Oracle's credit rating has been downgraded to a notch above "junk" status [1].
That means they can't borrow cheaply anymore. The only way to raise cash now is to cut payroll, and that's what they are doing. And what are they doing with the cash? Buying Nvidia hardware to rent out to OpenAI [2].
All Oracle is doing is unpacking Nvidia servers and plugging them in. This is a commodity business, Oracle has no IP in this. To fund it they are making deep cuts to their software development business which does have proprietary IP.
That may have made sense when it was originally announced because AI hype was at its peak at the time. Indeed, Oracle's stock shot up when Stargate was announced, and Larry Ellison briefly became the world's richest person. However, since then the AI hype has evaporated, and hyperscalers are no longer being rewarded with a higher stock price. Oracle stock has dropped more than 50%, and companies NOT investing 100s of billions in AI hardware are now being rewarded, such as Apple.
Larry Ellison's son had to scale down his media and TV empire ambitions when Oracle stock crashed. That's one thing to celebrate, because we don't want CNN to be controlled by the Ellisons.
Maybe some in this thread won’t celebrate CNN staying out of the clutches of the Ellisons.
But think of it this way. If Ellison’s acquisition of Warner Bros falls through Ellison must pay Warner Bros a $7 Billion breakup fee. That’s on top of the $2.8 Billion they paid Netflix to abandon its pursuit of Warner Bros.
So Ellison would have wasted $9.8 Billion and years of his life for absolutely nothing. And I think we can all agree that the world would be better off.
It's definitely not 10%, more like 3%. His net worth is currently listed as $248B. If he has to pay out the penalty on both acquisitions, his net worth will still be about $240B. There's nothing articulable about the difference in his life as a result.
I will give you the time though, or the motivations (however appalling they are) for his exertion of energy on these.
It’s been more than a decade when CNN was a respected institution. I agree it’s too late for the news media in general. Their incentives are unfortunately all lined up just like social media: pure ragebait is the fully optimized product. The only thing changing from now on is fine tweaks to get it slightly more… ragey.
I'd roughly agree they are, but they have clearly positioned themselves in the opposite way as the mainstream media - the rest compete for ad-supported clicks and views; those two are fully paywalled and at a price that deliberately drives away anyone below say, the 90th percentile by income or wealth.
That resembles, to me, how newspapers used to be - except instead of a small fraction of people being willing to pay for quality news, roughly two thirds were (62 million subscribers out of 92 million American households in 1989 [1]). Like Bloomberg today, their incentives were to provide information for serious people and to cultivate a trustworthy reputation, rather than to enrage people into commenting and sharing articles.
The decline of newspapers is of course too much of a tangent, but I think it's interesting how the math kind of illustrates why most 'news' has to be trash now.
From what I can see, online media has finally taken over. The horrendous coverage from the 2024 election may have finally been the last straw for many people.
People seem to be focusing more on individual reporters, subscribing directly to good journalists who have gone out on their own. We are also seeing a thing that pleases me ver much: Reporters focusing on the subjects they are experts in and not doing a jack of all trades master of none. Its made me accept that I wont get top tier news in every subject so I have to pick what really matters to me(Tech, Food, entertainment, geopolitics of specific regions of the world etc.).
On the low end though its more bleak. TikTok slop, Youtuber "commentators" etc.
> it would utterly destroy the American movie industry
I don't understand, if Oracle etc. has financial problems, why would movie-making bits be destroyed as opposed to sold to new owners?
If the American movie industry got "destroyed", what would that look like, and how would it lead to long-term malaise? Offhand, I can't imagine the same kind of supply-chain/infrastructure rot-problem as, say, the "destruction" of the automotive industry.
Consolidation into one company with a huge amount of market power ruins the market, destroys innovation, and destroys infrastructure and capacity within the vertical.
Oh, I see, I thought you were saying that Oracle's financial woes would have a ripple-effect that's negative for everyone else, as opposed to the mergers being a bad thing regardless of Oracle's financial situation.
Yeah, America is way overdue for some trust-busting.
Because David Ellison’s explicit plan is to run Warner Bros. Discovery (owners of CNN) and Paramount (owners of CBS) as two divisions within Skydance Media. He committed to keeping a 20-odd film slate at WBD as part of antitrust negotiations with the U.S. and other countries. So he has to keep the studio running while figuring out how to pay off the investors with depreciating Oracle assets.
I strongly suspect that broad enthusiasm for copy-on-write filesystems is largely past. Btrfs is out there and is the default for some Fedora editions. While I have no direct connections to that storage world any longer, I'm not convinced that relicensing ZFS would affect the landscape in a major way among the more significant distributions.
As someone who's used btrfs and zfs, btrfs today is still a pale imitation of what zfs was at launch. btrfs feels like people wanted to make a filesystem which had all the 'pretty neat' features of ZFS but without the tightly coupled management and benefits of ZFS (like volume management + RAID + encryption + compression all being managed through one tool).
btrfs ended up being basically a consumer version of a few of ZFS's most visible features - transparent compression, subvolumes, and copy-on-write - which then farms out the other most useful features - RAID + volume management + encryption - to the existing tooling. Makes sense for a smaller-scale project, no shade, but it definitely misses the mark if you've spent time on ZFS systems taking advantage of what ZFS has to offer (like recursive snapshots or vdevs).
I don't know the whole history of btrfs (although its primary maintainer was I think at Oracle at one point) but ZFS was definitely built from a hierarchical storage enterprise mindset.
Given different historical circumstances, it could probably have picked up more traction. But not sure what would change today even with an Oracle licensing change.
It seems that btrfs is being phased out of fedora. It looks like Fedora will be moving to stratis storage over the next year or two. Btrfs is nice but it's raid5/6 support still seems shaky and there's odd corner cases that apply to all btrfs setups (getting stuck when free space is low is mostly resolved but can still occur).
