I believe the "HN hate" is more on the accounting/contract side, rather than strict technology side.
It's the canonical enterprise vendor on the database side (DB2 has far smaller market share, and SQL Server market play is slightly different), so it's the poster child for anything from no two customers paying the same price for same metrics, to opaqueness and perceived unfairness of the contracts, to seemingly predatory fees, to ambiguous and frequently awful licensing on virtual CPUs, to the various shakedowns and so on.
I'm not saying others in the same market are markedly different; but just like IBM is the HN poster child for a "no longer relevant tech dinosaur", Oracle is the HN poster child for "predatory licensing & fees".
(* Note/disclosure, I have the distinct privilege of being happily employed by one to reasonably happily work on the products of the other :-D )
It's the canonical enterprise vendor on the database side (DB2 has far smaller market share, and SQL Server market play is slightly different), so it's the poster child for anything from no two customers paying the same price for same metrics, to opaqueness and perceived unfairness of the contracts, to seemingly predatory fees, to ambiguous and frequently awful licensing on virtual CPUs, to the various shakedowns and so on.
I'm not saying others in the same market are markedly different; but just like IBM is the HN poster child for a "no longer relevant tech dinosaur", Oracle is the HN poster child for "predatory licensing & fees".
(* Note/disclosure, I have the distinct privilege of being happily employed by one to reasonably happily work on the products of the other :-D )