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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.'
Is anybody surprised by this?
Most people who have dealt with Oracle often find themselves wondering how Oracle has never been charged under the RICO act.
They're a shakedown organization.
As much as I like an Oracle database, I've seen several situations in which Oracle is the most dishonest group of people to work with, and their licensing is pretty much "give us all the fucking money".
Sometimes it just seems like they make shit up as they go.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I did some contract work at a company once where I knew they were using Oracle products beyond their license. I brought it up with the CTO, even quoting the license contract verbatim and he assured me that it was all covered under license and Oracle knew how we were using the product. We had a pretty simple use case and didn't *need* to run Oracle at all, MySQL or PostgreSQL would have been more that sufficient for our needs (and it would have been easy to , but the CTO thought Oracle made the company more prestigious - so migrating off of Oracle was not an option.
Well, they were "lucky" enough to be chosen for an audit and after we inventoried the systems and sent over the oracle logs, Oracle said we were violating our contract terms and were short by about $250,000 worth of products and $25,000/year in back maintenance for 3 years.
Our CEO had contacts at Oracle and negotiated them down to "only" $150K + $10K/year, but that was a pretty significant hit to the company - they ended up folding about 6 months later (not entirely due to the Oracle expense, but losing a few months of burn didn't help).
..it seems like more and more companies are following this model, although the religious fervor may be less. We were bitten by the VMware scam this year in an audit triggered by the retirement of a legacy system and it's Oracle CPU licenses. Another dirty trick: audit triggered on any reduction of license, nice one! I've also heard of them playing all sorts of license conversion shenanigans when converting from old licenses to new licenses. Thankfully their audit was the last straw that caused our CIO to dictate that we switch to open source RDBMS providers going forward.
It doesn't even take a disgruntled ex-employee to trigger an audit. Sometimes you get hit at random. Last year we spent more on our Microsoft audit than we did on hardware for the entire year. They audited us because we bought a bunch of new copies of Windows Server after releasing a new product and buying a bunch of servers. They wanted to make sure we weren't doing it to cover up past abuse. Punishing customers for purchasing your products is a great way to encourage your customers to not buy your products. We've since started investigating rewriting some of our backend in Java and using Linux servers.
I work on a team that builds and operates an enterprise service bus that runs partially on the Oracle Weblogic/OSB stack, along with other JMS brokers such as fuse/talend AMQ brokers and Solace messaging appliances. The Weblogic/OSB portion of the ESB is by far the most brittle and expensive piece of software in the system. We're working to remove the cancer that is oracle software from our network, but since it's an operational system critical to our customer's business it's taking time. We spent about six months working with thoroughly incompetent oracle support staff in an attempt to get the OWSM security modules to perform some basic encryption/decryption and SAML token validation without any success. A significant portion of that time was spent just waiting on oracle support to provide patches for all the roadblocking bugs we encountered. When the patches were finally delivered, they were provided to us completely untested 'as-is'. The first patch delivered wouldn't even run because there were class files missing. We wrote our own security module using WSS4J and java callouts in about three months after we gave up on oracle ever getting us functional patches. A few months after that, oracle performed an audit and attempted to extort additional licensing fees from us for using OWSM. We had never used OWSM for anything but development and testing, and had removed it from our systems entirely by that time. The most satisfying call I've been on working this project was listening to my PM tell the oracle goons to go fuck themselves while they were issuing legal threats via conference-call. After that incident, Oracle wanted to "repair our relationship" and sent a team of what they called "customer service specialists" to meet with us. What they actually sent was a trio of arrogant used-car salesmen. We met with them and after introductions and a system overview we started discussing what it would take to get Oracle to actually fix our laundry-list of open SRs and enhancement requests (If you've never worked with oracle support, an Enhancement Request is what they call a bug they don't plan to fix). They responded to this by bringing up a new project being worked by another team at our company that they were starting database license negotiations with. They suggested that if we could grease the wheels and guarantee that database licensing deal went through then they could put pressure on support to fix the issues we had with weblogic/osb. Their "customer service specialists" were demanding a quid-pro-quo before they'd consider giving us the support we had already paid for. That meeting ended just as poorly as the OWSM shakedown attempt. Our weekly oracle phone conference is openly hostile at this point.
For many years I did the PL/SQL thing to separate the "business logic" and I built fairly large systems for fairly huge companies. I can make three very qualified statements:
One is that I never really liked working with Oracle as a developer or a DBA. The install was damn easy but configuring and tweaking the DB was a pain on a single machine and a huge pain on multiple machines. Backups and their restoration could easily go very wrong unless you had experienced people and still only after triple checking that things were properly being backed up. The same with any kind of failover etc.
Second is that while I am not too bad at estimating I pretty much refused to guess as to how much an Oracle licence was going to be. Getting a straighforward answer out of Oracle was actually a dangerous move careerwise as they would often want to send in salesmen when they would hear the names of the companies I was working for. They would basically then try to pull shit that would make me very unhappy. I was fairly certain that they were trying to do things such as replace me with more Oracle friendly consultants once they started to buy whole SaaS companies I cut oracle out of my life.
My last and most important statement is that at this point in history anyone using Oracle is a fool. MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, or just about any one of a zillion good datastores out there is so much better than Oracle that I simply don't know why anyone would use Oracle even if Oracle was free I would still use the others. If someone said that I had two choices Amazon Aurora or Oracle I would use Aurora even though I have never used it before. I will simply assume that it is easier to use, faster, cheaper, and less dangerous to my career.
I will give a classic Oracle use case that I did maybe 15 years ago. My client (fortune 50) wanted a system built that would allow you to browse their catalogue and buy stuff online (radical idea at the time). With about 200 main products and an estimated 200,000 to 1 million sales per year estimated (it was 15 years ago) everyone here can guess as to what kind of DB back end we are looking at. Transactional, reliable, blah blah. So we are putting this on a small cluster of machines with about 4 processors each. They insisted upon Oracle as they had been snowed by Oracle into thinking that to have Oracle plus another DB in the same company would blow them up. So I build the system which will then go onto about $400,000 worth of hardware. The entire development time was also spent trying to get Oracle to give them a price which I had said could be insane. So we deliver and the DB licensing was going to be $800,000.
I had seen this coming so our SQL was completely abstracted and very generic. There was no lock in PL/SQL.
The client basically loses their crap thinking that this project was going to make them look like a fool in their company and that this could be a career damaging move. So I point out that we saw this coming and have developed the system so that we can swap it over to an Open Source database that not only will be better but runs much faster meaning a more responsive website combined with lower harware costs because they now had more effective hardware capacity than they had with it running Oracle.
So since that project I have done zero Oracle work and will only do projects that either don't use Oracle or the project involves converting an Oracle database to something else; anything else.
The odd thing is that out of about maybe 300 developers with whom I have discussed Oracle as a DB 3 or so might have defended it. Without exception they were fully certified in using some Oracle product or another. The other 99% hated Oracle and everything it stood for. As in people who dropped MySQL soon after Oracle bought it. 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."