Feds brag about hefty Oracle discount – licensing experts smell a lock-in The US General Services Administration (GSA) has announced an agreement with Oracle it claims offers a 75 percent discount on the vendor's license-based technology. However, experts have pointed out that heavy discounts are commonly offered to Oracle customers, and a 75 percent discount might not be as good as it sounds. Big …
I guess you're unaware that in the US at least there are military/first responder (i.e. police, fire, ambulance) discounts available at many businesses both large and small. Many restaurants will give cops free coffee or free meals if they visit on duty / in uniform.
Not sure how that could be a "bribe", especially the widespread ones that are available to millions when you lump in the active duty military with police etc. Now if you're a pawn shop owner and you tell a cop "you see a TV here you like you can go ahead and take it, free of charge" then yeah maybe you're trying to bribe the cop not to look too hard into whether your shop is knowingly selling stolen goods.
These “first responder discounts” aren’t goodwill - they’re social bribes. A free coffee isn’t a kind gesture - it’s a calculated investment. A small price to pay for a subtle tilt in your favour when authority is exercised.
Give a perk to someone in uniform and you're no longer just a civilian - you're one of the good ones. When your shop gets burgled, maybe the officer remembers. Maybe your case gets that little bump in priority. Maybe they patrol your street a bit more often, while someone else - someone who didn’t pay the toll in lattes and sausage rolls - slips further down the queue.
And it’s not just police. Any public servant receiving steady freebies - paramedics, nurses, council staff - learns, consciously or not, who’s “on their side.” Who deserves just a little more effort. A little more empathy. That’s how favouritism spreads: not through orders, but through sandwiches.
In the UK, this isn’t just ethically dubious - it strays into misconduct. Because public service is supposed to operate on need, not on who’s been feeding the staff. These cosy little kickbacks corrupt that balance. They turn service into a loyalty economy, where those who flatter and feed get the fast lane.
Luckily that's mostly just Oracle, though there are some similarly predatory software publishers, Oracle is close to uniquely greedy and complex if you're a business with a large revenue stream that Oracle wants a piece of.
Cloud services are also a possible target for "licensing consultants" to make some money off of, but they can't be as greedy, since it's slightly easier to switch cloud providers than get out of an Oracle contract without paying them for a few years of not using it.
> announced an agreement with Oracle it claims offers a 75 percent discount on the vendor's license-based technology.
So the GSA is getting a 75% discount, meaning it will pay only 25% of the original quote. Sounds god, can see why they'd like that, although if it is only for a very short time period, as hinted at, maybe best avoid it.
> The GSA said the agreement offered a discount of $0.33 for every $1 used on eligible Oracle Cloud services
Um, no, apparently they are getting a 33% discount, paying only 77% of the original quote. Not a 75% discount. Ok, so maybe that first figure was meant to say "a discount that takes it down to 75%", i.e. an actual discount of 25% then? Not that that matches 33%, but it does indicate which side of the seesaw we are sitting on.
> Most Oracle ULAs end with discounts from 96-99 percent so a 75 percent discount on software is not as good as it seems.
And now 75% is not as good for the customer as it is common for the customer to get a 96% to 99% discount and only end up paying from 1 to 4 percent of the original quote? Hang on, that means that the seesaw *was* tipped the first way after all! It was a 75% discount (then what was the 33 cents about?).
> Oracle's ... sales strategies and contracts are top-notch at locking customers into long-term costs that are painful to avoid
Not surprised, if every customer has to wade through numbers that shift like that then they'll probably just sign on the dotted line just to stop the world swirling around!
I still have no idea what the discounts the GSA have actually been offered are, let alone what they are supposed to be a discount on and certainly not how long they'll last.
Well I'm sure Trump wasn't negotiating this so him being a nepo baby trustafarian doesn't have anything to do with it.
This is mostly going to be down to his underlings wanting to be able to claim "look at how much money we're saving the taxpayers" and therefore allowing Trump to claim that. The reality doesn't matter, nor does any fallout months/years later after the press releases have been made. Only the perception does. A 75% savings will sound great in a Trump tweet and his followers will eat it up, regardless of what was being paid before or how much it might lock-in the US government after.
Obviously given the incompetent and unqualified people Trump is appointing the Oracle people negotiating this were no doubt licking their chops seeing such a group of suckers across the negotiating table from them. I wouldn't be surprised if when everything is added up the US government ends up paying more and getting less than it did previously simply because people without vast experience dealing with such negotiations would be taken to the cleaners. I've done vendor negotiations before but I know with 100% certainty that I would be wildly out of my depth taking on Oracle in something like that.
