RE: White papers

There are no doubt copyright issues, and while I agree that whitepapers should be distributed freely, I can definitely see why Oracle would want to retain control of all documents, since they want to be able to withdraw and revise papers when things are confirmed to be incomplete, wrong, etc. If the papers are on a site not controlled by Oracle they can't be kept up to date. Now to what degree Oracle is able to keep the enormous pile of documentation they have at their disposal actually up to date is another question <g>. Another question would be jurisdiction. Up until 1974 the Soviet Union was not a signatory to the International Copyright Treaty, so there were no restrictions and no mechanism for prosecution of copyright violations in the USSR. On the other hand there was also no protection for Soviet intellectual property that made it out of the country. I don't know if Bulgaria is a signatory of the Treaty or not. If it is a signatory there are steps Oracle could take. Otherwise they're just plain out of luck.

Having said that, it's darn nice to see the whole collection in one handy, accesible bucket, and it would be good if there was a similar publicly available page at Technet/Metalink. That way everyone could get to the papers they need, use Oracle's bandwidth to do it, and be reasonably sure that the paper is authorized and up-to-date.

Regards,
Christopher Gait
Oracle DBA

(Semi)permanent address: cjgait_at_yahoo.com http://www.geocities.com/athens/3623

"Death is nature's way of saying: NEXT!"

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeffery Stevenson [mailto:jeff_at_mpv.com]
> Sent: Thursday, July 13, 2000 10:44 AM
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
> Subject: RE: White papers
>
>
> Yep, that whole copyright thing...I guess Oracle figures
> that they can
> either tunnel all the up-and-coming DBAs through their site.
> Is Oracle so
> strapped for cash that they can't survive without the ad
> revenue generated
> from a couple of whitepapers? Don't they realize that this kind of
> restrictive practice is going to hurt them in the long run?
> The industry is
> hurting for _quality_ IT personnel (and the DBA field is
> definitely one of
> the areas that can make or break a company). Making it
> harder for people to
> get the information hurts the growth of potential high-level
> DBAs. For a
> high-end commercial DBMS, you need support...quality support.
> Would you
> want someone "learning the ropes" on your customers
> production systems?
> Would it hurt your image if your DBMS was crashing/losing
> data/performing
> badly around the world because of a general lack of
> knowledge? "You don't
> want to use Oracle, I heard
> <fill-in-the-blank-with-major-company> tried
> using Oracle and wound up losing X% of their customers
> because of database
> problems." Sure Oracle can gain revenue by filling in some
> of the gap with
> their consultants, but where are they going to get those
> consultants from in
> the future? Grab people of the street and throw them in a
> boot camp to mold
> them in the image of an Oracle consultant? Don't mind
> me...I'm just ranting
> a bit. Oracle might have other reasons for the legal action
> (the people on
> the site could be telling everyone that it is their work or
> some-such like
> that).
>
> Jeffery Stevenson
Received on Thu Jul 13 2000 - 13:18:26 CDT