Contractually, as per employee handbook, I'm legally required to do so. Common for large corporation. Even small ones should do this. It avoids one foul-mouthed employee to say things that could otherwise be construed as being a corporate direction.

I dont think this has anything to do with recession planning.

Been in that company nearly 22 years and I've gone through (/survived) *many* restructuring operation (more than 10). It's never been about "surviving the next quarter". It's usually about optimisation of teams or product direction.

I know people in the Montreal group that have been affected. Don't ask numbers, I dont have em. But I do know other people in that group that didn't get axed. One VP there has had his manager teams' constituents affected. Dont know where—we're spread out globally. (I work in a different group and my teams mates spread from California to London plus a couple more in India.)

I'm not sure if there's a better way to handle things. I'm not even sure how they handled it in this case. But when our startup was acquired, they did the "everyone in this room still has a job" thing.

THAT, was by far, the worse I have witnessed. And it was before the acquisition so it's not on Oracle.

Obligatory "this is my opinion" thing and "I dont speak for Oracle".

You trying to tell me the onslaught of anonymous trolls on here makes for a better social experience?

I'm better off with my friends. Close or less close.

As an insider, from my chair, I can tell you Oracle is usually not into boasting it's survival / existence based on one high profile client.

We sometime see customers lists in internal memos but these generally dont end up as high-profile web site / PR announcements. Rather, key points get floated about during quarter numbers filing. I'm suspecting many of our higher-profile clients dont need (/want) their infrastructure details out in the open, or that any divulgation remains vague.

In my division, we see governments, pharma, entertainment and aerospace big names as well as smaller clients and collabs with 3rd party. It's the defence clients you usually never hear about.

So, I'd say, Oracle doesn't _need_ to make anything free to any one big client just to please them. It's also not a PR benefit. We already have plenty free or otherwise open offerings (our cloud products are both hosted or On Premise, support federated SSO, have plug-in or SDKs to be extended).

The "Oracle is evil" arguments is kinda funny when, from the inside, you see nothing inherently evil about what we do. How it's perceived by some customers, though, I can understand and it probably the result of bureaucracy, business processes or internal competition that leads to certain views about the company. I suppose this explains why I hate MicroSoft with a passion, yet, rare hear MS employees ever go out in masses, irate about a company they "should" hate, from our point of view.

The ultimate Darwin filter.

Someone can sum up the article please?

Dumping excess workforce is a precursor to a buyout.

Jerking off.

Did you just frickin assume my preferred language?

Starting with anonymous comments.

Well, that's what we do in our group (info withheld—not here to pander our things).

We use a file name validator object we pass around to a multitude or places in the app that enforces format of such things as file names.
But MITM attacks wouldn't be prevented by this and the first line of defence is server side: it will not accept unvalidated inputs.

Ease of use is enhanced by having client side verification telling the user exactly what's wrong with their input.

Memories. My first commercial product on Mac was in Modula-2 which was kinda big in the late 80s early 90s, until Metcom succumbed to the dark side of C and IDEs to become Metrowerks.

Back on topic;

Today, I work for a larger company (celebrated my 20th year there this past October) and it's become progressively harder for our group to include OpenSource products. There are more than one reason why but the biggest hurdle comes from Legal, that has to approve the licenses individually and research the background of the sources to some degree.

Only a couple of months ago did our iOS group decided to use in-house logging system rather than Apple's Unified Logging APIs and one reason we did this was to be able to control the granularity of the generated logs: Apple's Unified logging requires end-users to Vulcan-Nerve-Pinch their devices to trigger a "sysdiagnostic" core dump, generating 250megs archive that includes not only the current app but the entire loggs, including other software; totally impractical for sending to support and engineering.

As it turns out, this was the right decision due to the Zuckerberg effect. We now have to have way more scrutiny in what goes in the logs and this is way easier than if we were to deal with a number of open-source code that we would have to merge with our changes.

Sometimes, we'd love to use open source. But most of the times, it's impractical; at least at the client level, when you have to deal with a large Legal department that oversees what you can/should and can't/shan't do.