I'm not super-plugged into Fedora these days. Red Hat has long been pretty comfortable with a more conventional file system (think it's still XFS out of SGI by default) plus volume management for RHEL. ZFS was a non-starter for licensing reasons and Oracle; btrfs just wasn't there. I suspect things could have played out differently had Oracle relicensed ZFS once upon a time but that ship has likely sailed in a variety of ways.
XFS is a default filesystem in a production system? Really?
XFS was dead to me 20 years ago. The only time I ever actually verifiably lost data to a system crash was on XFS. I had actual zero length files with XFS after a crash. Lost actual data. But the file system was in totally happy consistent metadata state. Never ever would I ever consider that filesystem ever again.
The ominous "reisserfs" everyone complained about? Never lost a single byte of data to it even when I pulled the plug in the middle of a write operation to test it. No issues with ext4, no experience with btrfs.
Is it? I thought the contrary, the immutable distros are possible specifically because of them?.
Relicensing it would probably make it into kernel within months and I am absolutely sure adoption would happen quickly. Mind you, ZFS is more important to servers than desktop.
zfs is more mature and has a better feature set. It's also about the best file system for a NAS, since you can detect and repair single bad blocks if you run zfs's version of RAID5/6.
btrfs is lighter on memory use and a bit easier to administer (until it eats your data). But if zfs licensing becomes cleared up and it becomes a normal part of the linux kernel that would be a lot more attractive than btrfs to me
They are still making billions from highly sticky enterprise customers, which is more than enough to survive. Otherwise, Microsoft would have gone out of business years ago.
Sure, but then they're out of the "growth" stock category they so badly wanted to be in, with its higher valuation multipliers, then in the stodgy "keep the lights on" niche. If a company makes $10B this year, and you had a way of knowing it was going to make $10B every year from now on, there's not much incentive to invest in it.
Note that this doesn't make for a bad company! You can run a $0-profit company indefinitely and give employees nice jobs for providing nice services to your customers. There's nothing wrong with that. It's great! But you don't get the same multiples for that arrangment as you do for a company that's growing quickly. Lower multiples = stock drops = One Medium Wealthy Asshole Called Larry Ellison, and that's something I simply do not think he could tolerate.
Putting a big X on the Ellison photo in the rogue's gallery of tech elites will be satisfying. In an industry chock full of despicable men, Ellison is a real standout.
IBM has always been better than Oracle. It makes giant expensive software and hardware that require arcane knowledge to keep them running. But they also run reliably once you insert enough money.
Oracle's stuff JustDoesn'tWork(tm) once you move past its core database offering. And even that (see: RAC) is sometimes problematic.
> All Oracle is doing is unpacking Nvidia servers and plugging them in.
1. Any cloud business essentially is "unpacking servers and plugging them in." Yet the cloud business has been exploding quarter-over-quarter ever since AWS came online. To the tune of double-digit billions cash flow every quarter for each of the hyperscalers, even before the AI boom.
2. Nvidia servers are at the moment even less commodity than typical cloud servers and are currently THE hottest hardware resource in the world. Everyone is scrambling desperately to procure them, and the US and China are battling geopolitically over access to these things, and they are actively being smuggled to bypass these restrictions.
> However, since then the AI hype has evaporated, and hyperscalers are no longer being rewarded with a higher stock price.
This is a misreading of what has been happening with hyperscaler stock prices. They have consistently been punished despite record estimate-beating earnings pretty much every quarter for the past multiple quarters, precisely because they keep incinerating all that money and more on the same CapEx that Oracle is.
At this point it is pretty clear that the biggest moat in the whole AI boom is access to compute, for which the demand has just kept exploding. (See: Anthropic paying its competitors through its nose to keep Claude up.)
I've little love for Oracle, so I fear they will actually make out like bandits with these moves.
What? Nvidia stock, for instance has been moving largely sideways for the past 4 months. Maybe it's not as jubilant as before, but it hasn't exactly "evaporated".
That's relative to the hype we had before. Previously any involvement in AI was rewarded heavily, but now it is being punished. Wallstreet previously punished Apple for not enough AI now they are being rewarded for not throwing 100s of billions into AI hardware.
I think the parent is overselling it when they say "AI hype has evaporated". Nvidia is still trading high because they're still selling shovels in the gold rush, and the frontier labs are still trading high as well. What is collapsing are the infra providers who are just selling commodities: even if the bubble doesn't crash they will get chewed up, because there is nothing preventing them from being forced to sell at COGS: they have no moat and eventually their margins will be driven to zero.
PE is forward looking. Apple has the business model where people will continue to buy their newer phones and devices and use their paid services at the same or higher prices for the foreseeable future.
Do you think GPUs will continue to be bought at the same rate as during the ai data center buildout gold rush era, at the same ultra high up prices?
For CPUs, Moore's law lasted more than 50 years. We don't know how long it will last for GPUs. I think Nvidia will keep improving performance, lowering power consumption and reducing heat generation for many years to come.
What else does Oracle have? Mostly just a bunch of IP that a sufficiently strong AI will be able to recreate for a fraction of each customers bill. Oracle is very aware.
Where is the value coming from when all knowledge work (and later manual work) is 10-100-10000x cheaper done by AIs? You probably don’t want to build models, too easy to move to another provider when one is better, open models eat your lunch etc. But there are still means of production to be owned but it’s just GPUs
> We are grateful for your dedication, hard work, and the impact you have made during your time with us.
Why do companies bother with this horse excrement? Does a sentence like this make anyone feel better?
Most times, I wish they'd just send the honest truth. "Hey, we screwed up. We over-hired and ran out of funds so we had to let you go to make payroll" or "Our M&A strategists overpaid for an over-leveraged company and now we have to figure out how to pay down the debt. Your position was cut as a result."
Obviously corporations owe nothing to nobody (apparently) but I'd love it if the patronizing language stopped.
