Beware of Oracle's Licensing 'Traps,' Law Firm Warns (scottandscottllp.com) 136
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.'
LOL .. RICO (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I have heard from more than one person that Larry Ellisons only reason for existence is to make more money than Bill Gates. Looking at their prices, behavior with the community, and user-friendliness of their software... I'm wondering how they stay afloat at all.
Sure Oracle DB can be good, but every time I've used it it has been a total pain in the ass for no real reason. MySQL or PostgreSQL are better behaved in my opinion.
Re:LOL .. RICO (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Try pushing millions of transactions a day and you will see that Postgres is a toy too.
Re:LOL .. RICO (Score:5, Informative)
10 million transactions per day is only 115 per second. Most databases on decent hardware can keep up with that.
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Then I must have imagined Postgres crapping out and having to be rebuilt once a month. Even with SSDs, the thing would die under the load.
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BS.
Zalando.de (a major German online shop) runs on Postgres and they have one hell of a DB.
Re:LOL .. RICO (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, but the FUD is strong in this one.
We push close to 1k TPS through a reasonably setup postgres database (large and highly structured) with hardware levels I would say a bit less than oracle would throw at a similar oracle setup, and it is a fast rock. We have zero problems with it.
Throw that kind of load at any system untuned and it will fall over - oracle included.
People often compare postgres benchmarked on someones PC to oracle running on a large unix server - of course oracle will win there, but postgres can scale up pretty damn solidly these days also. Unless you have very specific requirements that require of of the niches postgres does not (yet) address it is great.
Re:LOL .. RICO (Score:5, Funny)
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Postgresql is ultra overrated, but it's loved by some. Kind of like sports teams, people always have to take sides.
Rather, Oracle is overrated.
Recently seen Postgres (9.4.4) give 40+% performance improvement over Oracle (11.2).
Plus, it can do *now* many things that Oracle can't.
(Senior Systems Architect & Admin + DB Performance consultant here)
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Dumbass
Postgres can get far past that.
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Dumbass
Postgres can get far past that.
Metrics on the web support that:
http://blog.pgaddict.com/ [pgaddict.com]
http://www.pythian.com/blog/be... [pythian.com]
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Try pushing millions of transactions a day and you will see that Postgres is a toy too.
MySQL and Postgres will both handle millions of transactions per day as long as the schema properly designed and the queries are reasonably well written. Seriously, millions of transactions a day is no big deal anymore.
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MySQL was shit until Oracle bought it and immensely boosted it. Unexpectedly, Oracle saved MySQL.
Ahhh... I beg to differ. SkySQL's MariaDB and/or Percona might save it. Oracle could only kill it via complete stagnation.
Anybody remember how much it took from 5.5 to 5.6, and how much better MariaDB is than the latter?
/ Experienced former MySQL DBA(15 years) and PostgreSQL DBA/Consultant now, for good.
(still gotta keep some high-perf Marias due to Magento's sillyness)
Plus: Oracle fanboi-troll wannabe, why don't you reveal yourself? Scared to provide real arguments/credentials?
Re:LOL .. RICO (Score:5, Funny)
One
Rich
Asshole
Called
Larry
Ellison
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Does that make SCO the sphincter?
Re:LOL .. RICO (Score:4, Interesting)
Oracle once tried to claim that all of the users of a non-Oracle OLAP system were Oracle "users" because an Oracle database was used to aggregate data from several other databases during a nightly ETL operation. The actual runtime system had no Oracle in it. They had the whole front office running around in circles for a while.
Fortunately the CEO had a pair and when it finally landed on his desk he got the right answers from his staff and then told the Oracle 'account' gang to sod off, which they did. Knowing my fellow 'muricans and their romper room mentality I bet that ploy works as often than it fails, however.
Oracle makes a powerful database, and no one has a gun to their head when they sign the contracts, but it's a big, big company, and inside that monster their are some bad agents; people that won't hesitate to scam ignorant and frightened sheeple to pad their sales commissions. That's why hard nosed people, while perhaps not terribly pleasant or empathetic and "nice", are necessary and important. It's also why they're running everything.
