Your phone calls and SMS messages that touch the phone network, likely touch Oracle. Yes, nearly all of them.
For a tech-adjacent example of an acquisition of an entrenched supplier, look at Tekelec, a telecom hardware and software vendor which Oracle purchased in 2013[1].
Tekelec had a number of products but Oracle really cared about one: the EAGLE family, which is a suite of hardware and software for handling network signaling and routing over SS7. For any customer, EAGLE sits at the core of their networks and it is why your calls actually get connected and billed correctly.
EAGLE had a customer base that included nearly all of the important global telecom carriers. From the press release:
> Tekelec’s technology enables service providers to deliver, control and monetize innovative and personalized communications services and is utilized by more than 300 service providers in over 100 countries.
Verizon[2][3] runs EAGLE STP in their core, as does AT&T[4] (f/k/a SBC). Old business win press releases from Tekelec mean Bell Canada and Rogers still likely do. Based on job postings, Vodafone and Virgin Mobile use EAGLE STP for exchanging SS7 messages to/from roaming partners. And from public RFPs, the US Department of Defense[5] runs their own private phone networks, with EAGLE STP at the core.
Given how prevalent EAGLE deployments were in the early 2000s, how SS7 is needed to make the phone network functional, and how STPs are fixtures that do NOT get swapped out often, I feel very confident in saying that Oracle has had a supporting hand in most, if not all, of the phone calls and text messages you've placed since 2013.
It's not used in 4G/5G; Diameter is used instead. Most cellular telcos are ending or planning to end their 2G/3G networks (3G moreso than 2G). In the US, the FCC continues to push for IP-only networks, and AT&T is turning off their landline services (though they keep pushing out the date, it's currently at 2029). Obviously, the US is not the only country, but this seems to be the global direction.
Nonetheless, I can imagine that Oracle will still worm its way into telco recordkeeping and billing systems even if the protocol changes...
> I've always advocated for having a read only database connection to be available for your customers to make their own visualisations.
Roughly three decades ago, that *was* the norm. One of the more popular tools for achieving that was Crystal Reports[1].
In the late 90s, it was almost routine for software vendors to bundle Crystal Reports with their software (very similar to how the MSSQL installer gets invoked by products), then configure an ODBC data source which connected to the appropriate database.
In my opinion, the primary stumbling block of this approach was the lack of a shared SQL query repository. So if you weren’t intimately aware with the data model you wanted to work with, you’d lose hours trying to figure it out on your own or rely on your colleagues sharing it via sneakernet or email.
Crystal Reports has since been acquired by SAP, and I haven’t touched it since the early ‘00s so I don’t know what it looks or functions like today.
My best friend from early uni days did a co-op with Crystal Services, and he's been with them for their entire history through Seagate Software, Crystal Decisions, BusinessObjects (and relocating from Canada to France) and then SAP. I myself have had 2 temporary retirements, at least 4 different careers and countless jobs in that time, and it's wild to know someone who has the same internal drive but has satisfied it with a much more linear path (though you could definitely argue he's seen just as much change as me). From employee ~50 to ~100,050!
This brings me back! My first job was at the Norwegian ERP Agresso, now part of Unit4. I started as a support technician, which was a experience since around the time, '97-'98, everyone was moving from Sybase/Ingres/Informix etc, to either MSSQL or Oracle. I got to interact with those older database systems and install and export/import data to systems running on eg Oracle across parallel Solaris servers at SAAB Areospace and Windows NT running on DEC Alpha at Ericsson, among other more vanilla deployments.
I was a developer albeit not professionally, and my boss gave me the opportunity to develop the integration between Agresso and Crystal Reports, my first professional development project, for which I am still grateful. It was a DLL written in C++ and I imagine they shipped that for quite a while after I left for greener pastures.
I was already a free software and Linux enthusiast, so I did a vain skunkworks attempt at getting Agresso to run with MySQL, which failed, but my Linux server in the office came in handy when I needed some extra software in the field--I asked a colleague to put a CD in the server so I could download it to the client site some 500 km away, and deliver on the migration.