There have been a couple of cases of honesty in tech layoffs in the last couple where the employer specifically said that the layoffs were for performance which added insult to injury to the people laid off in that round and damaged their future hiring prospects, e.g. https://www.fastcompany.com/91262263/meta-rebranded-performa.... I'd rather not have the honesty in that case; that's a terrible thing to do to people.
They have the same psychology the leaders of communist states had. It's a constant litany of self-congratulation and tone-deafness that has no connection to reality.
My employer has somehow managed to avoid the constant layoffs since 2022 trend, shockingly, and I think this is a big reason we have relatively low churn despite not having many promotions, refreshers, etc (on top of some relatively uncommon benefits for a large tech company). I was recently interviewing a few engineers from FAANG+ companies who are desperate to get out of the squid games and quarterly layoff fears. I wish more companies would realize what a selling point this is, and I wish my CEO would publicly brag about how is he is competent enough to not need to churn through 10+% of his workforce a year AND have great stock price growth over the last 6 years.
> desperate to get out of the squid games and quarterly layoff fears
"If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease. I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world."
While I feel sorry for the people involved, Oracle as a company richly deserves this, for reasons far too familiar to everyone here. This is a come-uppance that has been waiting to happen for decades.
I'm not sure this is the come-uppance you've been waiting for. Oracle still has a larger market cap than at any point in history except the last ~2 years.
As someone also freshly laid off (not Oracle though), let me solemnly acknowledge my new cohorts. Best of luck to everyone, it's tough out there. Stay sharp and focused, hoping for the best.
Oracle is in a spiral it seems. Is Stargate still plugging along?
And probably no small part of the downturn of Dilbert (besides Adams going a bit nuts) is that Adams is no longer in a workplace he can satirize so it remains stuck largely in 90s cubeland.
Oracle is now doing quarterly DB releases. This is not just patches but including big features. Any SQL enthusiast would most likely find Assertions [1] or Deep Data Security [2] interesting.
I think agents have the capability to multiply this problem times 10. It doesn't have to be that way though. I think a skilled person will create great software regardless of the tools they use.
I remember that comment and thinking that the author is complaining about a kind of success.
Oracle RDBMS is a critical component of huge and important application platforms from banking to infrastructure.
Millions of tests are good! I would be concerned if it wasn’t a “test heavy” development process.
A slow and measured pace with every consequence thought out is also good. Otherwise the product rots away in all but the most common combination of configurations.
Etc…
The only valid complaint is that the test farm is under-scaled. Increasing its capacity would direly increase development velocity.
I agree somewhat, but it took me a bit to articulate to myself. It is nuanced.
Testing is what held everything together. They seem to have been taking it seriously and that alone was enough to keep a product of that scale (barely?) afloat. A success!?
But it sounds like every other good practice went out of the window. They are drowning in unimaginable amount of technical debt, ossified over decades. That, and the complaint about testing infra indicates to me that even their tests are a pile of sh*. He wasn't running them locally, so they were integration tests. Meaning that had there been a foundation of unit tests - they wouldn't need that many slow integration tests.
It sounds like they just brute forced all their problems with test farms. I'm almost sure they double down on AI - why make your code base better if AI can figure out how 100 flags can interact with each other.
"That's life" in the RDBMS space. All of the major vendors are drowning in tech debt and there's (almost) nothing they can do about it because of backward compatibility limitations.
For example, Microsoft SQL Server 2025 will create new databases with default settings that are unchanged from SQL 7 -- from the previous century!
If you run sub-par agents on large codebase that's kinda what they do. Every task ends with duplication, added flags bifurcating the code and everything else described in that comment haha
>The company has not disclosed how many workers were affected by the latest cuts
One of the first things that "progressive" politicians should do if they take power is require large companies to disclose the exact number of firings before people are notified.
That's already the law in the US, the WARN act. It requires 60 days notice before any mass layoffs. The way companies "get around" this is by not actually laying you off, but giving you 60 days notice that you will be laid off and then removing all your access during those 60 days, at the same time they report the 60 days notice of layoffs. It's essentially 60 days severance (plus reporting to the government), which IMO is better than everyone walking wondering who will actually be laid off in 60 days. You can even see that in the email they sent, "today is your last working day" but there will be an email with "details on your [...] termination date". It's unclear to me if this layoff doesn't qualify as a mass layoff (so no warning period needed) or if they just haven't filed it yet, but I'm guessing they'll file it soon enough.
"Even if an employer does not have a collective agreement, they must negotiate major changes to working and employment conditions of employees who are members of a trade union as if the employer had a collective agreement."
Negotiations include getting the lists of positions that will be terminated, number of employees affected, new positions that may be opened during a reorganization, etc.
It’s 12gb and two ARM instances now. If you can get one. They’re frequently out of capacity. They even suspended the over-provisioned legacy instances.
If you want to have similar laws, you need to lobby your representatives, and get them to follow California's example, which introduced the Cal-WARN act:
> “an employer may not order a mass layoff, relocation, or termination at a covered establishment unless, 60 days before the order takes effect, the employer gives written notice of the order”
even in the UK they still get announced as layoffs, employees get their access revoked, and they're in some sort of limbo while the consultations / process takes place.
Too bad they weren't unionized--I assume that would have helped.
The workers who built the company and created its worth (obviously not evenly distributed) now get a "thank you very much goodbye" e-mail. I think they deserve ownership and to take part in these decisions.
It might have helped draw out the layoff process, potentially. Still not convinced unions would optimize overall outcomes for employees _while_ employed.
Maybe a better conversation to have as we keep moving through this AI Engineering era and a bunch of new companies are created. If you are considering founding a company, would you start it as a union shop? If not, why?
Founders are management, unions protect employees from management and shareholders. If you can build without employees, go for it.
Investors want to get wealthy, founders want to get wealthy, employees are just fuel for that machine. The examples are robust of how startup employees make out the vast majority of the time.
