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> Typefaces are, to the best of my knowledge, the only digital product that try to fuck you over with bullshit licenses Has Oracle disappeared? The article is

> Typefaces are, to the best of my knowledge, the only digital product that try to fuck you over with bullshit licenses Has Oracle disappeared? The article is kind of true though, especially when you need a font for a small part of your website like headers, the licence often make it not worth it if you're not a company. There's no middle ground between "here's your free font" and "pay me/us a lot of money".

tiffanyh 4y ago
Oracle will sell you a perpetual license that you own forever. Most foundries won't do that for fonts (at least for web).
- capableweb 4y ago
  Oracle still does a lot of fuckery with their licenses. For example, you're prevented to share any benchmarks you've performed with their software. Not sure it's been proven in court that you could prevent anyone from sharing such information, but at least they're trying.
  - dsr_ 4y ago
    It's true. Now, completely without benchmarks, I can tell you that my workplace has migrated from Oracle to Postgresql and performance is essentially the same: a few things were a little faster on Oracle, a few a little faster on PG. All revenue is directly or indirectly dependent on the database systems, which have been continuous for 20+ years: this is not a side-project. PG administration is much, much faster. Starting an Oracle database always involves a wait similar to booting an elderly operating system. Starting a PG database is fast. Things that Oracle will want to up-charge you to an Enterprise Edition license for, PG has for free. Want to spin up a new machine? No need to negotiate a new license with PG. The cost of the Oracle license would routinely be so large that you need to buy awesome hardware to justify it. You can install PG on anything, and justify it.
    - tiffanyh 4y ago
      Does your database run on NVMe storage? I ask because NVMe has neutralized a ton of performance differences across data related products.
      - dsr_ 4y ago
        It did in the last generation of Oracle and this generation of PG.
    - thr717272 4y ago
      Not only that but Postgres doesn't take two days to install properly. (Admittedly I'm talking a full from scratch Red Hat server with Oracle DB, Oracle managed data disks and Apex, bit still.)
- dahdum 4y ago
  True, but web fonts don’t have frequent critical patches. You can’t expect to use Oracle software without paying ever increasing maintenance in perpetuity. Well, maybe some, but certainly not any database products.
abruzzi 4y ago
This is the same line that made me scratch my head. I'm a non-network guy who has been stuck migrating our phone system from PRI to SIP, and every time I think I get it done, I have to buy another license from Cisco--that our resellers didn't tell us about at the beginning of the project. The latest issues is our voice gateways need a special security license to handle TLS. Outside that, cost per usage is one of the most common cost metrics I've seen--sure if its SaaS it seems directly related, but this is for on-prem licensing--I get the exact same application, only I'm licensed by how much I use it, like the authors font licensing complaint.
- manuelmoreale 4y ago
  In my defense, I did say "to the best of my knowledge" :) I'm just a designer/developer so I don't have deep knowledge of most of the tech world and I'm sure there are some crazy stories out there I am unaware of. But as I said, I'd be more than happy to hear them.
- j45 4y ago
  If you aren’t tied into Cisco permanently, maybe this can shed a light on the path ahead. There’s some excellent voip and sip solutions. Asterisk has been packaged into many a reliable flavour.
- vel0city 4y ago
  It absolutely astounds me the amount of licensing and related headaches companies are willing to deal with just so people can have desk phones with a name brand on them. It seems like absolute insanity to me, like we've devolved into the 1930s and AT&T still owns the phone inside your home.
- kjs3 4y ago