It's important to know that these numbers will vary based on what you're measuring, your hardware architecture, and how your particular Python binary was built.
For example, my M4 Max running Python 3.14.2 from Homebrew (built, not poured) takes 19.73MB of RAM to launch the REPL (running `python3` at a prompt).
The same Python version launched on the same system with a single invocation for `time.sleep()`[1] takes 11.70MB.
My Intel Mac running Python 3.14.2 from Homebrew (poured) takes 37.22MB of RAM to launch the REPL and 9.48MB for `time.sleep`.
My number for "how much memory it's using" comes from running `ps auxw | grep python`, taking the value of the resident set size (RSS column), and dividing by 1,024.
1: python3 -c 'from time import sleep; sleep(100)'
If it really is cargo culting, and the people buying the physical product are not keeping the manufacturers in check because they never play the vinyl, then I can see a potential situation where manufacturers ramp up to meet "demand" but at lower quality (improved profits).
The secondhand market becomes saturated with inferior pressings that are inevitably bound for landfills since they don't meet the quality/expectations of the people who actually play vinyl.
This doesn't make any sense; there's no craft here, where it's cheaper to press "bad" records vs "good" ones. You would literally need multiple production lines to intentionally execute this "strategy". Also a record cost next to nothing to make.
Writing go in yaml and forgetting everything else we learned software engineering. Proper ide's, being able to make abstractions, not copy pasting, structured templating and thus not string based templating, should I go on?
I also use Ollama for coding. I have a 32G M2 Mac, and the models I can run are very useful for coding and debugging, as well as data munging, etc. That said, sometimes I also use Claude Sonnet 3.5 and o1. (BTW, I just published an Ollama book yesterday, so I am a little biassed towards local models.)
The flip side is companies that are not active participants in the open source community (but know they use open source), are pinging all their engineering managers and asking "are we exposed to this!? how do you know!?".
So while it's useless noise to you, it's likely triggered by being on the receiving end of communications like "Hey, my boss is asking if $PROJECT is vulnerable because of a terrible article he read in $MAINSTREAM_MEDIA_PROPERTY?" times however many bosses are harassing their reports.
"I don't want to craft an email reply to every single person, just put up the no-op blog post and be done with it."
For a tech-adjacent example of an acquisition of an entrenched supplier, look at Tekelec, a telecom hardware and software vendor which Oracle purchased in 2013[1].
Tekelec had a number of products but Oracle really cared about one: the EAGLE family, which is a suite of hardware and software for handling network signaling and routing over SS7. For any customer, EAGLE sits at the core of their networks and it is why your calls actually get connected and billed correctly.
EAGLE had a customer base that included nearly all of the important global telecom carriers. From the press release:
> Tekelec’s technology enables service providers to deliver, control and monetize innovative and personalized communications services and is utilized by more than 300 service providers in over 100 countries.
Verizon[2][3] runs EAGLE STP in their core, as does AT&T[4] (f/k/a SBC). Old business win press releases from Tekelec mean Bell Canada and Rogers still likely do. Based on job postings, Vodafone and Virgin Mobile use EAGLE STP for exchanging SS7 messages to/from roaming partners. And from public RFPs, the US Department of Defense[5] runs their own private phone networks, with EAGLE STP at the core.
Given how prevalent EAGLE deployments were in the early 2000s, how SS7 is needed to make the phone network functional, and how STPs are fixtures that do NOT get swapped out often, I feel very confident in saying that Oracle has had a supporting hand in most, if not all, of the phone calls and text messages you've placed since 2013.
1: https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/oracle-buys-te...
2: https://www.verizon.com/about/sites/default/files/2025-03-07...
3: https://www.verizon.com/business/content/dam/business-market...
4: https://www.lightreading.com/business-management/tekelec-win...
5: https://sam.gov/opp/2227eac9a05f7c33f25b19a6ed5ab634/view
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