Slashdot Mirror
California + Oracle = $95 Million Fiasco
bahtama writes: "The Sacramento Bee is reporting that California apparently signed an agreement to purchase 95 million dollars worth of Oracle software that they really didn't need and that will not save them as much money as promised. They apparently purchased 270,000 licenses, which is more than all the state workers, including prison guards and others who would never need it." How do you think Oracle would treat the whole country?
If the poster would actually read the article, they'd see that the company Logicon sold the Oracle software to the state, not Oracle themselves.
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys" P. J. O'Rourke
If you read the article, it wasn't Oracle who should be blamed for this. It was the sales people from Logicon Inc who scammed them.
mp3's are only for those with bad memories
is that the CA Dept. of Information Technology (DoIT) that committed this colossal blunder was established just a few years ago precisedly to eliminate IT mismanagement and waste in State Agencies. I'm surprised Cortez (DoIT Director) still has a job, but that might not be true much longer. The legislature is considering abolishing the DoIT.
Do that and you'll never accomplish anything. Rarely does a community vote for referendums that will tax them more, even when things like schools, libraries and public works are desperately needed.
Ditto for raises for elected officials, we should be able to fire these idiots as easily as we elect them.
You obviously know little about democracy. If we did what you proposed we'd be no better than the ancient Athenians who let their "democracy" succumb to mob rule, where no one really ruled and the fate of any ruler was decided by the whim of a mob. And that's worse than wasting $95 million, recession or none.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
To fully understand what happened, you have to read the California State Auditor's report on the issue. It'll take a couple hours to read, but it's definitely worth it.
Bullshit.
1Q01: $903M income before tax, $320M income tax expense.
2Q01: $1.32B income before tax, $470M income tax expense.
3Q01: $785M income before tax, $275M income tax expense.
4Q01: $845M income before tax, $295M income tax expense.
Your political bias is showing. (OK, so's mine. Guilty as charged. ;-) But corporations pay assloads of tax too.
No wrongdoing?
When grandma goes to Circuit City to buy a computer so she can get email from the grandkids, and comes home with a $3500 Pentium IV 512 MB RAM GeForve IV and Printer Scanner DVD-RW, you don't think that's wrongdoing?
No *respectable* business will sell you something you don't need, or the wrong product to suit your needs.
Both parties behaved improperly. California entered into an agreement without knowing what they were getting, and Oracle led them down the primrose path (or should I say they maximized value for shareholders.) In the real business world, the company would just say, look, we know we signed but we're not paying anyway, here's your software back. Sue us if you have the time and money. Since it the State of California, Oracle will probably get their bucks since Cali. has to follow the letter of the law.
(I worked for a dot-com that simply didn't pay and returned the software to another dot-com, after management realized we didn't need a $70,000 email auto-response system. On the other hand, no-one realized we didn't need $30,000 of routers to connect two offices with less than 20 people each. Ah, those were the days.)
Where do you think the universities get their money? A lot of it comes from the government in one form or another. The anti-tax argument only holds if you can make a case that 1950s and 60s corporations would have paid for the internet themselves and allowed the kind of freedom that has given birth to sites like slashdot.
This sig is not the Zahir. Lucky for you.
Please remember that your money is printed by the government. True, it's not the state governments anymore. Nowadays only the Feds are allowed to.
...
What gives money it's value? Basically it's value is that the government will accept it as payment for taxes. It doesn't really have any other value. It's true that the corner store will accept it, but they need to pay taxes too, and so do their suppliers. If they didn't
Well, habit might carry the value of money for awhile, but not for long. If I didn't need to pay money, would I work? For what payment?
This is why real estate is taxed. So even if a farmer has a couple of horses and a couple of cows, it's impossible for him to exist without selling things for money. (Draw down of savings counts here, but there's also a pretty stiff inheritence tax unless you are pretty rich and/or can finagle your way around it.)
You don't just give them money. They gave it to you in the first place. (Largely via banks, which take a heavy service charge for the business. This tends to be obscured, but it's in the part of the law that says a bank is allowed to loan twice(?) what it has on deposit.) One of the hidden duties of the civil service and of government contractors it to put the money back into circulation. These people usually stick a part of the money into a bank account (see above). And the Feds subsidize this with government grants, which basically consists of freshly printed money. Taxes happen, but they are for a different purpose.
At least that's how it looks to me.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I've been an Oracle developer and DBA for 8 years. And let me tell you, I STILL don't understand Oracle's licensing. It makes no sense, and I think that they keep it that way on purpose to confuse buyers.
Go to http://oraclestore.oracle.com/ and try to buy a database. You'll see "Named User" licenses and "Processor" licenses. And you need a minimum of 10 named user licenses for each processor that the database runs on. Think of it as "connections" to the database. Most Oracle licenses require far more "named user" licenses than 10 -- on an 8-processor Sun machine, you need to purchase licenses for no less than 80 named users. It's confusing, but no where in the article does it actually say that the licenses are "per seat". That's implied in the editorial content at the top of the Slashdot posting.
Also, it wouldn't only be state workers that were connecting to and using the databases. What if the DMV set up Oracle databases with an external web interface that all the citizens of California could use to register motor vehicles?
Oracle is not meant to be used on a per-seat basis anyway. It's meant to be used as the third or fourth tier (back-end data repository) in an n-tier application environment, not installed on a PC on every worker's desk.
A company I worked for bought a financial system from Oracle, only later to find the number of licenses (1,000) was insanely more than we actually needed. Trying to weasel back out of the contract was murder, as Oracle sales, screw goodwill, wouldn't release us from the obligation for the excess licenses. The question really was, between the spec and the signed contract, where'd all the extra come from. It pays, literally, to read a contact before putting pen to it. I'm not accusing anyone of slight of hand, but it sure looked like it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
budget != appropriations. the budget is the thing they argue about on TV to get re-elected. appropriations are how they actually spend the money (the quantity of which is not known when the budget is drafted).
Well, it certainly looked informative. I found the numbers a bit interesting and followed your link. On page 379 (Table S-3, Budge Summary) of the FY 2001 Budget document from your gpo.gov link I found the following:
(2001 Estimates)
Discretionary: $634
DoD $279
non-DoD $355
Mandatory: $993
Social Security: $355
Medicare and medicaid: $342
Means-tested entitlements: $111
Other: $123
Total: $1,835
(All number in Billions)
So we've got 15% for DoD (355/1835)
and 6% for means-tested (111/1835). So you got half of it right but distorted the other half. Non-DoD and Social Security were more than DoD and Medicare/Medicaid was almost as much.
So, it's an interesting chain you've strung but it doesn't hold together.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
PosgreSQL can do anything Oracle can
.mdb file to SQL Server 2000. It's a joke and makes you look like an idiot to people who know anything about databases.
Ah. Everytime I hear "X can do everything Oracle can" it makes me smile.
You know why oracle charges so much money? You know why oracle's the second biggest software company? Sure it's partly marketing, but mainly Oracle markets itself. Oracle is the most powerful, scalable, and generally rock-steady-makes-toast-cuts-potatoes-in-3-styles database in the world by a long shot bar none.
Comparing postgressql to oracle is like comparing the JET engine and a
Send lawyers, guns, and money!