Oracle demands $12K from network biz that doesn't use its software Merula Limited, a UK-based network service provider, recently received a bill from Oracle for $12,200 for using the company's proprietary VirtualBox Extension Pack, which provides extra capabilities for the free GPL-licensed VirtualBox hypervisor. For Richard Palmer, director of the company, this was a perplexing demand. As he …
There is a good chance that whomever is using VirtualBox in this application may be using it as part of an automated test setup. I use it to test software on multiple operating systems. I can control the VM through VBoxManage and then run all the tests via SSH. The whole thing is orchestrated automatically via a bash script.
None of that requires the VirtualBox Extension Pack however, which adds some rather niche features, mainly related to USB device pass through. The problem in this case is with the VB EP, which you can download from the VB web site, but only for personal use and evaluation.
There is the distinct possibility that whomever is using VM in this application may not actually need or be using the Extension Pack, but only installed because it was there for download.
This has been a problem for oracle customers for decades. It was possible for a DBA to implement high availability features the customer hadn't licenced for years. Normally the manager responsible for the budget wouldn't be aware of it until either the annual lice bill suddenly leapt up or the got a call from Oracles Compliance team that would normally be followed up by a compulsory software audit if you wanted to avoid the bill.
In some cases the unfortunate DBS had embedded useful but expensive features so deep in the infrastructure that they couldn't be unpicked, in that case Oracle would usually make a 'special arrangement' if you committed to licencing the additional tools they would graciously apply your normal account discounts (90% in my case) but there was usually a bit of leverage applied to try and replace some non Oracle product with Oracles at the same time. I never fell foul of this issue personally as I was forewarned before moving into a tech management role and I briefed my DBA's but since going independent I've come across plenty of DBA's who have fallen down that particular pit. When I first stared working with oracle there was no competing product for High volume transaction processing other than DB2. I've always liked the product but always disliked the company. it seems endemic in the software industry, Microsoft tried to charge me for 1000 copies if windows because I had got rid of the boxes of floppy disks, Computer Associates tried to double the cost of my disk compression software when they bought the company. I found in all cases that if you had a corporate relationship with the company and your organisation had some industry visibility you could stand your ground and get it sorted out but I would have hated to be in that position in a smaller company.
"When I first stared working with oracle there was no competing product for High volume transaction processing other than DB2. "
Well there's Informix IDS which is still around.
Of course Janet Perna wanted to kill off Informix and have everyone switch to DB2. As the story goes... only one customer switched to DB2, the rest either stayed on Informix, or went to Oracle.
Posted Anon well... for the obvious reasons.
One of IBM's gimmicks with Informix is to push it for embedded systems so there are ARM ports. A bit of scratching around shows there's also a PHP module. Hmmm. A Pi Nextcloud server running on Informix? If I ever have a spare week to play with that...
I won't have MySQL, Virtual Box, Java or any of their rubbish. But loads of stuff requires it, I've had a look at some open source projects but had to bin them straight away because they use Virtual Box to run an emulator. So many online project use it for VMs. It's possible employees are downloading it to play with stuff.
"I won't have MySQL, Virtual Box, Java or any of their rubbish."
VirtualBox is licensed under GPLv2. What is your concern? https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ
OpenJDK is available under the GPL license. Same question. https://openjdk.java.net/
I prefer MariaDB over MySQL just because Oracle, but MariaDB is also GPL.
"Merula does not operate or manage any computer using VirtualBox or any Oracle software."
Not using it does not mean Oracle won't ask you money, buddy. You *may* use it, therefore you need to pay for it, see the whole Oracle licensing terms, particularly on virtualization.
/sarcasm
"When companies use their legal department as a profit center it is highly indicative that the products they claim they are incorporated to provide are no longer competitive in the marketplace,"
There's probably no way to phrase it any better. Everyone I know of is fucking off Oracle's abusing licensing terms, whatever the transformation/risks costs.
It'll take time but Oracle DB is dead in the water.
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really depends on what your doing with it obviously.
I ran an Oracle DB as the back end database for our vCenter 5.x installation for about 7 years (migrated to vCenter 6.5 early this year which came with the embedded DB and built in HA).
