How to Netflix Oracle’s blockbuster audit model It's a good rule of nostril that if your litigation department is a source of revenue, your business model stinks. The law is there to discourage delinquent behavior when all else fails, not to amplify power for profit. If there's a better, fairer way to stop naughtiness, you should try that first. Let's pick a random example …
《>It's time IT's own late fee model becomes late as in the late Arthur Dent.
Didn't Arthur Dent survive the destruction of Earth itself?》
As far as I recall he managed to survive to the end of all Douglas Adams' books.
He surived Earth's demolition, Vogon poetry (more avoided) and ejection into inter-planetary or -stellar space, the krikkit robots and more so not quite a paradigm of terran mortality.
By his own admission Slartibartfast wasn't particularly good at threats.
Agrajag might be a better model of tenuous existence as Arthur managed end Agrajag's on numerous occasions except possibly in his bowl of petunias incarnation(?)
The best option is, of course, never to touch any company that has difficult/opaque licensing terms, or are known abusers of audits.
We were quite fond of Solaris back in the day, but once borged by Oracle it was game over and Linux machines went in to do those jobs as the Sun boxes were retired.
"never to touch any company that has difficult/opaque licensing terms"
Absolutely this. I've come across tons of software where there are a bunch of install options that are activated or nor depending on the license key supplied. That means that if a feature is installed and usable, it has been licensed. Conversely, if a feature is not licensed, it won't be available at all. If I have a 30 concurrent seat license, The 31st user gets a 'no can do' message.
Surely if Oracle really wanted their customers to only use what they pay for, they could automate the auditing themselves.
That's always what customers say before they get a feature. Back in the day, many software products had exactly the kind of "technical license limit" that you mention. Customers hated it. They'd complain that, just when they desperately wanted the 31st user to use the software, it was a horrible practice for the software vendor to restrict the use. That's how software vendors progressively withdrew their realtime technical license limits and replaced that with commercial licensing limits, which are enforced only once a year, via audits.
> They'd complain that, just when they desperately wanted the 31st user to use the software, it was a horrible practice for the software vendor to restrict the use.
I’m guessing that’s because they wanted to use license 31 “now” and couldn’t wait for procurement process to wind its way to having the license in their hands. That way be dragons; it’s mightily kicking the can down the road and leaving you way open to overspend.
Exactly that.
love or hate Oracle if you want want to use the DB, Weblogic or a few of the other best of breed solutions and dont want any license headaches or audit risk then move to License included model on cloud / OCI. if you must stay on prem then get a ULA or one of their 'Cloud in your own datacentre' deployments and License included again. Or just use something else
Never ceased to be amazed by the 'smart' people in IT who cannot understand a software license. Oracle and many other licenses are trust based so no license keys or restrictions ever which means that companies with poor SLM and governance have plenty of rope to hang themselves with
Smart people in I.T. usually focus on the I.T. - If you're lucky they ask the local licencing guru (hopefully an old wise former "smart I.T. guy") before deployment - but more often they ask after the system started moaning about licencing or are picked up by an internal "audit"!
A reminder that Oracle, Microsoft licencing people should be on the Goldafrinchum B ark!
Quite then spend the savings on commercial support if you need that and give the developers a hefty donation. I don't have an M$ office licence I instead took that money and gave it to the libreoffice devs, they're more deserving. I honestly think this would be a very fair way to help open source developers.
I remember optimising the Oracle CPU and seat licensing at one site by moving apps around and getting rigorous with offboarding userids of people that left. A fair bit of work but it paid off. Next thing I know Oracle then ring our switch who put them through to me. "Can we change the licensing model?" I played dumb like I was cleaning staff.
《The law is there to discourage delinquent behavior when all else fails, not to amplify power for profit. 》
On what planet? Certainly not on planet america. Washington Irving wrote complaining of such legal shenanigans between his compatriots a very long time ago.
Not just in the US, the Law is drafted by those who wish to legitimize their delinquent behaviour in order to amplify their power and profits.
Just downright simplemindedness, not even rising to the level of naivety, to believe otherwise.
"We must reluctantly assume that Oracle acts in the name of shareholder value."
...for honestly stating that. So often we demonize the company for their strategy. However, it is really the shareholders* who are driving the behavior. They don't invest in a company for charitable good, they expect their investment to grow and return money.
(* Regular people like us with 401k's and other retirement plans, often using mutual funds which are invested in companies like Oracle.)
Make that short term shareholder value.
For non critical loads simply switching to Postgres will save a ton of money.
Critical applications need closer scrutiny but it is likely that what was bleeding edge performance requirements 10 to 15 years ago could now be handled by commodity Linux, Postgres and several tweaks.
Plus never specify Oracle on a system under development.
What's the betting that in 10 years time the company gets swallowed into the Broadcom/CA software care home.
However, it is really the shareholders* who are driving the behavior.
Give me a break. Employees (profit, non-profit and government) generally work in their own interest. Sometimes that coincides with the customers, sometimes with the owners, sometimes with the management. The whole farce that is "executive renumeration" is intended to try to get management interest to coincide with owner interest, but that is notoriously ineffective.
They don't, though.
There have been multiple studies showing that executives who receive large rewards generally cause all other shareholders investments to lose value.
Share awards diluting the value of existing shares, bad acquisitions, and of course the simple extraction of $100,000,000 or more every year.
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