Oracle is lawnmower, it doesn't hate you, it doesn't have feelings, Oracle is as mindless and soulless as a lawnmower, however instead of mowing the lawn it makes money.
Oracle doesn't have feelings, it is for all intents and purposes the Borg.
Except the Borg don't have individuality whereas the people at Oracle do. I'm tired of pretending that, say, individual human SEs are not responsible for their work because they're just doing what a corporation demands.
Fine, you can try to hold the developers responsible.. somehow.
Except it won't mean anything. Because someone will just fill their shoes after they leave. There's enough money to make that possible. And in fact it's the companies doing the most icky things that have the most money to just go hire more. That's where the revenue firehose is.
When I was at Google, it was internal culture for Googlers to raise a fuss about a lot of things all the time -- despite the company being an advertising company there was a general uneasiness about crossing various "lines in the sand". There was a very active internal dissent culture, on "memegen" and the weekly TGIF all-hands, and so on. It was broadly acceptible to stand up at TGIF and politely take Larry to task on some thing that was seen as crossing this line in the sand. It happened all the time.
Over time the company just got better and better at evading responsibility to this pitchfork crowd. After all, they had investors to satisfy. And the "line in the sand" just got further and further out, and what was seen as "creepy" and "not Googley" and against company principles just got more and more watered down.
And if you walked away from that (like I did, not that I was of any importance)? Google has plenty of money to go hire new SWEs.
The answer has to be regulation that sits above and beyond the corporations. Nationwide or global standards of behaviour, enforced by law, that set basic ground rules for what is permissible in the market. How we get there from here, I don't know. Some jurisdictions have been better about this than others.
> Because someone will just fill their shoes after they leave.
The fact that dictators are usually replaced by dictators doesn't mean dictators aren't actually the problem. This is akin to the common argument that other, bad people are also doing the same thing that I'm doing, therefore what I'm doing is good, or at least morally neutral.
Just because there are people just as bad as you that can replace you doesn't make you not bad.
> The answer has to be regulation that sits above and beyond the corporations. Nationwide or global standards of behaviour, enforced by law, that set basic ground rules for what is permissible in the market.
We say this as if the institutions that would define and enforce this behavior aren't subject to the same self-interest as Google management. Soon, plenty of them will be ex-Google (and other tech) management, to which they'll return after delivering.
What "we" need to do is dismantle and descope large institutions. But since there's really no "we" what we each need to do is protect ourselves from these institutions by creating smaller federated defensive institutions of narrower scope, and treating the Googles and the USAs of the world like the weather, or more accurately like natural disasters or invasive species.
> Except the Borg don't have individuality whereas the people at Oracle do.
Sadly we know that groupthink is a thing and that many people seek conformity over conflict and correctness. You can safely assume that anyone working for Oracle is a mindless Borg drone out for more money without any care what they destroy to reach that goal. They are still guilty as hell but from a general apathy and not some active choice to be evil.
I think you don't understand how Oracle works to put in perspective a 18th century Russian serf probably has more capability to influence his environment than does an SE at Oracle. You really need to look at the talk posted, an SE at Oracle is nothing more than a cog in a machine. Trust me the SE's at Oracle could do everything in their power to make some change happen in oracle and it would be similar to a gnat farting to try and change the direction a cruise liner is heading.
The 'lawnmower' is capitalism as a whole, not just Oracle.
It is an incentive system which maximizes on only one kind of efficiency.
Consumers and investors are not capable of making collective / aggregate market decisions on any criterion other than profit.
Moral judgements play no part in it. Explicitly not so, in fact.
The individual agents in this structure are merely transitory carriers of a larger overriding process. Even if as large as Oracle or Google or whatever.
You could make Oracle go away but the logic remains. The hydra has many heads.
the conventional counter-argument to that is that anything we care about can be valued, which in turn can be monetized, so everything under (and including) the sun can be compared and optimized for in a decentralized way.
that's much harder (and perhaps P=NP impossible) to do in practice for qualitative aspects of life (e.g., love, wonder, beauty, etc.), which is why we have such an imbalance of valuing things that are easier to value (food, machines, services, etc.).
You really need to watch the video but TL:DR is that Oracle isn't per say evil, it just chases profit like a lawnmower cuts grass.
If you get your foot cut off by the lawnmower, it isn't the lawnmowers fault as it wasn't out to get you, just out to cut grass.
The same is 'true' of Oracle wrt them chasing profit. If you stand between them and profit, that is your fault if you get hurt as you always know what Oracle is going to do in that situation.
Oracle is people. Both in some abstract legal sense and in a literal sense: its a group of people doing things.
As such they are accountable for their actions - what sort of utter stupidity is this "oh but since the word corporation is involved we don't need to hold people accountable" bullshit you are spewing?
Not really fitting. Oracle is just a group of people. If you take away the rider, a lawnmower is still a lawnmower. If you take away the employees oracle entirely ceases to exist. You can't hand wave their moral responsibilities as humans.
You're making the mistake of anthropomorphizing the lawn mower. It's not evil, it just is.