alignment with Oracle's core beliefs and managed to spread her heretic thoughts on customers was not addressed.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by zafiro17 on Thursday August 13 2015, @06:38AM
Oracle made scads of money at a time when companies could manage their software the way Oracle continues to do so today: locked down sources, aggressive corporate management/handling/channel sales, and restrictive licenses. Much of the software world doesn't work that way anymore, but Ellison and crew seem not to have noticed.
That tweet was stupid. The fact that they took it down means perhaps they recognized it as so. Is Oracle changing, is its business approach adapting to this new world? Probably not, but it's possible to hope. Otherwise, we shall just carry on, looking for Oracle's eventual destruction as the dinosaur that it is. The make a good database, but increasingly it's not worth it, and their corporate culture is well-recognized by businesses as toxic. No one looks forward to cutting a deal with Oracle; you buy their stuff because you have to, and because you're not willing to run your corporate financial infrastructure on MySQL and a couple of Python scripts.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Thursday August 13 2015, @10:01PM
The problem is for a long time, there wasn't a serious alternative for Oracle. Oracle's RAC was basically the gold standard, and while I know DB2 has clustering, I'm not sure how strong its fault tolerance is. PostgreSQL only recently added async replication to the core, and while its design allows for hot standby somewhat better than MySQL, the fact is it still doesn't have an out of the box way to avoid a single point of failure that a true clustering solution can provide.
MySQL Cluster, despite the fact its picky as fuck about its queries doesn't really give a fuck if one its database nodes craps out as long as the shard's data is replicated. We've rebooted both hydrogen and neon (SN's backend DB servers) and the site didn't even blip. I *know* PostgreSQL-X2 exists, but I'm not aware that EnterpriseDB or other Postgres support providers provide support (which is a major thing in large companies).
To compound the fact, Oracle tends to underpin mission critical infrastructure, which makes changing it out extremely hard to justify, and it's own dialect of SQL is pretty foreign compared to other systems, plus the oodles of plSQL crap layered everywhere.
Still always moving