So if you're one of those reading this story and thinking "OMGWTFBBQ that so unfaaaaair make it illeeeeegal now OMG," then do us all a favor and don't expose yourself to contract negotiations with 800lb gorillas like Oracle. There are grownups for that work.
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So if you're one of those reading this story and thinking "OMGWTFBBQ that so unfaaaaair make it illeeeeegal now OMG," then do us all a favor and don't expose yourself to contract negotiations with 800lb gorillas like Oracle. There are grownups for that work.
Nah; you don't need a (human) grownup; you need a bigger, more aggressive gorilla. If you don't have one, the grownups in your organization should have the good sense not to try doing the job themselves. The sort of battles that gorillas engage in are not the sort that even the "best" human would want to tackle. Humans won out over gorillas not by being more powerful, but by being more intelligent. If you fight them on their own terms, you lose (no matter which species you are ;-).
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In more civilized times, those sales people would be soundly thrashed and then literally thrown into the street. Their behavior is unacceptable. Since that sort of direct feedback is now discouraged, perhaps there should be legal limits on their behavior.
As for me, I just stay the hell away from Oracle. I have better things to do with my life than deal with crap like that.
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perhaps there should be legal limits on their behavior
Sure. Add more cops. Solves everything.
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Or remove some cops and bring back the thrashing.
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..or perhaps direct feedback should be encouraged over passive aggression and political correctness.
Re:LOL .. RICO (Score:4, Interesting)
Someone analyzed Oracle's financials once. Oracle makes more money from maintenance contracts than all other parts of their business combined. Take out the maintenance contract revenue and Oracle loses money every year.
What a great business model. Sell people shit that doesn't work properly and is too complicated to figure out and then charge them extra to make it work (more or less).
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I believe it.
We were looking at Sparc Server support. I couldn't find a power supply online, so ended up calling the Oracle Help line. Turns out, you couldn't just buy one. they would provide them as part of a service contract. I can't remember the exact price, but it was pretty much the same as the server itself.
We now have Solaris running on a HP Proliant Server, and it runs great, and easy to find spare parts.
Obligatory Admiral Ackbar (Score:5, Funny)
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"That's no moon, it's Oracle owning your moon."
Re:Obligatory Admiral Ackbar (Score:5, Funny)
No no no.
More like:
"That's no moon-- It's the bill from Oracle!"
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"I have a bad feeling about this." "I know." ;)
These guys really have a hard-on for Oracle (Score:1)
Look at their "recent posts" box. Just one Oracle article after another. I wonder if Uncle Larry's legal team can go after them for defamation or libel or something.
Re:These guys really have a hard-on for Oracle (Score:4, Insightful)
>> 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.
Sometimes companies deserve it (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
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What is it exactly that legally entitles companies like Oracle to audit you?
Why can't you just tell them to F off?
Re:Sometimes companies deserve it (Score:5, Informative)
What is it exactly that legally entitles companies like Oracle to audit you?
Why can't you just tell them to F off?
Contracts.
Re: Sometimes companies deserve it (Score:3, Interesting)
Which means that companies using Oracle products without any contract at all runs no risk unless someone reveals their use.
And even then they can tell the Oracle guys to sod off.
Nothing stops organizations from having a skunk works area either where only a select few have access or knowledge.
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Which means that companies using Oracle products without any contract at all runs no risk unless someone reveals their use.
And even then they can tell the Oracle guys to sod off.
Nothing stops organizations from having a skunk works area either where only a select few have access or knowledge.
At one time, Oracle wouldn't sell you anything without a maintenance contract. i would be very surprised if they changed that.
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they can tell Oracle to sod off, but telling the DOJ to sod off when Oracle reports them for using stolen software is a bit dicier.
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And even then there must be evidence at hand before the justice process starts. It also depends on if DOJ have the rights to do it in the area in question.
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In the end, contracts are worthless unless there's the threat of men with guns showing up to physically enforce them.
Has it ever gotten to this point? I'm just thinking if I ran a company and another country wanted to send their goons in to look at my hardware and proprietary data, I'd want to be able to legally tell them to fuck off.
