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Beware of Oracle's Licensing 'Traps,' Law Firm Warns (scottandscottllp.com)
itwbennett writes: Slashdot readers are no strangers to Oracle's aggressive licensing practices, practices that have earned them notoriety over the years. This week, Texas law firm Scott & Scott wrote a blog post warning enterprises about the 'traps' in Oracle software licensing. One of the biggest problems with Oracle software is how difficult it is for companies to track internally what they're using and how they're using it, said Julie Machal-Fulks, a partner with Scott & Scott, in an interview with Katherine Noyes. 'They may use just one Oracle product and think they're using it correctly, but then Oracle comes along and says, 'no, you're using it wrong — you owe us a million bucks.'
Absolutely nobody should be surprised by this kind of thing. The whole industry has problems managing licensing. This has nothing to do with Oracle. You can get bit the same by Microsoft. All it takes is one disgruntled ex-employee to trigger an audit.
The fact that Oracle doesn't have an annoying license manager doesn't mean it's freeware.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
>> Just one Oracle article after another
They know their target market (Oracle customers sick of being raped) and it must be big enough to justify the marketing spend to keep developing these articles. I'd bet they'd love the free publicity if Larry went after them as his top legal concern.
While Postgres seems to be built by people that seem to understand the requirements for a production RDBMS, MySQL comes off like a toy made for lazy developers.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
There are a lot of Anonymous FUDsters posting from Redwood today.
So how on earth is Oracle still in business? How is it that every time that Oracle is brought up in a technical discussion that the experts don't say. "Why don't we just hire people to punch us in the face while we develop the system? For using Oracle is about an equal act of self loathing."
My impression is that one of the reasons is that Oracle has a full stack of applications, and once you have locked yourself in by using two or more applications from the stack, you can only see an "unnecessary" cost for moving to some other product, without gaining any functional benefits. And even if you manage to change one of the products, you will probably see little to no reducation in maintenance costs, because that's the way Oracle's SULS price model is constructed (for example the "SULS on all or nothing" clause).
The decision to move to another vendor is not done by technical experts alone. It is done by the company - which consists of the technical experts AND procurement AND legal AND business controllers. Each of these parties has to have a business case to move to another vendor - otherwise nothing will happen, unless something very disruptive happens.