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Key quote: "threatening customers with big bills for software they’re using but haven’t paid for" The _really_ key bit: "haven't paid for". The customer is n
by jpollock 11y ago
Key quote:
"threatening customers with big bills for software they’re using but haven’t paid for"
The _really_ key bit: "haven't paid for".
The customer is not in compliance with their software license. At that point, they are probably looking (the very least) substantial per-core fees for the esoteric Oracle Enterprise features that they are using in production.
I worked for a software firm that was selling telecommunications software to carriers. We charged per subscriber per year. If the carrier wasn't paid, we didn't get paid. However, the carrier didn't keep their license up to date with the number of subscribers they had. Anyways, up comes the support contract for renewal. They complain about slow performance, slow releases and high fault rates - aiming for a discount.
We, pull out their 3 month old press release showing record numbers of subscribers, exceeding their license by 50%. To the tune of ~$500k/yr.
Yeah, the contract got renewed, with no discounts. You see, they'd already received the discount.
Take Away: If you're going to use software with a license, make sure you're in compliance with that license.
If you use Oracle, make sure you have a scripted install and that you audit the feature set against the license. This script and feature set needs to be re-audited for every new release, since the pricing and built-in features will change. It is UP TO YOU, the deployer to ensure that you are in compliance with your license. Oracle has automated audit tools, and when it comes time to renew, they know what you are using.
If you use Open Source, make sure you keep it SEPARATE from your main code base and read the terms of the license you are using. BSD (with advertising) vs GPL vs LGPL vs AGPL have very different impacts on your code.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jpollock 11y agoActually, no they're not. Oracle has a per-core license for Enterprise. Even on their own hardware (my knowledge is a couple of years old, so it may have changed), you either had to license the entire machine or link the database to a subset of the cores. We ran into just this situation where we had large combined nodes with a database tier and an application tier running in different LDOMs (Solaris VM-equivalents) on the same hardware. Limiting the database server to just the cores it needed dropped the license costs insanely. If a job is able to float around a cluster, the entire cluster would need to be licensed. As the article says, VMWare has a document stating exactly this. From VMWare: "Scenario B: Partially Licensed Clusters When a customer does not have enough Oracle application instances to justify creating a dedicated cluster for those applications, only a subset of the hosts in the cluster are licensed for the Oracle application. In this situation, the customer must be careful to restrict the movement of Oracle application instances and virtual machines to only those hosts that are licensed to run the product." http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vmw-understanding-oracle-certification-supportlicensing-environments.pdf http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vmw-understanding-...
- Oletros 11y agoProblem is that the rest of the article show no sign of using software without paying
- gcb0 11y agooracle gave them the software on a quasi-good-will and the client had no means to prove where they used or not used the software. The article calls it "a tricky to not pay oracle" which is idiotic and should read "lack of due diligence". i'm not defending oracle. i think everyone who signs with them deserve all that. but in contract law, they are pretty mundane, for that one case. Their IP lawsuits are another history.