Oracle sues Envisage claiming unauthorized database use amid licensing crackdown

Oracle this month filed a lawsuit against Envisage Technologies, claiming the Bloomington, Indiana-based IT firm has been violating its copyrights by running Oracle Database on Amazon Web Services in an improper way. The complaint [PDF], filed in a US federal district court in California, alleges Envisage has been operating …

[4whatitsworth]

If i see Oracle even mentioned in a potential db i just turn heel and walk away. Not worth the hassle. MS is awful, Oracle are worse.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, don't use Oracle

All of this reinforces my belief that Oracle is in the license enforcement business (aka Mafia) more than the software development business, and that if you aren't one of the six customers in the world who "need" some of their fancy-schmancy high-end stuff, you're a lot better off avoiding Larry & Co. completely. Oracle Partner Network Agreement and appropriate amendments? WTF? Perhaps Envisage would do better by advertising that they avoid Oracle products like the plague. It would be a selling point for me.

[The Man Who Fell To Earth]

Re: Or, don't use Oracle

Of course. If Oracle was really in the databaee business, their software wouldn't be so awful to use.

[Vometia has insomnia. Again.]

Re: Or, don't use Oracle

I'm left thinking of my '90s development heyday and the then obvious strengths of the various DB vendors: Informix was popular with developers; Sybase was popular with wranglers of financial data; IBM's DB2 and DEC's RDB shouldered the traditional business-focussed and other DB gubbins.

And then there was Oracle which didn't seem to have any particular focus but reminded me of that annoying and unpopular kid from school who was always desperate for the teacher to pick him so he could show the rest of the class how clever he was.

[Ilsa Loving]

Are they nuts?

Who in their right mind would willingly choose Oracle for basic database functionality anymore? Unless you are doing something very specialized that can only be served by Oracle's tools (unlikely), using *anything* by Oracle is extremely risky.

[Warm Braw]

Re: Are they nuts?

While I totally agree, it's been a common view in the industry for at least a decade and very little seems to have changed.

I was once, at a very young age, partly involved in recommending the purchase of an IBM-compatible mainframe (in the days when those were a thing) and it was an education to see the IBM sales machinery move in on the senior management who would be signing the cheque. Needless to say, a much larger cheque was signed to acquire the "genuine" article without any further consultation with the users or the technical advisers. It's almost as if decisions of this kind aren't based on merit.

[Robin Bradshaw]

Please give generously

Larry wants a new mega yacht so its time to turn out your pockets

[Mishak]

Licensing, annual support fees, statutory damages and share of profits?

I can understand the first three (if the case is legitimate), but why would they also expect payout on profits?

Or is that just there so they can drop it in court to show they are "willing to be reasonable"?

[Jon 37]

Re: Licensing, annual support fees, statutory damages and share of profits?

They don't honestly expect a full payout on all the theories they've advanced. But they can ask now for profits, since the profits were allegedly made by breaching the Oracle agreement. And if their other theories are thrown out in court, they can't come back and ask for profits later, it has to be in the original complaint.

US court procedure is that they're supposed to list all their possible claims up front, and then some may be knocked out as the litigation progresses. They're not allowed to add surprise new theories at the last minute. They can only amend their claims if NEW information turns up (or if they screwed up with how they wrote the claims they can fix that). This makes things simpler for the other side, they know what they're defending against.

[Fenton]

You want to move your DB to the cloud

And if you want to move to the cloud, you only have a few choices and pay double for the privilege.

[Peter-Waterman1]

Re: You want to move your DB to the cloud

Right, just limited to these databases in the cloud (top two providers only)

Azure Managed SQL

Azure SQL Database

Azure Database for Postgres

Azure Database for MySQL

Azure Database for Maria DB

Azure Cosmos DB

Azure Cache for Redis

Amazon Aurora

Amazon RDS SQL

Amazon RDS MariaDB

Amazon RDS PostGres

Amazon RDS MYSQL

Amazon RDS Oracle

Amazon Redshift

Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon Elasticache for MemCache

Amazon Elasticache for Redis

Amazon DocumentDB

Amazon KeySpaces

Amazon Neptune

Amazon Timestream

Amazon QLDB

And these are just the managed ones, of course you can also roll your own and run on VMs

[Fenton]

Re: You want to move your DB to the cloud

I meant if you want to move your Oracle Database to the cloud you have to pay cloud licensing which is double the on-prem licence

[Peter-Waterman1]

Re: You want to move your DB to the cloud

I guess that's why Oracle revenue is not doing a lot compared to the cloud providers. People are moving to the cloud, it's twice as expensive to run Oracle in the cloud, people dump oracle in the cloud, Oracle revenue is flat.