Union support is at record highs, there will always people who think they can do better without, best to not argue with folks who ignore data and stats. Their belief system won’t be swayed with logic and reason.
(a potential solution to this is for unions to turn into cooperatives and accelerators over time; they could build their own investment funds with their pensions an investor in their portfolio companies, if Bending Spoons was a union cooperative if you will, for example)
I doubt it was cold as in no prior information cold but more like "cold sounding". If the layoffs affected > 50 employees then it would have triggered the CALWarn act which is the California additions to the federal warn act. So the oracle employees got 60 days notice and have known the email was coming today for 2 months. If they didn't then Oracle owes them 60 days of pay and benefits.
The usual way companies handle this is to set the actual layoff date as 60 days from when the email goes out. If you hear about a mass layoff including two months of salary for everyone affected, that’s what’s going on. Typically system access is revoked but the paychecks keep coming as usual and vacation keeps accruing, because you’ve got that extra two months of “employment.” The company also gets the benefit of being able to call you back in if it turns out there was something vital you were doing that never got documented.
This, the company stays compliant with all the regulations but they don’t have to worry about disaffected employees during those 60 days.
I was an Oracle employee that was laid off in the March wave. That’s exactly how it worked.
6am email. You were an employee through any notification/WARN period. But no access. No work. Garden leave euphemistically.
WARN varies by state and location. And usually is only applied to onsite employees. And only if the layoff affects certain number or more. So if you are a remote employee, you were done at the next pay period. For me in CO that was 4/10. Not 60 days obviously as I didn’t qualify for a WARN notice due to being remote.
Various CA colleagues were through May or close to that.
Oracle's credit rating has been downgraded to a notch above "junk" status [1].
That means they can't borrow cheaply anymore. The only way to raise cash now is to cut payroll, and that's what they are doing. And what are they doing with the cash? Buying Nvidia hardware to rent out to OpenAI [2].
All Oracle is doing is unpacking Nvidia servers and plugging them in. This is a commodity business, Oracle has no IP in this. To fund it they are making deep cuts to their software development business which does have proprietary IP.
That may have made sense when it was originally announced because AI hype was at its peak at the time. Indeed, Oracle's stock shot up when Stargate was announced, and Larry Ellison briefly became the world's richest person. However, since then the AI hype has evaporated, and hyperscalers are no longer being rewarded with a higher stock price. Oracle stock has dropped more than 50%, and companies NOT investing 100s of billions in AI hardware are now being rewarded, such as Apple.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/magazine/takeaways-larry-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_LLC
Oracle going out of business would at least be one thing to celebrate in 2026.
Larry Ellison's son had to scale down his media and TV empire ambitions when Oracle stock crashed. That's one thing to celebrate, because we don't want CNN to be controlled by the Ellisons.
Larry is also the reason why all new Star Trek series have been cancelled:
https://www.cbr.com/paramount-dismantling-star-trek-9-year-s...
I do love how the software world has the caricature of a comic book villain in Larry Ellison
Well, that's a blessing at least. It was painful watching the butchering of Star Trek over the last decade.
Noooo Strange New Worlds was the best thing that ever happened to trek
Lower Decks is so good too.
Picard was great! Romulans, Borg, Q, Data!! What more could you ask for?!
A plot?
lol burnnnn
I consider Picard Season 2 the worst season of TV ever made.
I assumed the reason was Starfleet Academy was complete slop
Oh thank god. It hurt my soul watching the horror that is the new ST. Starfleet Academy was almost unspeakably terrible
Meh. The last Star Trek worth watching was TOS.
That's funny way of spelling DS9.
last time I found CNN appealing was in the early 90's...if that tells you anything about it.
Bourdain worked for them after that
Maybe some in this thread won’t celebrate CNN staying out of the clutches of the Ellisons.
But think of it this way. If Ellison’s acquisition of Warner Bros falls through Ellison must pay Warner Bros a $7 Billion breakup fee. That’s on top of the $2.8 Billion they paid Netflix to abandon its pursuit of Warner Bros.
So Ellison would have wasted $9.8 Billion and years of his life for absolutely nothing. And I think we can all agree that the world would be better off.
And will be still worth a quarter trillion dollars.
Years of his life, perhaps, though a large part of that will be banks and lawyers, not him grinding it out.
He won't even notice the money being gone, not even close.
I’m worried your cynicism is overwhelming your capacity for rational thought.
Years of his life and 5-10% of his net worth. That’s the kind of thing people notice.
It's definitely not 10%, more like 3%. His net worth is currently listed as $248B. If he has to pay out the penalty on both acquisitions, his net worth will still be about $240B. There's nothing articulable about the difference in his life as a result.
I will give you the time though, or the motivations (however appalling they are) for his exertion of energy on these.
That's true, but then again, CNN is a mere husk of its former self. Something needs to change, but maybe it's too late for profit-driven news media.
It’s been more than a decade when CNN was a respected institution. I agree it’s too late for the news media in general. Their incentives are unfortunately all lined up just like social media: pure ragebait is the fully optimized product. The only thing changing from now on is fine tweaks to get it slightly more… ragey.
Bloomberg and Economist seem to be doing OK, so it is possible.
I'd roughly agree they are, but they have clearly positioned themselves in the opposite way as the mainstream media - the rest compete for ad-supported clicks and views; those two are fully paywalled and at a price that deliberately drives away anyone below say, the 90th percentile by income or wealth.
That resembles, to me, how newspapers used to be - except instead of a small fraction of people being willing to pay for quality news, roughly two thirds were (62 million subscribers out of 92 million American households in 1989 [1]). Like Bloomberg today, their incentives were to provide information for serious people and to cultivate a trustworthy reputation, rather than to enrage people into commenting and sharing articles.
