Oracle: We Do Open Source Just Like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft… Mostly
May 27, 2020
Silicon Angle published the PR-ish “Oracle’s Open Source Alter Ego Behind Some of Its Most Popular Products.” Oracle is creeping up to the half century mark. In Internet years or dog years, Oracle has been around so long that it is like comfortable shoes. The shine may be gone, but, by golly, those slippers work well indoors.
Oracle has its fans, and it has some detractors. Among its fans are the procurement officials in the US government who keep on renewing those contracts for the company’s flagship database. Among its detractors are some Googlers, licensees who struggle with integrating some of the company’s products into zippy new environments like NoSQL, and firms offering unauthorized Oracle training.
None of these considerations sully the Oracle open source article. We learn:
Oracle’s paid products and services are actually loaded with ingredients from open-source communities, including Linux, to which it is also a contributor. This circular ecosystem of contributing and borrowing back enables some of the versatility and cross-environment compatibility in the company’s latest database and hybrid-cloud offerings.
Why is Oracle into open source? Why are Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and other commercial proprietary software vendors embracing open source? DarkCyber finds this statement in the article interesting:
The use of Linux across Oracle’s portfolio, and as the underlying OS for its products and services, enhances end users’ experience.
The article includes a testimonial from the Oracle wizard of open source, who says:
When its contributions improve both the larger Linux community and its own products, a circular flow of innovation develops that helps everyone that uses Linux, according to Coekaerts. “It’s not so much about making my own world better and having Linux be better and Ksplice and so forth, which is important, but that becoming part of the bigger picture — that’s the exciting part.” — Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president of software development at Oracle Corp.
DarkCyber was under the obviously false impression that proprietary software vendors were embracing open source for these reasons:
- Shift some development costs to the community
- Link proprietary systems and methods to open source to provide a runway to commercial licenses
- Prevent other companies from capturing open source technologies and preventing others from using those technologies
- Respond to enterprise customers who view open source as a way to avoid the handcuffs of proprietary software by implementing a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” strategy
- Gain insight into individuals who might be good hires.
Obviously DarkCyber was incorrect. We acknowledge our error.
Stephen E Arnold, May 27, 2020
Amazon AWS Translation Notes
May 26, 2020
DarkCyber wants to say, “Good job” to the person who assembled “Amazon Web Services.” The write up is a list of more than 160 AWS services. Each service is identified by the often wonky Amazon name and followed by a brief description. The list is a medieval gloss for a 21st century cloud vendor’s service, product, frameworks, and features. The monks who compiled Psychomachia of Aurelius Prudentius would be envious.
Amazon wants to offer something for everyone, and as the company has emitted services, coherence has been a casualty. Worth downloading and tucking in one’s “We Want to Be Number One” folder. I assume a mid tier consulting firm or a WFHer will put the list into Excel and indicate which of these AWS offerings are available and mostly working from competitors like Google, IBM, and Facebook.
Stephen E Arnold, May 26, 2020
Microsoft: Good Enough Is Not the Standard We Need
May 25, 2020
Imagine the topic options swirling around this weekend: A mass marketish iPhone jailbreak procedure, Amazon allegedly selling to blacklisted companies, Joe Rogan either pulling off the podcast coup of the year or falling into the black hole of irrelevance.
What catches DarkCyber’s eye?
Microsoft Acknowledges Internet Error in Windows 10 Cumulative Update KB4535996
Three points related to the allegedly accurate statement.
First, the problem affects some WFHers. Those are people who need the Internet to do work and get paid. Bad.
Second, the problem originated in February 2020, and it is only now (May 24, 2020) being “acknowledged.”
Third, Microsoft fouled up its magical online upgrade process.
So what?
Microsoft is gung-ho on the cloud, its “building” for the future, its reinvention of apps, and its partner flogging.
Maybe the company should consider that good enough is not good enough.
Even Amazon — a firm with some issues — steps up and says, “Hey, our vaunted speedy delivery is going to work like a horse drawn cart now.”
Microsoft appears to have embraced its good enough, and it is not.
I am tired of going to my office which has Linux, Mac, and Windows machines. There I see the Windows machine waiting for me to enter a secret code or press a button to update. Yesterday one of these machines reported that it couldn’t reach my Microsoft account?
These guys are going to do warfighting?