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In the end, contracts are worthless unless there's the threat of men with guns showing up to physically enforce them.
Has it ever gotten to this point? I'm just thinking if I ran a company and another country wanted to send their goons in to look at my hardware and proprietary data, I'd want to be able to legally tell them to fuck off.
Unless your business is in Shitcrapistan where there are no meaningful courts, Oracle has enough money to sue you no matter where you are located.
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In the end, contracts are worthless unless there's the threat of men with guns showing up to physically enforce them.
That isn't true. The bigger threat in practice is that if you don't honor your contracts, others will stop trusting you to honor your contracts in the future. Imagine trying to operate a business without credit—not just loans, but any situation where a product or service is delivered in advance of payment. Being reduced to "cash-in-advance" dealings with other businesses would be a major blow to most companies. The prospect is more than enough to ensure that contracts will be honored without resorting
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Well, legal discovery comes close.
Which goes something like this: Oracle sues, you file a defense, Oracle files a motion for discovery, you file a motion to not ... blah blah
Re:Sometimes companies deserve it (Score:4)
The spirit of Darl McBride lives on....
"Contracts are what you use against parties you have relationships with."
Re:Sometimes companies deserve it (Score:4, Interesting)
My wild and unfounded guess: lawyerly speak in the license and contract which says "we own joo bitches".
If you're running their software, their highly tuned team of lawyers specializing in extortion have written all the documents such that you give them permission.
That's just a guess, and it's only my opinion, so it's not technically libel or slander against these alleged lawyers whose specialty is extortion.
But, it all comes down to the license and the contract. And EULAs allow them to change the terms any time they like.
Say no, and they might move on to the next highly specialized team of lawyers. And then it gets ugly.
Re:Sometimes companies deserve it (Score:4, Informative)
Pretty much, from the Oracle VM UELA [oracle.com]:
Section C.2.
...
We may audit your use of the Programs
Re: (Score:2)
Deals with the devil are like that. The time to say no is when such a contract is offered. That;'s the only way to keep them from having power over you.
Inevitable perhaps but how long can you delay? (Score:2)
I would imagine that the contracts give them that "right" but I'd also wager than many companies running Oracle are dependent on ongoing Oracle support and updates to keep business-dependent systems up and running.
I wonder what happens when a company actually does decline to allow themselves to be audited and how long they could put it off.
Let's say you were running Oracle, but unhappy with it and you began planning a migration off it, so you quit paying for support. Oracle believes this makes you in viola
How is Oracle MySQL not prestigious? (Score:2)
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
Except Oracle maintains MySQL. So going with MySQL would still make "We use Oracle software" a true statement.
Re: (Score:2)
I've never even come close to an Oracle install. What kind of things are in the contract that Oracle audits for?
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I've never even come close to an Oracle install. What kind of things are in the contract that Oracle audits for?
It's wide open, they can go on a fishing expedition for whatever they want. Typical things (IIRC) were using servers with too many processors, too many instances running, I think there were user limits (?), and all sorts of other stuff.
In the end, they'll find something to ding you for, never fear. It's like if you take your car to a mechanic and ask him to check it, he'll find something that needs to be fixed. The same with dentists, IT techs, heavy equipment inspectors, etc etc etc.
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Ugh, that sounds really obnoxious. I have never understood paying extra for multiple processors. I mean, I guess it makes SOME sense today virtualization, but historically?
Hello? It's payware... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Hello? It's payware... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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We can only speculate what the triggers are for a software audit.
Some common causes are: when the customer stops paying maintenance, when there has been disagreements between the customer and the sales person about interpretation of license agreements, when the customer performs a larger hardware consolidation, or when the customer performs a larger migration. Oracle, as other software vendors, of course do not tell you the triggers, because the customers would try to avoid those.
It boils down to whether or
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You have the option of CAL or per CPU core.
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>> SQL Server is two or three SKU's that include all the features in the box and the licensing is by device/user or CPU core. fairly simple ...says no one who's every had to deal with application requirements that require segregated processors/systems, offsite or DR processing, unknown capacity needs, fluctuating rulings on whether web applications are "one user" or "one SQL seat per user" etc.