The decline of newspapers is of course too much of a tangent, but I think it's interesting how the math kind of illustrates why most 'news' has to be trash now.
But isn't not-for-profit news media also struggling?
From what I can see, online media has finally taken over. The horrendous coverage from the 2024 election may have finally been the last straw for many people.
People seem to be focusing more on individual reporters, subscribing directly to good journalists who have gone out on their own. We are also seeing a thing that pleases me ver much: Reporters focusing on the subjects they are experts in and not doing a jack of all trades master of none. Its made me accept that I wont get top tier news in every subject so I have to pick what really matters to me(Tech, Food, entertainment, geopolitics of specific regions of the world etc.).
On the low end though its more bleak. TikTok slop, Youtuber "commentators" etc.
> From what I can see, online media has finally taken over.
Makes me think of Neil Gaiman's American Gods
I kind of like the whole Paramount acquisition as something that is just going to drag them down.
CNN is mostly a lost cause, though I do agree with your statement.
The real problem with that one, though, is it would utterly destroy the American movie industry, which is a crucial part of our economy and culture.
> it would utterly destroy the American movie industry
I don't understand, if Oracle etc. has financial problems, why would movie-making bits be destroyed as opposed to sold to new owners?
If the American movie industry got "destroyed", what would that look like, and how would it lead to long-term malaise? Offhand, I can't imagine the same kind of supply-chain/infrastructure rot-problem as, say, the "destruction" of the automotive industry.
It's the merger. That's the problem.
Consolidation into one company with a huge amount of market power ruins the market, destroys innovation, and destroys infrastructure and capacity within the vertical.
Oh, I see, I thought you were saying that Oracle's financial woes would have a ripple-effect that's negative for everyone else, as opposed to the mergers being a bad thing regardless of Oracle's financial situation.
Yeah, America is way overdue for some trust-busting.
Because David Ellison’s explicit plan is to run Warner Bros. Discovery (owners of CNN) and Paramount (owners of CBS) as two divisions within Skydance Media. He committed to keeping a 20-odd film slate at WBD as part of antitrust negotiations with the U.S. and other countries. So he has to keep the studio running while figuring out how to pay off the investors with depreciating Oracle assets.
Not for the employees, obvs. I'm not going to celebrate misery, especially if that misery makes an already-tough job market that much worse.
If it happens in 2026, they will likely be bailed out.
I hope whoever buys their parents, they relicense ZFS
I strongly suspect that broad enthusiasm for copy-on-write filesystems is largely past. Btrfs is out there and is the default for some Fedora editions. While I have no direct connections to that storage world any longer, I'm not convinced that relicensing ZFS would affect the landscape in a major way among the more significant distributions.
As someone who's used btrfs and zfs, btrfs today is still a pale imitation of what zfs was at launch. btrfs feels like people wanted to make a filesystem which had all the 'pretty neat' features of ZFS but without the tightly coupled management and benefits of ZFS (like volume management + RAID + encryption + compression all being managed through one tool).
btrfs ended up being basically a consumer version of a few of ZFS's most visible features - transparent compression, subvolumes, and copy-on-write - which then farms out the other most useful features - RAID + volume management + encryption - to the existing tooling. Makes sense for a smaller-scale project, no shade, but it definitely misses the mark if you've spent time on ZFS systems taking advantage of what ZFS has to offer (like recursive snapshots or vdevs).
I don't know the whole history of btrfs (although its primary maintainer was I think at Oracle at one point) but ZFS was definitely built from a hierarchical storage enterprise mindset.
Given different historical circumstances, it could probably have picked up more traction. But not sure what would change today even with an Oracle licensing change.
It seems that btrfs is being phased out of fedora. It looks like Fedora will be moving to stratis storage over the next year or two. Btrfs is nice but it's raid5/6 support still seems shaky and there's odd corner cases that apply to all btrfs setups (getting stuck when free space is low is mostly resolved but can still occur).
I'm not super-plugged into Fedora these days. Red Hat has long been pretty comfortable with a more conventional file system (think it's still XFS out of SGI by default) plus volume management for RHEL. ZFS was a non-starter for licensing reasons and Oracle; btrfs just wasn't there. I suspect things could have played out differently had Oracle relicensed ZFS once upon a time but that ship has likely sailed in a variety of ways.
XFS is a default filesystem in a production system? Really?
XFS was dead to me 20 years ago. The only time I ever actually verifiably lost data to a system crash was on XFS. I had actual zero length files with XFS after a crash. Lost actual data. But the file system was in totally happy consistent metadata state. Never ever would I ever consider that filesystem ever again.
The ominous "reisserfs" everyone complained about? Never lost a single byte of data to it even when I pulled the plug in the middle of a write operation to test it. No issues with ext4, no experience with btrfs.
Stratis does not support data integrity checksums. There is dm-integrity hack but it slows down the write speed by halve.
Is it? I thought the contrary, the immutable distros are possible specifically because of them?.
Relicensing it would probably make it into kernel within months and I am absolutely sure adoption would happen quickly. Mind you, ZFS is more important to servers than desktop.
I expect that there is enough history around ZFS that getting it into the kernel would be a pretty big move.
zfs is more mature and has a better feature set. It's also about the best file system for a NAS, since you can detect and repair single bad blocks if you run zfs's version of RAID5/6.
btrfs is lighter on memory use and a bit easier to administer (until it eats your data). But if zfs licensing becomes cleared up and it becomes a normal part of the linux kernel that would be a lot more attractive than btrfs to me
If Sam and Dario manage to kill Oracle, this whole era of software will have been worth it.
Happen to agree. But to the comment above, yes, it's rack and stack but I suspect Oracle's legion of lawyers can put some sort of spin on this.
They are still making billions from highly sticky enterprise customers, which is more than enough to survive. Otherwise, Microsoft would have gone out of business years ago.
