> Isn't Oxide kind of like Oracle now building polished vertically integrated monster machines ?

Oxide is kind of like Sun Microsystems, building polished vertically integrated monster machines, e.g. Sun E10k.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Enterprise

Isn’t the main issue with Oracle the aggressive sales and exploitation of captive customers?

They don't call oracle "a law firm with a software division" for no reason.

I'd assume oracles main issue is that personal-computers-on-steroids as servers mostly won, and we don't all need AS/400 or mainframe architectures. 99% of problems can be solved with practically commodity hardware and software.

Competing with someone you don't like who has a monopoly on something makes a lot of sense.

The opposition to Oracle was never about building vertically integrated machines.

To me they are much more similar to Sun than Oracle (before the latter aquired the former).