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Oregon Settles $6 Billion Lawsuit Over Oracle's Botched Healthcare Website (registerguard.com)
"While the crippled website eventually worked, Oregon failed to enroll a single person online [and] had to resort to hiring 400 people to process paper applications." An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes the AP:
The state paid Oracle $240 million to create its Cover Oregon website but ultimately abandoned the site and joined the federal exchange to comply with the Affordable Care Act... The state initially asked for more than $6 billion in punitive damages when it filed the lawsuit in 2014 against the Redwood City company, but Oregon ultimately accepted a package that included $35 million in cash payments and software licensing agreements and technical support with an estimated upfront worth of $60 million...
Six years of unlimited Oracle software and technical support included in the deal will save the state hundreds of millions of dollars in years to come and ends a bitter legal battle that has damaged Oregon's "collective psyche," Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum said in a statement. "The beauty of the deal is that if we choose to take full advantage of the free (software), we are uniquely situated to modernize our statewide IT systems over the next six years -- something we could not otherwise afford to do," she said.
"Oracle has insisted the website worked but former Gov. John Kitzhaber chose not to use it for political reasons."
Six years of unlimited Oracle software and technical support included in the deal will save the state hundreds of millions of dollars in years to come and ends a bitter legal battle that has damaged Oregon's "collective psyche," Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum said in a statement. "The beauty of the deal is that if we choose to take full advantage of the free (software), we are uniquely situated to modernize our statewide IT systems over the next six years -- something we could not otherwise afford to do," she said.
"Oracle has insisted the website worked but former Gov. John Kitzhaber chose not to use it for political reasons."
> Oregon ultimately accepted a package that included $35 million in cash payments and software licensing agreements and technical support with an estimated upfront worth of $60 million.
Software licensing which will probably cost them more than $95 in the next few year(s) because they are not using the software according to the license.
... they will generate a very big cash-flow for Oracle, since they are now uniquely situated to completely vendor-lock-in their statewide IT systems?
Oracle avoids a $6 Billion lawsuit
Oracle nets $200 million after a small reimbursement
Oracle potentially gives away software that creates a lifetime dependency on their products going forward
Oracle hasn't actually given away any software yet
Win/Win
for Oracle
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Caveat: I'm no friend of Oracle, and as much as both sides in this were odious, I was actually voting for the state.
I live here, and have connections in government IT. The inside word is that this was largely botched on the government side, with too high expectations, too many changes, and huge feature creep. I would argue that Oracle's mistake was not getting out when they plainly saw that this was a dysfunctional working relationship.
But look what Oracle offered -- a paltry (by their standards) sum, amounting to a roughly 15% discount on the original price tag, plus licenses that lock Oregon into more dependence on Oracle, which are guaranteed to make money for Oracle down the road.
One can paint this as a victory for Oregon with inflammatory headlines, but it looks to me like Oracle won in the end. (And since this is Oracle, "the end" is exactly what you imagine it to be.)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Is there really something that Oracle does that an open-source database can't do?
Yes.
Wear suits, take CEOs and senators out to dinner together, pass a few envelopes under the table...
No sig today...
Because using open source means you yourself are accountable. If Oregon had done this project with an open source database and it had failed, the government would be the one bearing the blame. Hiring a big-name company to do it means if something goes wrong, the government's butts are covered. They hired a well-known company to do it for them. If the company couldn't do it, then obviously it must be the company's fault!
(I use "the government" here only because it's specific to this case and lets me avoid confusing pronouns. The same thing happens when companies choose Oracle or Microsoft or IBM or any other big name without really doing a serious analysis.)
Europeans money is worth more
They get more vacation
They get free college
They have free healthcare
They live longer
They have lower infant mortality
They have more holidays
We have been fucked and we argue that the government is screwed up. We screwed up when we let corporations destroy our government.
So frankly, what's the point in automating at all, if it's going to be as expensive as a decent manual solution that would have been up and running in 3 months?
I keep having this argument at my office. The big bosses want to invest in a programming project that will supposedly eliminate the need for human intervention in a publication process. I keep pointing out that humans still have to look at the material before publication (witness Facebook's recent experiments with algorithms as news editors). But they are so dead-set against hiring a person with benefits that they'd rather spend twice as much buying hardware and writing software that only does half the job.
If they'd hired a person, the backlog would be cleared and the process would be working smoothly. Instead, we're on the nth redesign of the GUI that is nearly unusable because the engineers are in charge of designing it.