Sure, but then they're out of the "growth" stock category they so badly wanted to be in, with its higher valuation multipliers, then in the stodgy "keep the lights on" niche. If a company makes $10B this year, and you had a way of knowing it was going to make $10B every year from now on, there's not much incentive to invest in it.
Note that this doesn't make for a bad company! You can run a $0-profit company indefinitely and give employees nice jobs for providing nice services to your customers. There's nothing wrong with that. It's great! But you don't get the same multiples for that arrangment as you do for a company that's growing quickly. Lower multiples = stock drops = One Medium Wealthy Asshole Called Larry Ellison, and that's something I simply do not think he could tolerate.
> They are still making billions from highly sticky enterprise customers
That's true. This lets Oracle coast for a while. But if they coast for too long SAP will overtake them.
Putting a big X on the Ellison photo in the rogue's gallery of tech elites will be satisfying. In an industry chock full of despicable men, Ellison is a real standout.
I wonder which shitty company will become the new Oracle. Oracle wasn't the first Oracle.
Who was the first Oracle? Did IBM transition into it before Oracle did?
IBM has always been better than Oracle. It makes giant expensive software and hardware that require arcane knowledge to keep them running. But they also run reliably once you insert enough money.
Oracle's stuff JustDoesn'tWork(tm) once you move past its core database offering. And even that (see: RAC) is sometimes problematic.
Broadcom would buy up all of Oracle's useful IP and patents and continue the grift.
"Dear Santa..."
They still maintain Java and Graal VM. That is more that the BS coming out of Misanthropic and ClosedAI.
Why do we loathe Oracle again? And what do they do exactly for Larry Ellison share in the company to be worth 100bn?
> Why do we loathe Oracle again?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_...
https://www.patentleaderboard.com/company/oracle
> All Oracle is doing is unpacking Nvidia servers and plugging them in.
1. Any cloud business essentially is "unpacking servers and plugging them in." Yet the cloud business has been exploding quarter-over-quarter ever since AWS came online. To the tune of double-digit billions cash flow every quarter for each of the hyperscalers, even before the AI boom.
2. Nvidia servers are at the moment even less commodity than typical cloud servers and are currently THE hottest hardware resource in the world. Everyone is scrambling desperately to procure them, and the US and China are battling geopolitically over access to these things, and they are actively being smuggled to bypass these restrictions.
> However, since then the AI hype has evaporated, and hyperscalers are no longer being rewarded with a higher stock price.
This is a misreading of what has been happening with hyperscaler stock prices. They have consistently been punished despite record estimate-beating earnings pretty much every quarter for the past multiple quarters, precisely because they keep incinerating all that money and more on the same CapEx that Oracle is.
At this point it is pretty clear that the biggest moat in the whole AI boom is access to compute, for which the demand has just kept exploding. (See: Anthropic paying its competitors through its nose to keep Claude up.)
I've little love for Oracle, so I fear they will actually make out like bandits with these moves.
They can raise cash by selling off the stock they have spent a decade buying back.
I'm very hopeful to see Larry loose everything, and Oracle stripped for parts. Karma that is well overdue.
>However, since then the AI hype has evaporated
What? Nvidia stock, for instance has been moving largely sideways for the past 4 months. Maybe it's not as jubilant as before, but it hasn't exactly "evaporated".
That's relative to the hype we had before. Previously any involvement in AI was rewarded heavily, but now it is being punished. Wallstreet previously punished Apple for not enough AI now they are being rewarded for not throwing 100s of billions into AI hardware.
Apple is perpetually Doomed according to Wall Street.
Apple still did have to learn what it costs to invest in AI hype marketing, with all the lawsuits about the iPhone 16.
I think the parent is overselling it when they say "AI hype has evaporated". Nvidia is still trading high because they're still selling shovels in the gold rush, and the frontier labs are still trading high as well. What is collapsing are the infra providers who are just selling commodities: even if the bubble doesn't crash they will get chewed up, because there is nothing preventing them from being forced to sell at COGS: they have no moat and eventually their margins will be driven to zero.
NVDA P/E is 26. That's hardly overhyped. For comparison AAPL P/E is 38.
PE is forward looking. Apple has the business model where people will continue to buy their newer phones and devices and use their paid services at the same or higher prices for the foreseeable future.
Do you think GPUs will continue to be bought at the same rate as during the ai data center buildout gold rush era, at the same ultra high up prices?
For CPUs, Moore's law lasted more than 50 years. We don't know how long it will last for GPUs. I think Nvidia will keep improving performance, lowering power consumption and reducing heat generation for many years to come.
What else does Oracle have? Mostly just a bunch of IP that a sufficiently strong AI will be able to recreate for a fraction of each customers bill. Oracle is very aware.
Where is the value coming from when all knowledge work (and later manual work) is 10-100-10000x cheaper done by AIs? You probably don’t want to build models, too easy to move to another provider when one is better, open models eat your lunch etc. But there are still means of production to be owned but it’s just GPUs
ORCL down more than 50% in the past 12mo.
is it true that the companies investing 100s of billions into AI, have taken up a lot of debt in hope of AI making them trillions in revenue?
> All Oracle is doing is unpacking Nvidia servers and plugging them in. This is a commodity business
But it's not if you can jump to the front of the GPU allocation line like Musk has done.
> We are grateful for your dedication, hard work, and the impact you have made during your time with us.
Why do companies bother with this horse excrement? Does a sentence like this make anyone feel better?
Most times, I wish they'd just send the honest truth. "Hey, we screwed up. We over-hired and ran out of funds so we had to let you go to make payroll" or "Our M&A strategists overpaid for an over-leveraged company and now we have to figure out how to pay down the debt. Your position was cut as a result."
Obviously corporations owe nothing to nobody (apparently) but I'd love it if the patronizing language stopped.