Dug up the original quote
"ORACLE DATABASE STANDARD EDITION - NAMED USER PLUS 3 YEAR" plus software updates/support. 20 named users (wouldn't recommend this config for an DB running an internet facing app), was $6,300 at the time. I was (and still sort of am) unsure how many named users I needed, I probably could of gotten away with maybe 2 or 3 given that really nothing other than vCenter (which had 2 DBs one for vCenter itself one for VMware Update manager - so 2 named users?) and nightly datapump job for backups. But I saw the cost of 20 and just said screw it license it for a bit more just in case.
I'm sure our license was too small for Oracle to care, they contacted me at least once or twice a year trying to upsell something. I explained what we use Oracle for and there wasn't any opportunities for upsell in this environment. They always understood(sometimes it took some additional explaining) in the end and left me alone for another 6-12 months.
One crazy bit is for a while they were pestering me about renewing support, support that didn't expire for another 2 years. I never understood that. I see emails from last year reminding me my support is expiring in 2020 and the cost to renew the support is .."USD $3.15" .. eventually those emails stopped.
I haven't dug into Oracle's licensing recently but several years ago standard edition could run on unlimited cores and you generally paid per socket(max of 4 I think). vs the enterprise which has the funky per-core licensing. I think Oracle SE even included RAC licensing at one point anyway.
I went through two Oracle audits with a company back in 2006(happened just as I joined the company) and again in 2008. Boss ignored my advice to change to standard edition in 2006 (they were originally licensed for "Standard edition one" if that version still exists, for a DB on an internet facing social media site). They had Enterprise edition installed.
They paid hefty fines and were assured everything was OK after the audit in 2006 so my boss ignored my advice. Auditors came around again in 2008 and found lots of new violations, this time they accepted my advice and I went through the process of migrating everything to standard edition(found it ironic the Oracle staff were not aware of the per socket licensing advantages to Oracle SE vs per-core licensing on Oracle Enterprise), even changing the CPUs from dual core (optimal for per-core licensing on fast cores) to quad core (better for standard edition more power). HP found out the DL380s they sold us as quad core capable ended up not being quad core capable they had to replace the motherboards (some time later they updated their docs reflecting some early boards could not do quad core processors).
The migration from Oracle EE to Oracle SE at that company was pretty painless, I mean no app changes, I did all the work. We had a Oracle consulting company that helped manage things and their custom monitoring app required partitions, so it was their standard practice to install Oracle EE with partitioning ($$$), so they had to change their shit around, but they realized they should do that anyway.
At least with Oracle 10g which is what we had at the time I think, we were still able to leverage Oracle enteprise manager with the performance packs and stuff (against the license), it was easy to wipe the installation from the DB when it came time for the next audit, no issues(semi regularly wiped the config for that anyway due to problems, didn't care about data retention on that stuff). Newer Oracle I noticed it didn't seem possible to install things that way anymore. Really missed the performance packs, I'm not a DBA but it was just amazing to see how quickly anyone could track stuff down, vs MySQL even in 2019 is nowhere close to it(and the way things have progressed in mysql over the past decade MySQL will probably never get to where Oracle was 10-15 years ago).
Forgot to mention part of the migration to Oracle SE was some of our dev/test systems ran on single socket ESX installations (technically vmware did not support single socket at the time), Oracle didn't support their DB on ESX either I believe (had to repro any issues on bare metal). Our production OLTP systems ran on bare metal but everything else was in an "unsupported" configurations mainly for cost savings(servers were dual socket just pulled one cpu out). didn't have any clusters, each ESX system was stand alone, no vmotion, no HA, didn't even have vCenter, just ESX Standard edition I think it was called. Never had an issue.
Why have they not offered Peter Green a directorship?
I'm sure there's a sizeable pension fund that needs draining along with numerous assets that can be flogged off to fund one last round of bumper bonuses before the company is sold off to a local used car dealer for a quid.
We have video evidence of you using software you haven't got licences for. We really don't want to sue you so please pay us 5 BTC and we will forget all about it...
Similar also to speculative copyright strike's on youtubers.