[EnviableOne]

Re: You want to move your DB to the cloud

unless its on oracle's cloud, in which case its slightly cheaper, but your stuck in oracles cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: You want to move your DB to the cloud

Sometimes you do need to pay for the privelege though. We had 100+ developer db's on one machine in our datacentre paying for the licence by cpu. Moving to the cloud in this case would have cost us many many times more due to differences in licencing. It did push us though to working around EE requirements and move to running XE in a container instead. So Oracle still lost the money....

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: You want to move your DB to the cloud

"...pay double for the privilege."

It's been 20 years about and I'm still unsure of this advertised privilege. However, the last 20 years have reinforced the fact that when your DB goes down, it goes down no matter where it's at.

[dave 81]

Oracle are litigating again.

What a total non-surprise.

[TVU]

Re: Oracle are litigating again.

Indeed, which is why ensure that I have nothing to do with them, their services or their software products because their presence can suddenly turn into a huge, unannounced liability.

[spireite]

Three virtual guarantees in life....

Death, Taxes, and an Oracle lawsuit

[yetanotheraoc]

You want how much not to sue?

`Envisage initially agreed to discussions but subsequently refused to continue talking to Oracle, informing the database giant that "absent a lawsuit, it would not engage in discussion regarding its use of Oracle Database or its licenses to the software."`

After ending discussions with Oracle, Envisage immediately set about doing what they should have done in the first place -- migrating to a different database. Probably they wanted to continue discussions, but as Oracle is well versed in The Art of War such discussions would have amounted to giving Oracle the missing evidence it later needs for the inevitable lawsuit.

[a_yank_lurker]

Mafia and Ethics

The Mafia has better ethics that Leisure Larry's Minions.

[SecretSonOfHG]

Suing your customers sounds like a great marketing tactic

Oracle is ensuring a future where only existing customers and products where its DB is part of the backend (yes, SAP) will keep paying their annual support fee.

[Vulture@C64]

I have used Oracle and SQL Server for years, but these days anybody who needs anything more than PostgreSQL is probably not doing it right. If PostgreSQL is good enough for the likes of CERN then it's good enough for pretty much anything. It's lightening fast, uber reliable and stable and just does what it says on the tin. Run it on Centos 7x64 and you have probably the most reliable and stable SQL database system ever produced.

[TVU]

I'm glad that you mentioned CentOS because Oracle is now saying "Oracle Linux: A better alternative to CentOS" whereas other CentOS alternatives like Rocky, Alma and Springdale won't come with any future nasty financial surprises.

[Chris G]

The licencing, as a service business model is comparable to loan sharking, you never get to own what you are paying for and support and updating is often uncertain and sometimes a mine field

If I was still in business, I would do everything I could to avoid licenced products.

I like to be in control of the tools I use.

[s. pam]

Time to flush Oracle

and move to Postgres, MariaDB or MySQL and run that on AWS.

far simpler, just export your schema, import and screw Larry.

[EnviableOne]

Re: Time to flush Oracle

Dont do that, the Jeff has you by the short and curlies.

make sure its cross-platform and have some in GCP and some in azure too

[rcxb]

Oracle Replacement

Last I checked, EnterpriseDB's PostgreSQL database with Oracle PL/SQL compatibility cost around 1/10th the price of Oracle's DB.

You save a bunch of money, avoid the Oracle license audits/lawsuits, and it leaves you in a good position to convert your Oracle PL/SQL to PostgreSQL's PL/pgSQL as time permits and then you can forego all database licensing costs entirely. They even provide documentation on porting: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/plpgsql-porting.html