Simon Willison’s Weblog

Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think "oh, the lawnmower hates me" – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle.

— Bryan Cantrill

# 17th September 2024, 4:14 pm / oracle, bryan-cantrill

Tools are the things we build that we don't ship - but that very much affect the artifact that we develop.

It can be tempting to either shy away from developing tooling entirely or (in larger organizations) to dedicate an entire organization to it.

In my experience, tooling should be built by those using it.

This is especially true for tools that improve the artifact by improving understanding: the best time to develop a debugger is when debugging!

— Bryan Cantrill

# 18th January 2024, 3:27 am / software-engineering, tools, bryan-cantrill

for those open source companies that still harbor magical beliefs, let me put this to you as directly as possible: cloud services providers are emphatically not going to license your proprietary software. I mean, you knew that, right? The whole premise with your proprietary license is that you are finding that there is no way to compete with the operational dominance of the cloud services providers; did you really believe that those same dominant cloud services providers can’t simply reimplement your LDAP integration or whatever? The cloud services providers are currently reproprietarizing all of computing — they are making their own CPUs for crying out loud! — reimplementing the bits of your software that they need in the name of the service that their customers want (and will pay for!) won’t even move the needle in terms of their effort.

— Bryan Cantrill

# 15th December 2018, 5:02 pm / open-source, bryan-cantrill