This seems pretty desparate even by Oracle standards.
i placed a softwâre on the xxx video clips (Orâckle) web site ând guess whât, you vīsīted this website to hâve dâtâbâse fűn (you know whât i mean). While you were viewing trânsâctions, yoűr web brőwser initīatd őprating âs a RDP having a keylőgger which gav me âccessibility to your scrn and câm. Right after that, my software collectd all of yőűr contacts from yőur Orcâle, âs wll as -mail . and then ī mâde a doubl-screen vīdeo. 1st part shows the tâbl;es yoű wer watching (yoű hâve a nice tâste in bârgepőlis lől . . .), and nxt part shows the view of yőur webcâm, & it īs u.
Well, if it's work related, they'd be licencing it properly, of course. If an employer or client needs an app to have unfettered net access, it's going to be on a separate physical/virtual client with suitably generous FW rules. And there's always VPNs, etc if you're worried.
...Oracle are on the cusp of crashing; they are so abusinve to their customers (honestly the Redmond Beast is a fluffy teddy bear by comparison), and there are so many other options out there that they might be hitting the tipping point where people simply won't use them anymore. Oh happy day!
I did at one time use VirtualBox for non commercial reasons for trying out procedures before blowing up my live system. I found the extension pack some what disturbing because because it tied you into a contract with Oracle with software that was allegedly free to use. I essence with out the extension pack having a performance car with bicycle wheels. I'm sure Oracle will go after the commercial users first shortly followed by domestic users later. I'm much happier now with Qemu with every thing you need without a contact. They sowed the seed with VirtualBox and now it time to harvest the cash. Small changes to the contract will put some people in danger being litigated against.
.. as I'm in the process of deciding on which virtualiser to use for a Linux platform (we have to run a couple of services, and VMs makes resilience and replication easier).
Guess which one dropped off the list? Not that it would have been on it once I spotted who made it, but I was literally about to start looking around and then talk to people who actually have a clue (yes, I know, that makes me a bad operator, but I like things to work. Bite me).
Well done, Oracle.
Just use kvm/libvirtd if you're on Linux. It's already there in most distros, extremely well documented and now performs as well or better than anything else. Only drawback is it is not available on Windows. After one too many blue screens with Hyper V on my Win 10 work machine, I settled for vb (sans extension pack) because my only other option, VMware, also had issues on my company's Win 10 builds. Sadly, many projects like vagrant went with vb as their default because it is still the only open source solution that works across platforms. Of course every time I run into a problem with vb on Windows, I find myself wishing I was allowed to use Linux at work.
Only drawback is it is not available on Windows
Actually, that's a major benefit in my book. That stops any Microsoft zealot from trying to move virtualisation to a platform that is by default unstable, requires far more resources to establish a degree of resiliency and is subject to dangerous licensing games.
I prefer to avoid that stack of risks..
Can't believe I'm saying this, but if you're after bare metal then hyper-v is both free and actually rather good including running Linux VM's.
If your desktop is Windows (which I doubt) then it's also a free option to enable.
Got a couple of devs I know who have just moved to hyper-v and WSL and they seem to like it
>If your desktop is Windows (which I doubt) then it's also a free option to enable.
You need a windows 10 pro or windows server license to use hyper-v. The only way to get it for free is to run win10 fast ring, It updates so fast the license is never activated. But you are then at the mercy of beta testing new versions, I had an issue where v8 vms was automatically upgraded to v9, and it could no longer be used anywhere else. There is also on cut and paste bug with gfx console that drives me nuts. (cut and paste not supported, need to use ssh).
I've just moved to Hyper-V, since the latest Win10 update broke VMware Player that I was using until now for a couple of quick test VMs. It does seem to work OK, but its usability is awful compared to things like Virtualbox and VMware Player. Like most Microsoft things, its UI/UX can best be described as poorly thought out.
That seems to be quite clear - Oracle really need to improve their methods if they want to finger the right people.
I had a look at the linked Reddit threads and, apart from people ranting about how awful Oracle Db is (not that I disagree), the main anger seemed to be at Oracle daring to decide to charge people for Business use of the VirtualBox Extension Pack.
Why the anger?
""When companies use their legal department as a profit center it is highly indicative that the products they claim they are incorporated to provide are no longer competitive in the marketplace," he said"
^ That is such an accurate summary of Oracle today - modern purveyors of outdated Snake Oil recipes.
Merula is the preferred ISP for a secretive online conference of BOFHs of which I'm proud to be a member.
