It's tempting to say "Oh yes, definitely," but that wouldn't be completely honest. The real answer is, of course, much more nuanced than that.

It's not the totally unfettered we-do-what-we-want-when-we-want-to Wild West that was Ksplice-the-startup, but it is still a small, tight-knit team with a lot of autonomy, and I think the small-team aspect is a huge component of what makes a startup so fun.

Of course, the transition to big-company has its benefits. For example: benefits (see what I did there?), an HR department so that we can hire people internationally, a sizeable budget, and the ability to focus on the things that are core to what we're doing without having to worry about all of the overhead associated with running the company.

Not to mention the legitimacy benefits: a few years ago, we had a meeting with BigFinancialCo and they basically told us: "Yes, we love your product and we want to run it, but look, we're BigFinancialCo and we spend a zillion dollars on IT. As much as we want to, we just can't run some product made by people who work out of what appears to be some sort of co-ed MIT nerd frathouse in Cambridge." Which, fair enough -- the house was pretty gross.

Now that we're Oracle, it's much more of an, ah, how shall I put this, "no one got fired for buying IBM" situation. (Yes, I see the irony in that statement.) Any technical skepticism is easily dispensed with, because we credibly have the support resources to back up the product.

My job in particular is definitely one that has probably changed the most: I no longer do day-to-day sales stuff (the Oracle Linux sales team does it all), and as a result I get to focus a lot more on product management, only tactically dropping in on customer meetings when it makes sense.

By contrast, the day-to-day of our engineering team here at Oracle is actually extremely similar to how it was at Ksplice. Which hopefully answers your question :)

I'd have to see it, I guess. I've worked at a post-buyout "started-up" company before, and it... taught me a lesson about assuming that being bought was good for a work environment.