  Yeah, Cisco licensing is (and always has been) 'complicated'. But a lot of that is because customers like to say things like "I'm not going to use that feature, why am I paying for it". So Cisco has 500 licensing options for everything to maximize the amount it can extract. Perverse incentives and all that. The other end of the spectrum is Microsoft that says "Here's what you get in an E3 license, take it or leave it, because trying to put together an enterprise license that only has what you want to pay for is 1) gonna be more expensive in the end, and 2) we make it as hard as possible to do that.".
manuelmoreale 4y ago
> Has Oracle disappeared? I'm not in that kind of world so I'm not familiar with Oracle business practices. And I agree, there's usually no middle ground and it's both annoying and bizarre.
- btown 4y ago
  I'll never pass up an opportunity to post Bryan Cantrill's epic Oracle Lawnmower rant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2047s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2047s
a4isms 4y ago
> There's no middle ground between "here's your free font" and "pay me/us a lot of money". This is a general problem in many businesses. Back in the early days of blogging, Joel Spolsky wrote an entire article about how there was basically no software that cost more than $1,000 and less than $75,000. This was more than a decade ago, the numbers today would be different because we care about LTV not sticker price, but the gap would still exist.[1] Of course, heuristics like this are not strictly true, but the general shape of his argument is still correct: There are three kinds of monetization models for software: Free, cheap, and dear: 1. Free as in beer. Open source, etc. 2. Cheap. $10 – $1,000, sold to a very large number of people at a low price without a salesforce. 3. Dear. LTV of $75,000 – $1,000,000, sold to a handful of rich big companies using a team of slick salespeople that do six months of intense PowerPoint just to get one goddamn sale. The Oracle model. Net result is that some products are sold to people to scratch their own itch, and some products are sold to businesses that can justify the ROI of spending a large amount of money, and between the two it is hard to find reasonable options. We see this in all the products that start at a low price and solve a simple problem, like DropBox and 1Password. Then they pivot to "The Enterprise" and you are now talking subscriptions, seat licenses, and all sorts of fancy enterprise features to justify the price. I used to see this in hotels when I travelled on business. When my clients were paying, they put me up in fairly luxurious hotels that charged me $3 for a room service coffee. When I was paying, I stayed in Motel6-type places that had free coffee in the room or at the end of the hall. I think everyone eventually offered free coffee in the room, but the last time i traveled there was a similar dynamic with WiFi: The naive would expect the cheapest accommodation to try to rent you internet access, but it was the other way around. "You have an expense account? Ha! Pay for WiFi!" Same dynamic: If you are selling to business, you have to have the sales force, customer success organization, and features business want to buy (like back-end integration with business expense and planning systems). That all costs you money, which you recoup by charging an arm and a leg. TL;DR: The moment you start selling to business, you are on a path to charging huge money for something that when sold to individuals, ought to be affordable. [1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-duckies/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-... "Camels and Rubber Duckies"
- jacobr1 4y ago
kjs3 4y ago
when you need a font for a small part of your website like headers I can't get past thinking "why would you do that", especially for something you're having to pay for to use, and could break your web site if something goes wrong. That seems like the poster child for "hey, find an alternative, any alternative, that doesn't rely on a paid third party for something as trivial as how a header looks".
- chihuahua 4y ago
  That's true. But also, it seems absurd to me that people care enough about fonts to pay money for them. To me, there are only 5 fonts in the world: * any Serif font (Times, etc, they all look the same except for 1-pixel differences) * any Sans serif font (Arial, Helvetica, it's all the same thing) * Serif monospaced (Courier) * Sans serif monospaced (Consolas etc) * Silly unreadable fonts like Papyrus. Sure, technically, there are lots of these, and they do look different, but there's no reason to use one of these, unless you just want to make your site difficult to read.

