Yep. And which is better for the customer can vary on the circumstances. I worked for a company that licensed its software both ways (depending on the customer)

Yep. And which is better for the customer can vary on the circumstances. I worked for a company that licensed its software both ways (depending on the customer), although as a disclaimer I was a software eng, not in sales. One thing I'll caution: it's a mistake to think the per-user rate would necessarily be the same in both cases. The business tries to price its software based on value added. IIRC, in the rare cases that we offered customers the choice of pricing method, the final price was (estimated) to be roughly the same, with the per-user rate being the variable... Disclaimer: I haven't read the original article and I don't have any opinion on what Oracle's doing in this specific case as a result.