Good enough is not. Not for Google, not for Facebook, not for Amazon, and not for Microsoft.
Good enough. Does that mean excellence today?
Stephen E Arnold, May 25, 2020
Microsoft and Its Latest Search Innovation: Moving Past Fast? Nope
May 22, 2020
I read “Microsoft Search: Search Your Document Like You Search the Web.” Perhaps Microsoft did not get the reports about the demise of the Google Search Appliance. That “invention” made clear that searching a corporate content collection like you search the Web was not exactly the greatest thing since sliced bread. There were a number of reasons for the failure of the GSA. It was a black box. You know that mere mortals could not tune the relevance component. You know that it produced results that left employees wondering, “Where is the document I wrote yesterday?” You know that the corpus of Web content is different from the fruit cake of corporate content. Web search returns something because the system is rigged to find a way to display ads to the hapless searcher.
Contrast this with documents in the cloud, in different systems like that old AS/400 Ironsides application used by the warehouse supervisors, and content tucked away on employees’ USB drives, mobile phones, the oldest kid’s iPad, and on services a go to sales professional uses to store PowerPoints for “special” customers. Then there are the documents in the corporate legal office. The consultants’ reports scanned and stored on the Market Department’s computer kept for interns.
Nevertheless, the article explains:
We’re utilizing well-established web search technologies, such as query and document understanding, and adding deep learning based natural language models. This allows us to handle a much broader set of search queries beyond “exact match.”
Okay, query expansion, synonym look up, and Fast Search’s concept feature. But there’s more:
With the recent breakthroughs in deep learning techniques, you can now go beyond the common search term-based queries. The result is answers to your questions based on the document content. This opens a whole new way of finding knowledge. When you’re looking at a water quality report, you can answer questions like “where does the city water originate from? How to reduce the amount of lead in water?”
May I suggest that Microsoft and dozens of other enterprise search vendors have promised magical retrieval?
May I point out that the following content types are usually outside the ken of the latest and great enterprise search confection; for example:
- Quality control data on parts stored in an Autodesk engineering document
- Real time data flowing into an organization from sensors
- Video content, audio content, and rich media like photographs
- Classified or content restricted by certain constraints. (Access controls are often best implemented by specialized systems unknown to the greedy enterprise search indexing system.)
- Documents obtained through an eDiscovery process for legal matters.
Has Microsoft solved these problems? Sure, if everything (note the logically impossible categorical affirmative) is in an Azure repository, it is conceivable that a user query could return a particular content object.
But that’s Microsoft fantasy land, and it is about as likely as Mr. Nadella arriving at work on the back of a unicorn.
Microsoft feels compelled to reinvent search every year or two. The longest journey begins with a single step. It is just that Microsoft took those steps decades ago and still has not reached the now rubbelized Fred Harvey’s.
Stephen E Arnold, May 22, 2020
JEDI? What JEDI?
May 21, 2020
The battle royale players are Amazon, Microsoft, White House officials, the Department of Defense, former employees of high profile firms, law firms, and consultants. The subject? JEDI. The procurement has been entertainment worthy of a William Proxmire Golden Fleece Award. (Remember Senator William Proxmire?)
DarkCyber spotted “Scoop: Google Lands Cloud Deal with Defense Department.” We know this is a scoop because the word “scoop” appears in the headline. Subtle.
The write up reports as a real news scoop:
Google Cloud has landed a deal to help the Defense Department detect, protect against, and respond to cyber threats, Axios has learned. The deal, with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), is in the “seven figures…”
The main point is to make clear that it will be business as usual at the Pentagon. The single vendor idea is not making much headway when it comes to information technology.
What’s next? Awards to Hewlett Packard, IBM, and Oracle?
Good question. We thought we heard cheers from the buildings near the old SeaWorld in Silicon Valley. Maybe that was a party held at IBM Federal off Quince Orchard Road in Gaithersburg?
Probably our team’s collective tinnitus.
Stephen E Arnold, May 21, 2020
IBM: Rapprochement, Pragmatism, Survival?
May 18, 2020
Just a tiny decision. Probably nothing. The thwarted time sharing warp drive machine is sputtering. Gone are the days of IBM mainframes and those pesky plug compatible pretenders. Online meant IBM, by golly.
Then IBM drifted from the data centers, wandered in the PC wilderness, and ended on the shores of Lake Craziness in the Adirondacks chanting the mantra “Watson, Watson, Watson, come here I want you.”
