"The only way the ORACLE RDBMS will ever be delivered to Russia is in the nuclear warhead of an ICBM."On December 24th, I posted the above as an unverified Larry Ellison quote. Well cyber privateers, thanks to my thousands of readers and one trusted friend from years ago, I have confirmation. The following email came in on January 27th:
By the way, I personally heard Larry say: "The only way the ORACLE RDBMS will ever be delivered to Russia is in the nuclear warhead of an ICBM." He said it to me several times in front of training classes of new hires.Clearly, Larry is the master of the calculated overstatement, since Oracle is not only active in Moscow but in Beijing and in other Eastern European countries (Hey, Google it for yourself!). General publishing prudence demands that a quote be verified by at least two independent sources. I have one down and at least one more to go. I'm sure another will pop up. Too many people are reading about cyber privateering, now. Word spreads. I'll await another confirmation via someone I know from…the good old days. Possibly one of those who attended an Oracle training class my friend cited in his email. There are apparently two Moscow Oracle offices (I can't read Russian and could use some translation from one of the many Russians who follow this blog, but here's the Google map):
I still can't come up with a similarly inflammatory quote of my own concerning payback to the Chinese and Russian cyber attacks on my little Linux box. But I'm working on one. Who knows? Maybe a really colorful line or two will emerge from the mouth of a fictional character in one of my novels. And to Mike Wilson, author of The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison, sorry I didn't come up with a source for you when you were researching the book.
I do however have a bone to pick with you, Mike. On page 165 of the hardcover edition of your book, you introduced me by saying: "Bennett, who had helped write the ad equating Oracle to SQL/DS and DB2, possessed all the qualities Ellison was looking for in an adman: He was bright, he was creative, and he was by no means a slave to the literal truth." Doggone it Mike, I am a slave to the literal truth! Which is why neither me nor my clients have ever been sued for one of my ads. I use technological intimidation to cut through all the hyperbole and spinning of the truth. For the record, I completely agree with and live by the definition: "A lie is any communication the intent of which is to deceive." Period. My Cyber Privateer Code of Ethics probably explains my visceral reaction to the cyber criminals who try to present false credentials in order to get into my Linux system. Someday there will be an accounting, and I'd really like my name somehow be tied to the payback mechanism. Fair warning, bad guys. Fair warning.
Mr. Ellison didn't know that somewhere in 1987 or 1988 Bulgarian institute Interprogramma together with Soviet company NPO Informatika "developed" a RDBMS called KARS, the exact copy of Oracle. My part in this job was to translate original Oracle manuals (Pro*C, SQL*Plus, SQL*Calc, etc) into Russian.
ReplyDeleteDmitri, bravo and thanks for the input!
ReplyDeleteBTW, you know what was my worst headache? I didn't know whether the Bulgarian programmers had renamed Oracle's library calls like `ofetch' and `oclose' to `kfetch' and `kclose' correspondingly. No, they didn't :)
ReplyDeleteYou crack me up.
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