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Sun did engineering. Oracle does business.

I’d be surprised if Oracle released the trademark without a fight to the end. They have a special way of decimating open source projects.






oracle does engineering just fine, and they are actually still around...so maybe Sun was doing it wrong

Quality of engineering and longevity of the company producing the engineered product have nothing to do with each other.

Evaluated by how useful they are to society at large, many businesses should not exist forever--or even for very long. Xerox PARC, Kodak, and Netscape are examples of companies (or, in PARC's case, a division of a company) that contributed significantly to their fields before becoming defunct. Those contributions aren't worsened or inferior, somehow, because the companies that engineered them are gone.

Whether or not a company is still in business only tells you whether a company is good at keeping itself alive. Over time, that quality is increasingly disconnected from whether a company produces valuable goods or services.


The quality of engineering varies wildly within Oracle, to the point that entire divisions can be relied on to produce absolute garbage because longevity completely trumps talent. Oracle Cloud has great engineering (which these days is quite hampered by bureaucracy and misplaced frugality, in my opinion), but outside OCI and a few small select orgs, the situation is dire.

At a couple points my org had hiring crunches and leadership’s short term solution was to find employees from other orgs that could be “loaned” to us. The quality was universally jaw-droppingly low. I had to do code reviews and they would do the craziest junior-developer no-standards stuff that would cause their PRs to get rejected repeatedly, because not only did they make dumb decisions, they didn’t even understand the explanations of why they were dumb decisions. It was infuriating and a horrible waste of time, and the second time around, we tried to say we don’t want that kind of help, but leadership insisted that the free manpower was not optional.


That sort of loaned manpower isn't free, despite management's continued delusions that it is. Loaners have a cost, both up-front (onboarding, mentoring, reviews, etc) and on-going (lack of organic expertise in the new code remaining on the team, maintenance of suboptimal or inconsistent code, etc). But they're not the sorts of costs that show up well on balance sheets, so good luck convincing anyone that they exist.

only if there is a 1-1 correspondence between engineering acumen and money-making acumen, which I'm sure you already know isn't the case.

Who is responsible for the java API updates?



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