IBM has a new president able to make decisions different from the previous chiefette. Gone are the daily stock buybacks. Terminations of those over 55 have slowed. Ads, although still a little wacky, no longer explain that IBM is a winner (a game show winner, that is).
The future of the company may be rapprochement. With what company? Microsoft, the devil in the OS/2s? Google? The company IBM understands according to a letter an IBM executive wrote me years ago. Huawei? Oracle, the mere database company which bought Sun Micro? No. No. No.
The “let’s be friends” is explained in “Red Hat and AWS launch OpenShift, a Joint Kubernetes Service.” DarkCyber noted:
According to Red Hat vice president of Hosted Platforms Sathish Balakrishnan, the fully managed service will help IT organizations to more quickly build and deploy applications in AWS on Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes platform, using the same tools and APIs. In addition, developers will be able to build containerized applications that integrate natively with the more than 170+ integrated AWS cloud-native services.
Yes, small news.
However, maybe Big Blue and the cagey orange smile may extend their relationship. IBM’s cloud and IBM itself might benefit from becoming BFFs with the FAABG least likely to kick Big Blue off the revenue bus.
The Bezos bulldozer chugs along, and even IBM can run fast enough to jump on the somewhat indifferent money scraper.
Stephen E Arnold, May 18, 2020
Crazy Expert Report: Covid19 and Enterprise Search? Really?
May 18, 2020
I received a notification from an online information service called WaterClouds Reports and Kandj and Prof Research. What? Water clouds, Kandj, and Prof Research. Will too many flailing experts spoil the content free soufflé?
Plus, the water thing meshes nicely with Beyond Search and DarkCyber.
What’s WaterCloud Reports up to these days? The answer is delivering information purporting to be about market research, news and reports using a number of different business identities. Suspicious? Yep, very suspicious.
I learned:
The news concerns “The Absolute Report Will Add the Study for Impact of Covid 19 in Enterprise Search Software.”
Now that’s a small dump truck of nuttiness.
What’s in this report available from and outfit called Kandj Market Research and not Water Cloud Reports?
Check this lingo with Covid tacked at the end:
The recent report titled “The Enterprise Search Software Market” and forecast to 2024 published by KandJ Market Research is a focused study encompassing the market segmentation primarily based on type and application. The report investigates the key drivers leading to the growth of the Enterprise Search Software market during the forecast period and analyzes the factors that may hamper the market growth in the future. Besides, the report highlights the potential opportunities for the market players and future trends of the market by a logical and calculative study of the past and current market scenario. The Final Report Will Include the Impact of COVID – 19 Analysis in This Enterprise Search Software Industry.
The news story suggests that the multi thousand dollar report may not be completed. Is it possible that this digital container of loopy zeros and ones is only completed when someone buys a copy?
No problem. Enterprise search is definitely a hot topic when Covid 19 is involved. Whip out your credit card. The report costs $4,000. There’s a deal too. Fork over $6,000 and you get an enterprise license. In the average WFH company, how many employees are hungering to read a report about enterprise search and Covid 19?
Answer: Not many.
What big time enterprise search vendors are included? Here’s the partial list. You have to spit out an email in order to see names of the other five vendors:
AddSearch
Algolia
Apache Solr
Elasticsearch
SearchSpring
Swiftype
Two open source systems apparently have reacted to Covid 19 for enterprise search. Also four other firms have put on their digital N95 masks and tried to “save” search.
Several observations:
- Outright scam or just a high school term paper? DarkCyber is leaning to the scam end of the spectrum?
- Covid 19. Nothing thrills like a key word which may attract clicks from the curious or the clueless.
- Kandj and the cloud whatever? Wow.
Not even Forrester, Gartner, Kelsey, and other mid tier consulting firms use this type of marketing. Well… sometimes?
Stephen E Arnold, May 18, 2020
Amazon Promises an All Star Sub and Thomson 404s to Source
May 18, 2020
The news item was not a breath taker: “Amazon Says Appropriate Executive to Be Available, As U.S. Panel Calls on Bezos to Testify.”
On May 15, the Bezos bulldozer said no in a nice way to the US government. Mr. Bezos would be driving the bulldozer to a small town where one lone retail store front was operating. Apparently knocking down the building in Farmington, Illinois, required his attention. The US government would be able to speak with “the appropriate Amazon executive.” No surprise.