There have been a couple of cases of honesty in tech layoffs in the last couple where the employer specifically said that the layoffs were for performance which added insult to injury to the people laid off in that round and damaged their future hiring prospects, e.g. https://www.fastcompany.com/91262263/meta-rebranded-performa.... I'd rather not have the honesty in that case; that's a terrible thing to do to people.
And open themselves up for liability and getting sued by admitting mistakes? In your dreams.
They have the same psychology the leaders of communist states had. It's a constant litany of self-congratulation and tone-deafness that has no connection to reality.
My employer has somehow managed to avoid the constant layoffs since 2022 trend, shockingly, and I think this is a big reason we have relatively low churn despite not having many promotions, refreshers, etc (on top of some relatively uncommon benefits for a large tech company). I was recently interviewing a few engineers from FAANG+ companies who are desperate to get out of the squid games and quarterly layoff fears. I wish more companies would realize what a selling point this is, and I wish my CEO would publicly brag about how is he is competent enough to not need to churn through 10+% of his workforce a year AND have great stock price growth over the last 6 years.
> desperate to get out of the squid games and quarterly layoff fears
"If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease. I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world."
— Satoru Iwata (former Nintendo CEO)
You could publicly brag about your company by naming it here :)
While I feel sorry for the people involved, Oracle as a company richly deserves this, for reasons far too familiar to everyone here. This is a come-uppance that has been waiting to happen for decades.
I'm not sure this is the come-uppance you've been waiting for. Oracle still has a larger market cap than at any point in history except the last ~2 years.
As someone also freshly laid off (not Oracle though), let me solemnly acknowledge my new cohorts. Best of luck to everyone, it's tough out there. Stay sharp and focused, hoping for the best.
Oracle is in a spiral it seems. Is Stargate still plugging along?
I love the smell of [layoff emails] in the morning.
Makes me wonder why they're shedding so much and if Zitron was a little right after all.
Yeah what’s the end game here? Can they keep running with such deep cuts to staff and morale…
Well, we'll know to worry/celebrate when they start laying of lawyers.
The software side can probably go many years without new features. Nobody picks Oracle in 2026 for the features.
> The latest cuts come after Oracle's workforce fell by roughly 21,000 employees, or 13%, during fiscal 2026
13% doesn't seem too different from other tech companies
The 13% quoted there was from previous layoffs that mostly took place in Q2 of 2026.
This is another 20,000 - 30,000 (the exact number isn't public yet) on top of that.
The difference is that they didn't overhire during Covid.
> Yeah what’s the end game here?
Just Ellison with a giant red borrow more button.
All the other employees are just overhead
Morale has been low at oracle for years. Now it’s just a “we pay you and push you as hard as we can for it until you quit” shop.
That's... most jobs.
Most work for least pay is just business, I thought?
Beatings shall continue until morale improves.
Depends on how many employees are on visas that depend on them working for Oracle I guess...
Well they do have their own interference capacity. So AIs to solve every single issue.
>" Can they keep running with such deep cuts to staff and morale…"
...First time?
Oracle is literally the company Dilbert was making fun of
He worked at Pacific Bell between 1986 and June 30, 1995, and the personalities he encountered there inspired many of his Dilbert characters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams
And probably no small part of the downturn of Dilbert (besides Adams going a bit nuts) is that Adams is no longer in a workplace he can satirize so it remains stuck largely in 90s cubeland.
> Adams is no longer in a workplace he can satirize
He's also not in a place where he can draw cartoons, what with being dead and all.
Yes, I was speaking of latterly and I could have been clearer with tenses.
> Adams is no longer
Indeed.
I wonder how this holds up in the age of AI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
Oracle is now doing quarterly DB releases. This is not just patches but including big features. Any SQL enthusiast would most likely find Assertions [1] or Deep Data Security [2] interesting.
So looks like they overcome their limitations.
[1] https://oracle-base.com/articles/26/assertions-26 [2] https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/security/deep-data-securi...
Interesting that the immediate reply to that comment is about how ASML code is equally shitty
I think agents have the capability to multiply this problem times 10. It doesn't have to be that way though. I think a skilled person will create great software regardless of the tools they use.
I remember that comment and thinking that the author is complaining about a kind of success.
Oracle RDBMS is a critical component of huge and important application platforms from banking to infrastructure.
Millions of tests are good! I would be concerned if it wasn’t a “test heavy” development process.
A slow and measured pace with every consequence thought out is also good. Otherwise the product rots away in all but the most common combination of configurations.
Etc…
The only valid complaint is that the test farm is under-scaled. Increasing its capacity would direly increase development velocity.
I agree somewhat, but it took me a bit to articulate to myself. It is nuanced.
Testing is what held everything together. They seem to have been taking it seriously and that alone was enough to keep a product of that scale (barely?) afloat. A success!?
But it sounds like every other good practice went out of the window. They are drowning in unimaginable amount of technical debt, ossified over decades. That, and the complaint about testing infra indicates to me that even their tests are a pile of sh*. He wasn't running them locally, so they were integration tests. Meaning that had there been a foundation of unit tests - they wouldn't need that many slow integration tests.
It sounds like they just brute forced all their problems with test farms. I'm almost sure they double down on AI - why make your code base better if AI can figure out how 100 flags can interact with each other.
> unimaginable amount of technical debt
"That's life" in the RDBMS space. All of the major vendors are drowning in tech debt and there's (almost) nothing they can do about it because of backward compatibility limitations.
For example, Microsoft SQL Server 2025 will create new databases with default settings that are unchanged from SQL 7 -- from the previous century!
If you run sub-par agents on large codebase that's kinda what they do. Every task ends with duplication, added flags bifurcating the code and everything else described in that comment haha
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/23/oracle-ai-job-cuts-layoffs-2...
Versus https://www.techtimes.co.uk/oracle-new-layoffs-restructuring...
It's unclear how many were actually cut because the 21000 / 13% numbers were reported nearly 3 months ago?
How many h1bs are they filing for?
