More coverage of Larry Ellison's fascism

[Greg Broiles]

At 11:00 AM 10/17/2001 -0700, Tim May wrote:

>(* Ellison says he will "give away the software," but he doesn't say to 
>whom, or how agencies required to interact with the software will get 
>their copies, or who will do the maintenance, etc. He is obviously looking 
>for Oracle to give away some free copies but then be the Official Supplier 
>to Big Brother. State capitalism in its most obvious form.)

Indeed. Actually, in the third quarter of 2001, Oracle made 67% of its 
revenues from consulting and services, and only 33% of its revenue from 
licensing, according to their 10-Q SEC filing. (The split was 64/36 for 
service/licensing in Q3 2000).

As the Mercury News article says ..

>Ellison said that if he does donate the software, maintenance and upgrades 
>won't be free.
>
>``I don't think the government has any trouble paying for the labor 
>associated with the software,'' he said. ``I made this offer not because 
>the government can't afford to pay for the software, but because I shut up 
>the critics who were saying, `Gee, Larry Ellison wants to build a national 
>database because he wants to sell more databases,' which is pretty cynical 
>and bizarre. What's in it for me is the same thing that's in it for you: a 
>safer America.''

.. so basically he'll give the USG a one-time break on the software 
purchase, but they'll pay full rate for the consulting to get it up and 
running, and for maintenance thereafter, which would easily run into the 
billions of dollars, given the scope of this project, the size of the 
database, and the uptime/performance requirements a realistic 
implementation would call for.

What an asshole.

Oracle talked the City of Oakland into adopting Oracle Financials to run 
the city's books and payroll - the project ran months over deadline (past 
1/1/2000, even though it was being installed to fix a Y2K problem with the 
existing installation), resulted in withholding errors and missed paychecks 
for city workers, missing reports for budget purposes, and generally 
created an administrative and accounting nightmare. Deep into the project, 
the Oracle consultants admitted that they'd promised to do things for 
Oakland that they'd never done before, that they weren't sure how long it 
would take to finish, or if the promised functionality would ever be 
delivered.

I don't know if they ever finished.

And now they want to do *that* with a National ID database - so the 
taxpayers get screwed three times - once paying for it, once because it's 
inaccurate, and once because it's a fucking fascist nightmare.

Now all we need are Ross Perot and/or EDS and/or IBM telling us they can do 
the same thing but cheaper and faster.


--
Greg Broiles
gbroiles at well.com
"We have found and closed the thing you watch us with." -- New Delhi street kids