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> the licensing is by device/user or CPU core. fairly simple
That's what we thought until we got audited by Microsoft. After moving our web servers to Nginx and backend to Java, the only remaining Microsoft products used in our company were their attempt at an SQL server running on Windows. Despite our best efforts to buy the right licenses, the audit determined (or decided?) we weren't doing the right thing. The audit took two man-years of our time and cost us more than we paid for the licenses in the
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Unfortunatly... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Never Again (Score:5, Insightful)
I've heard this before. (Score:1)
Examples of violations please (Score:1)
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"repair the relationship" (Score:5, Interesting)
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A part of our AAR/Lessons Learned discussion regarding this particular scenario involved realizing that oracle knew the 'relationship' was over before we did and stopped giving a shit about making us happy after they had our money.
Virtualization Trap (Score:3)
One real beauty I was involved with handling from Oracle was how they can charge you for all the cores on the VM host even though you are only using say 2 out of 16 cores for your server. Of course they would not do this if you were using their VM stack.
They tried this to me for Weblogic licenses and after getting a whopping quotation that was easily 20 times what it should have been, I just ended up porting the enterprise app over to Tomcat bringing our license costs for our J2EE stack down to nil.
Re: (Score:2)
True. In actuality, we did not need the J2EE features like JavaBeans. We were fine with just servlets so Tomcat was a perfect fit for our stacks.
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One real beauty I was involved with handling from Oracle was how they can charge you for all the cores on the VM host even though you are only using say 2 out of 16 cores for your server. Of course they would not do this if you were using their VM stack.
They tried this to me for Weblogic licenses and after getting a whopping quotation that was easily 20 times what it should have been, I just ended up porting the enterprise app over to Tomcat bringing our license costs for our J2EE stack down to nil.
Yeah, that's a common one, and Oracle will cave on it if you press them.
Orifice, software that ruins the internet (Score:1)
I have never really understood Oracle (Score:5, Interesting)
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."
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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 agree totally for a greenfield site. However one thing that Oracle is good at is lock-in. Many sites have no choice because of legacy PL/SQL forms or even Oracle SOA systems. In such cases people have little choice, then the locking ratchet keeps going .... since we have all this Oracle infrastructure paid for we can just use it for the next project..
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But in companies where they are facing nimble upstarts this sort of thinking is often what leads to their demise. I have watched as companies would suddenly start looking at their solid AS300 and wonder, "Maybe that might kind of be a sort of liabil
Re:I have never really understood Oracle (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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There is no opensource alternative to Oracle APEX (Score:2)
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.
There is no sane alternative to Oracle APEX, unfortunately. It's waaay to easy to whip out company-wide applications that require no client installation, nothing, no opensource system could do the same.
the correct answer to that is (Score:2)
"fuck off, we'll use postgres instead".
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I agree, but RAC is like crack, and Oracle know it. FWIW, RAC is actually pretty good - esoteric, yes, but actually capable of an awful lot.
The thing about Oracle is that if you run single server, then you could conceivably migrate to Postres. You've got a world of dev work to do, but you could do it. Once single server starts puffing a bit and the sharp suited Oracle guys tell you RAC is your best option, the PHBs get involved. In fairness to them, they're faced with a big license fee to pay each year, or
There are 4 types of shops.... (Score:4, Informative)
There are Microsoft shops out there, and there are some that I've worked with that are happy with Microsoft.
There are IBM shops out there, and there are some that I've worked with that are happy with IBM.
There are Best of Breed shops, (LAMP/OSS/etc) and they are happy as hell.
There are Oracle shops out there, and never have I heard a client say "We Love Oracle!"
Google could have belted them (Score:1)
As revenge and/or a bargaining chip for the Java lawsuits, Google could have bought PostgreSql stewardship and fleshed out the rough spots to make it more competitive and compatible with Oracle. Not too late.
This is exactly Oracle's tactic. (Score:2)
Re: Customers are treated better than employees (Score:2)