Openness of Oracle licensing and audit tools questioned Oracle customers can only use its licensing tools after the company has started to talk to them about software audits or offered license advice. Meanwhile, third-party tools that have been verified by Oracle do not help users in terms of license compliance. In what may seem a double bind for users in the complex and often …
What's the point? asks Craig Guarente
I'd have thought that was blindingly obvious to everyone that's ever followed how big corporations deal with their customers over licensing. The big corporation does not want it's customers to be compliant on their own, they make more money if the customer can be non-compliant in spite of herculean efforts to understand the complex web of requirements - that way there's sales and "punitive prices" to be raked in. Alternatively, the customer errs on the side of caution and buys more than they actually need - which also rakes in more money. Either way the big corp wins - so why would they do anything at all to help their customers ?
Namely, one cannot be legitimately fined or penalised for licence non compliance unless suitable tools for verifying said compliance are openly available; and/or a set of licence conditions written in the sort of language a reasonably well educated person would understand, and not relying on specific narrow legalese interpretations of particular words (especially if they have other looser meanings to normal people).
Oracle are like drug dealers, you get a few hits for free, you're encouraged to use as much as you like and then they pull out the bill and if you haven't got the cash then "Big Harry" will be round to escort you to the nearest ATM and make you pay up under threat of watching your kneecaps being prized out using a rusty screwdriver!
Seriously, don't dance with the red devil, there's plenty of viable alternatives. Before you have a pop at me I was a proud Oracle DBA of 25 years, I love Oracle's products but the world has changed but when MariaDB and PostgreSQL ( pretty damned close to Oracle! ) are as good if not better for most production uses unless you need some serious grit in your IT set up, then why sign up to pay for Larry to buy another huge yacht.
You might under these circumstances:
* if you've died in a tragic blimp accident over the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day;
* have ever volunteered for a lobotomy after several too many beers;
* be a politician and will therefore have had your common sense surgically removed;
* be called Larry.
Otherwise, no.
I know it's a rhetorical question, but it has a real answer. Usually it's laziness; you find that Oracle has bought up most of the companies that made software that serves some niche aspect of your business process. Maybe it's something specific to your vertical or maybe it's just something that fits especially well into an existing process. Maybe you were already using it when Oracle bought the supplier, which is Oracle's preferred way of adding to their portfolio as they don't really have much of an engineering culture. Because your company is probably like most large corporations, it's forbidden you the IT director to hire people because headcount/salary comes out of a different (poisoned) budget bucket from capex and "other opex" like software licenses, contractors, and services. And capex is off-limits too. So while you'd like to hire a few engineers to build the thing you really need, which you would then own free and clear forever, you can't. So you decide to license Oracle's software.
But Oracle won't just sell you one license for the one thing you need. Some combination of "technical requirements" (real or otherwise), bundling, and discounting will be used to force you to take a large collection of Oracle products whether you need them or not. If you won't buy them, you either won't be sold the software you do want or you'll get it only at a ruinous price -- often a price much higher than the price of the entire package. This is one of Oracle's basic sales strategies.
The intent is that since you're paying for this stuff anyway you'll conclude that it's silly to pay for other stuff that does more or less the same things. They'll also do this in such a way that you're signed up for many years with no way to get out of the deal if, say, the person who negotiated this gets fired for costing the company billions of dollars on useless toxic Oracle products. Your beancounters won't sign off on the more-expensive point solution deal, because the multi-year subscription package both costs less in total and doesn't have to be capitalised. So now you're an Oracle shop. One license audit, coming right up!
Oracle understands their customers very, very well. It takes advantage of the shortsighted defects in corporate structure, budgeting, and risk management very effectively. The hallmark of the devil is that he knows your weaknesses, and goes right after them.
Utterly, bitterly true.. I will just add that many times the ones who are in charge are facing big pressure from management to get things "right" and are more than too often incline to pick Oracle over other "less advertised" suitable solutions because who could blame you for choosing the biggest shiny one ? Even if it means to sign a blood pact with the red devil ?
Anon because you know... Used to be in company bought and put to death by Oracle as so many... And yeah pretty disgrunted too bu who wouldn't ?
"third-party tools that have been verified by Oracle do not help users in terms of license compliance"
It's not just Oracle. It's widespread in principle. I was involved a while back in development of a tax accounting application. We found that strict adherence to the HMRC specifications for tax accounting software did not guarantee compliance as far as they were concerned. Nor do HMRC assure that the (obligatory) independently developed tax calculation applications comply with their requirements. However any errors are always by default the responsibility of the taxed party.
It's called 'being in a position of power' that allows you to show with impunity how corrupt you've always been.
So, unbelievably true.
I did my damnnedest to get rid of instances of Oracle 6 that had persisted way beyond their best before end. Unfortunately our core asset management system has Oracle underlying it. (And, if one goes back far enough, hand-coding in Cobol even).
It is not an accident that that is now up for replacement; as it does not even remotely serve our needs.
The minor problem being that the business hasn't quite worked out the scale of the change we are talking about here and only assigned a small and inexperienced team to it so far... I'll just have to shout louder.
My suggestion, take it or leave it, is that the Glas team be engaged during initial contract negotiations. This would mean that the customer would have access to the tool(s) from day one. Additionally, running the tool(s) in a non-Oracle shop should report zero licenses required*.
* - until they find JRE on 104% of of your computers
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