What was a surprise to some in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky, was the dead link to the Amazon blog post pointing to the full text of Amazon’s response to the US government. This is particularly interesting since the article was written and checked by at least Ismail Shakil and Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru and Editing by Sonya Hepinstall and Gerry Doyle.
Ah, those trust principles appear to address issues other than verifying links to Amazon documents.
Stephen E Arnold, May 18, 2020
Microsoft and Cyber Security: Popping Up a Level?
May 15, 2020
Remember when Microsoft “invented” DOS? What happened to Gary? Nothing good.
Remember when Microsoft “invented” compression? What happened to those Stacker people? Poof.
Remember when Microsoft “reinvented” enterprise search? What happened to Fast Search & Transfer’s UNIX licensees? Hasta la vista, muchachos.
Now Microsoft seems to be preparing to convert the cyber security vendors into Microsoft partners. We noted “Microsoft Opens Up Coronavirus Threat Data to the Public.” Another virtue signaling story? Maybe.
The article reports/asserts:
Microsoft is making the threat intelligence it’s collected on coronavirus-related hacking campaigns public…
That seems useful. Here’s another piece of information presented as a quote from the head of the Cyber Security Alliance:
“Overall, the security industry has not seen an increase in the volume of malicious activity; however, we have seen a rapid and dramatic shift in the focus of that criminal activity,” Daniel, a former White House cybersecurity coordinator, told CyberScoop. “The bad guys have shifted their focus to COVID-19 related themes, trying to capitalize on people’s fears, the overall lack of information, and the increase in first-time users of many on-line platforms.”
The article points out:
The 283 threat indicators Microsoft has shared are available through Microsoft’s Graph Security API or Azure Sentinel’s GitHub page.
Open information. Github. Partnering. Fighting disease. — How much goodness can one services firm deliver?
DarkCyber believes that Microsoft is dropping apples that do not fall far from the DOS, Stacker, and Fast Search UNIX tree.
Microsoft wants to be in the thick of cyber security in order to surround and benefit from the money flowing into a starting-to-consolidate cyber sector.
Only this week, a Florida based vendor of investigative software started beating the bushes for a buyer. Consolidation has begun and is accelerating.
How can Microsoft benefit? Those cyber security outfits make darned good Microsoft partners. Installing, tuning, and customizing Microsoft services (on premises and in the cloud) makes good business sense.
Maybe DarkCyber is misinterpreting an act of sincere common good as a dark pattern?
On the other hand, we could ask Gary, a Stacker person, or a Fast Search UNIX licensee. Err, maybe not.
Stephen E Arnold, May 15, 2020
Google: Responding to the Bezos Bulldozer Just Slowly
May 14, 2020
Bulldozers have a top speed of what 10 kilometers per hour, maybe less if grinding through abandoned retail store fronts? As part of the DarkCyber research for our Amazon blockchain report, we put in our files “Amazon considers Entering Insurtech Market.” The date of this write up was 2017. The bulldozer has been making progress. AWS seems to be making progress. Amazon’s outstanding online marketing and documentation provides a semi-clear picture of what the Bezos bulldozer has accomplished. See, for example, Insurance.
We found the “truth” centric Thomson Reuters’ story “Insurer Brit and Google Cloud to Launch First Digital Lloyd’s Syndicate” intriguing. We learned:
Insurance company Brit and Google Cloud are together launching the first digital Lloyd’s of London syndicate, accessible from anywhere and at any time.
Thomson Reuters’ perceives that insurers are “in a race to team up with tech giants such as Google.”
Several questions:
- Did the Amazon insurance push fizzle and Thomson Reuters miss the two year old story?
- Did Google overlook the Amazon announcements which began flowing in 2017? For instance, “Amazon Is Coming for the Insurance Industry – Should We Be Worried?”
- Will regulators pay more attention to the financial services push from US technology giants?
DarkCyber cannot answer these questions. However, it would be helpful if a time context for Google’s activities were provided. The information makes clear how quickly or slowly Google responds to the slow moving Bezos bulldozer which is chugging along in some interesting financial markets. Are those camels watching the bulldozer moving forward? Nah, the bulldozer is probably delivering groceries.
Stephen E Arnold, May 14, 2020
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