Slashdot Mirror
U.K. Government Seeking To End Reliance On Oracle
jfruh writes: The U.K. Cabinet Office has reportedly asked government departments and agencies to try to find ways to end their reliance on Oracle software, a move motivated by the truly shocking number of Oracle licenses currently being paid for by the British taxpayer. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs alone has paid £1.3 million (US$2 million) per year for some 2 million Oracle licenses, or about 200 licenses per staff member.
200 licenses per year? If anything, that doesn't speak to technical concerns. It points towards incompetent legal / licensing / contracting. Who's negotiating those licenses with Oracle? Do they know what they are doing at all?
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
DEFRA is apparently paying $2M for 2M licenses, which if my math is correct, works out to $1/license. Sounds much less reasonable when you see it as 200 licenses per employee, but not that bad when you think of it as $200/year per employee in licensing fees. If this is completely unreasonable, then save money by firing employees who cost at least 2 orders of magnitude more than $200/annum and are not productive. At a minimum, if there really is no need for 200 licenses per employee, the first heads on the block should be the people who promoted/approved the contracts which got them 200 licenses per employee. Once again, it is still $200/employee each year, so what is the big deal?
Have you ever dealt with Oracle licensing, or are you just spouting off?
Because I can guarantee you, Oracle fucks over corporations and governments about the same.
Oracle is legendary for this stuff.
I can also tell you for a lot of applications, the choice is Oracle, and SQL server. And no matter what Microsoft tells you (who is also trying to fuck you over on licensing), for many applications SQL server just can't do the same job.
The vendor of the software needing the DB won't support your open source platform, or anything else.
If you haven't heard about Oracle's licensing practices or think this is inept governments, then you really have no idea of what you're talking about.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I'm fairly certain that, if a major government like the UK were to go to PostgreSQL, the maintainers of the project would soon find themselves in court over some nebulous IP claim about how some obscure library uses the same call declarations as Oracle's code.
We're in the age where the big software companies have essentially become robber barons.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It doesn't have to be that hard or that bad. Some companies manage this much better than others do despite the fact that Ellison is the devil incarnate.
This situation likely represents a nearly complete state of neglect.
No one cares because it's not their money and it's a government agency where saving money will only get your budget cut next year.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
ALL of the RDBMS platforms have their little quirks and proprietary features. The more you swallow the kool-aid, the more difficult it is to migrate away.
Oracle is no better or no worse than anyone else in this respect.
Although chances are that this will end up being all about what the 3rd party app vendors will support.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I've had the fortune (or misfortune depending on your definiton) to work on a lot of companies' systems and have had a very "cross platform" career. Oracle's licesning, which has gotten worse in recent years, is just now starting to send most companies looking for other ways to do the same thing. The problem is that Oracle is still the de facto standard for "enterprisey" software projects. A lot of this is legacy -- for quite some time the only mainstream database systems were DB2 on AIX or pSeries/zSeries, and Oracle on Solaris. You might say that's ancient history and you're right -- SQL Server is good enough for most workloads that need a "fully supported" DB and Linux is a viable alternative to Solaris. But I can tell you that these applications don't just die -- they're alive and more functionality is being built on top of them. Most big enterprise applications (SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and so on) are either Oracle products or are integrated to run on Oracle middleware/databases. Most of the big outsourcing firms' "standard stacks" revolve around Oracle DB running on Linux or Solaris, and J2EE running WebLogic. This makes perfect sense; outsourcers can pick up CS grads who know Java for cheap, and J2EE's nature lets you parcel out and offshore pieces to whoever is cheapest that week.
Since most government IT is outsourced both in the UK and the US, I would say that it would be very difficult to replace Oracle without re-architecting whole applications. Some stuff is easy - you don't need a Solaris license to run Apache for example. Some is not -- just like SQL Server, Oracle makes it very easy to slip into "Oracle-only" development mode when interacting with databases and middleware. Once that dependency is in place, it either has to be identified and pulled out, or it just keeps chugging along. And since systems like this are not sexy (customs processing, DMV records, tax collection, etc.) they don't get seen by the public very much.