I'm confused... Did you expect anything different from Oracle?
oracle could've cruised nicely but nope greed and Larry Ellison's ego (add his son's too) - they bit off more than they can chew.
Banks threatened Larry with a margin call for his $80B loans with stock collateral?
>The company has not disclosed how many workers were affected by the latest cuts
One of the first things that "progressive" politicians should do if they take power is require large companies to disclose the exact number of firings before people are notified.
That's already the law in the US, the WARN act. It requires 60 days notice before any mass layoffs. The way companies "get around" this is by not actually laying you off, but giving you 60 days notice that you will be laid off and then removing all your access during those 60 days, at the same time they report the 60 days notice of layoffs. It's essentially 60 days severance (plus reporting to the government), which IMO is better than everyone walking wondering who will actually be laid off in 60 days. You can even see that in the email they sent, "today is your last working day" but there will be an email with "details on your [...] termination date". It's unclear to me if this layoff doesn't qualify as a mass layoff (so no warning period needed) or if they just haven't filed it yet, but I'm guessing they'll file it soon enough.
This is how it works in Sweden: https://www.unionen.se/in-english/notice-to-termination
"Even if an employer does not have a collective agreement, they must negotiate major changes to working and employment conditions of employees who are members of a trade union as if the employer had a collective agreement."
Negotiations include getting the lists of positions that will be terminated, number of employees affected, new positions that may be opened during a reorganization, etc.
Off-topic, but I hate the use of the word "photo" in the caption under the AI-gen'd image:
> (PHOTO: GEMINI AI)
Yells at cloud
Related:
Here's the severance package Oracle offered laid-off US employees - https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-severance-package-us-... - September 14th, 2026
Stop cheering. Oracle still offers a free arm 4x6GB kubernetes cluster and 2 free amd cpu‘s.
It‘s the best free platform for learners and small scale operations.
They can keep the free tier VPS, my problems with Oracle over the years go a bit deeper than that.
It’s 12gb and two ARM instances now. If you can get one. They’re frequently out of capacity. They even suspended the over-provisioned legacy instances.
No it's not, every time I try to sign up they just tell me no. Doesn't matter how much personal info I give them.
the only reason there is compute availability is because devs hate Oracle so much that they don't know about it
an LLM told me about that option when I was seeking out free tiers
Thats how they usually happen ? They are always "cold"
This appears to be a UK new site*, and it's definitely not how they usually happen there. In fact, it's not even how they legally happen.
> 100 or more redundancies - the consultation must start at least 45 days before any dismissals take effect
https://www.gov.uk/redundancy-your-rights/consultation
If you want to have similar laws, you need to lobby your representatives, and get them to follow California's example, which introduced the Cal-WARN act:
> “an employer may not order a mass layoff, relocation, or termination at a covered establishment unless, 60 days before the order takes effect, the employer gives written notice of the order”
From https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/Cal-WARNAct.html
But as others have said, it's not as strong as the UK laws, so it just becomes a de-facto notice period instead. It's still progress though.
* Although not one I've ever heard of, which is a little suspicious.
There’s a federal WARN act too. Neither the state nor federal versions gives the employees any legal right to try to change the business’s mind.
even in the UK they still get announced as layoffs, employees get their access revoked, and they're in some sort of limbo while the consultations / process takes place.
At least people get paid during the gardening leave.
It seems to be a British article.
For European standards, it's not only cold but would be absurdly illegal.
Unless you're C level, in which case you get promoted to "Vice President in Charge of Looking for a New Job" for a quarter.
Oh boy here we go again
Too bad they weren't unionized--I assume that would have helped.
The workers who built the company and created its worth (obviously not evenly distributed) now get a "thank you very much goodbye" e-mail. I think they deserve ownership and to take part in these decisions.
It might have helped draw out the layoff process, potentially. Still not convinced unions would optimize overall outcomes for employees _while_ employed.
Maybe a better conversation to have as we keep moving through this AI Engineering era and a bunch of new companies are created. If you are considering founding a company, would you start it as a union shop? If not, why?
Founders are management, unions protect employees from management and shareholders. If you can build without employees, go for it.
Investors want to get wealthy, founders want to get wealthy, employees are just fuel for that machine. The examples are robust of how startup employees make out the vast majority of the time.
Union support is at record highs, there will always people who think they can do better without, best to not argue with folks who ignore data and stats. Their belief system won’t be swayed with logic and reason.
(a potential solution to this is for unions to turn into cooperatives and accelerators over time; they could build their own investment funds with their pensions an investor in their portfolio companies, if Bending Spoons was a union cooperative if you will, for example)
I doubt it was cold as in no prior information cold but more like "cold sounding". If the layoffs affected > 50 employees then it would have triggered the CALWarn act which is the California additions to the federal warn act. So the oracle employees got 60 days notice and have known the email was coming today for 2 months. If they didn't then Oracle owes them 60 days of pay and benefits.
The usual way companies handle this is to set the actual layoff date as 60 days from when the email goes out. If you hear about a mass layoff including two months of salary for everyone affected, that’s what’s going on. Typically system access is revoked but the paychecks keep coming as usual and vacation keeps accruing, because you’ve got that extra two months of “employment.” The company also gets the benefit of being able to call you back in if it turns out there was something vital you were doing that never got documented.
This, the company stays compliant with all the regulations but they don’t have to worry about disaffected employees during those 60 days.
I was an Oracle employee that was laid off in the March wave. That’s exactly how it worked.
6am email. You were an employee through any notification/WARN period. But no access. No work. Garden leave euphemistically.
WARN varies by state and location. And usually is only applied to onsite employees. And only if the layoff affects certain number or more. So if you are a remote employee, you were done at the next pay period. For me in CO that was 4/10. Not 60 days obviously as I didn’t qualify for a WARN notice due to being remote.
Various CA colleagues were through May or close to that.