We are proud to be the type of people who try software that performs different tasks. No doubt this includes VirtualBox on Merula IPs. This is only as tests.
Oracle needs to recognise this and take the pressure off Richard.
..where some fly by night company ships boxes of toner to random companies without being asked to, and without it being ordered by anyone. If it's a reasonably-sized company, no one knows who ordered it or has time for the wild goose chase to find out. So the box sits in a storeroom or someone's office. Then a couple of months later a "past due" bill for the shipment arrives, often to just be paid by someone else who also can't be bothered to do any legwork.
The thing is, the core VirtualBox application is open-source, it's only the "Extension Pack" that's a proprietary item. And if I'm not mistaken, VBox could support alternative extension packs (and maybe even multiple packs at one time). It would simply require adapting some of the KVM/QEMU/Xen/whomever-else's equivalent driver/utility code to work with VBox (yeah, I very much realize it may not even be "simple" at all). And while you're at it, add in support for lesser-known operating systems (such as OS/2, AmigaOS, *BSD, etc) which don't currently have client packages.
Stick it to Oracle by removing the need for them.
IANAL just have done enough w contracts over the past 20+ years...
Oracle could sue. (Anyone can sue in the US if you find a dirty enough lawyer and pay enough...)
But they would have a hard time winning their case.
Sure the IP address lines back to his company.
Oracle will probably want him to point to the company / guy using the IP address at the time. (While DHCP, the leases are long and will auto renew to the same IP address unless its already in use....)
The ISP could comply, or tell Oracle to pound sand.
Oracle could then sue and get a judge to subpoena the ISP's customer record for the offending customers.
The ISP could fight it and could win.
The ISP could also fight the whole case because they never signed a contract with Oracle.
And even with a shrink wrap license... most activation strategies require a user to send an email verification to get a product key.
But bottom line... Oracle doesn't have a lot of room on this... of course since this is in the UK, YMMV.
Oracle will probably want him to point to the company / guy using the IP address at the time. ...Oracle could then sue and get a judge to subpoena the ISP's customer record for the offending customers.
"Sorry, we don't keep records of that."
The Beeb's latest article on the King's Cross CCTV ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-49921175 ) includes amongst the reasons for not being able to audit that setup the fact it wasn't designed to be audited and the lovely phrase "the limitations of corporate memory". I think they meant "shredder".
Who uses ANY Oracle software these days? Amazon's virtual systems are faster with better backups. Java is dying faster than someone taking vaccine advice from a porn star, their database system is such a bloated dinosaur, Amazon should rename their database offerings to Meteor and kill them off once and for all.
Oracle is surviving purely on name and long-term business contracts alone. As those expire, government departments in every country on the planet aren't renewing, neither are corporations.
That's a nice line, though I think porn stars are probably smarter than that :)
But you're right, not only is Java being squeezed out due to the constant security issues and more modern ways of coding web content, but Oracle's own decision to begin charging for their Java engine is shooting themselves in the foot. When someone uses something for free for well over a decade, then finds out it suddenly isn't free anymore, it's the most powerful motivation I know of to find alternatives. (Like Amazon Corretto, for example)
A botnet appears to have taken over Oracle's 140.238.xxx.yyy and 130.61.xxx.yyy domains, and is spraying garbage to the four winds, along the lines of "GET //admin/categories.php/login.php?..."
Or, maybe, this is Oracle's attempt to see who's using their product? Or, maybe, some disgruntled users decided to try their cloud offering for free?
Try getting a single user licence and you will find that you can't.
The minimum quantities for 500 users when I last checked.
I think the business plan when is to go for small businesses who won't need a 500 user licence but will have some employees that will run the add-on anyway.
Combine that with the fact that the licence conditions may vary over time, I believe a legitimate use can become an illegitimate use and subject to the licence.
Section 380 of the Criminal code of Canada makes it a felony (serious offence) to obtain money or anything of value from others by deceit, and even the attempt to do so is a crime. U.K. law is probably similar. The crime of false pretenses may also be relevant here. Oracle's managers obviously think it is not bound by ordinary laws by trying the gambit described here. Their behaviour is shameful. The U.K. police and prosecutors should investigate and take appropriate action against the company and/or its involved managers.
io_uring is getting more capable, and PREEMPT_RT is going mainstream The Register 
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