tiffanyh 4y ago

Oracle will sell you a perpetual license that you own forever. Most foundries won't do that for fonts (at least for web).

capableweb 4y ago
Oracle still does a lot of fuckery with their licenses. For example, you're prevented to share any benchmarks you've performed with their software. Not sure it's been proven in court that you could prevent anyone from sharing such information, but at least they're trying.
- dsr_ 4y ago
  It's true. Now, completely without benchmarks, I can tell you that my workplace has migrated from Oracle to Postgresql and performance is essentially the same: a few things were a little faster on Oracle, a few a little faster on PG. All revenue is directly or indirectly dependent on the database systems, which have been continuous for 20+ years: this is not a side-project. PG administration is much, much faster. Starting an Oracle database always involves a wait similar to booting an elderly operating system. Starting a PG database is fast. Things that Oracle will want to up-charge you to an Enterprise Edition license for, PG has for free. Want to spin up a new machine? No need to negotiate a new license with PG. The cost of the Oracle license would routinely be so large that you need to buy awesome hardware to justify it. You can install PG on anything, and justify it.
  - tiffanyh 4y ago
    Does your database run on NVMe storage? I ask because NVMe has neutralized a ton of performance differences across data related products.
    - dsr_ 4y ago
      It did in the last generation of Oracle and this generation of PG.
  - thr717272 4y ago
    Not only that but Postgres doesn't take two days to install properly. (Admittedly I'm talking a full from scratch Red Hat server with Oracle DB, Oracle managed data disks and Apex, bit still.)
dahdum 4y ago
True, but web fonts don’t have frequent critical patches. You can’t expect to use Oracle software without paying ever increasing maintenance in perpetuity. Well, maybe some, but certainly not any database products.

abruzzi 4y ago

This is the same line that made me scratch my head. I'm a non-network guy who has been stuck migrating our phone system from PRI to SIP, and every time I think I get it done, I have to buy another license from Cisco--that our resellers didn't tell us about at the beginning of the project. The latest issues is our voice gateways need a special security license to handle TLS. Outside that, cost per usage is one of the most common cost metrics I've seen--sure if its SaaS it seems directly related, but this is for on-prem licensing--I get the exact same application, only I'm licensed by how much I use it, like the authors font licensing complaint.

manuelmoreale 4y ago
In my defense, I did say "to the best of my knowledge" :) I'm just a designer/developer so I don't have deep knowledge of most of the tech world and I'm sure there are some crazy stories out there I am unaware of. But as I said, I'd be more than happy to hear them.
j45 4y ago
If you aren’t tied into Cisco permanently, maybe this can shed a light on the path ahead. There’s some excellent voip and sip solutions. Asterisk has been packaged into many a reliable flavour.
vel0city 4y ago
It absolutely astounds me the amount of licensing and related headaches companies are willing to deal with just so people can have desk phones with a name brand on them. It seems like absolute insanity to me, like we've devolved into the 1930s and AT&T still owns the phone inside your home.
kjs3 4y ago
Yeah, Cisco licensing is (and always has been) 'complicated'. But a lot of that is because customers like to say things like "I'm not going to use that feature, why am I paying for it". So Cisco has 500 licensing options for everything to maximize the amount it can extract. Perverse incentives and all that. The other end of the spectrum is Microsoft that says "Here's what you get in an E3 license, take it or leave it, because trying to put together an enterprise license that only has what you want to pay for is 1) gonna be more expensive in the end, and 2) we make it as hard as possible to do that.".

manuelmoreale 4y ago

> Has Oracle disappeared? I'm not in that kind of world so I'm not familiar with Oracle business practices. And I agree, there's usually no middle ground and it's both annoying and bizarre.

btown 4y ago
I'll never pass up an opportunity to post Bryan Cantrill's epic Oracle Lawnmower rant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2047s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2047s

a4isms 4y ago

> There's no middle ground between "here's your free font" and "pay me/us a lot of money". This is a general problem in many businesses. Back in the early days of blogging, Joel Spolsky wrote an entire article about how there was basically no software that cost more than $1,000 and less than $75,000. This was more than a decade ago, the numbers today would be different because we care about LTV not sticker price, but the gap would still exist.[1] Of course, heuristics like this are not strictly true, but the general shape of his argument is still correct: There are three kinds of monetization models for software: Free, cheap, and dear: 1. Free as in beer. Open source, etc. 2. Cheap. $10 – $1,000, sold to a very large number of people at a low price without a salesforce. 3. Dear. LTV of $75,000 – $1,000,000, sold to a handful of rich big companies using a team of slick salespeople that do six months of intense PowerPoint just to get one goddamn sale. The Oracle model. Net result is that some products are sold to people to scratch their own itch, and some products are sold to businesses that can justify the ROI of spending a large amount of money, and between the two it is hard to find reasonable options. We see this in all the products that start at a low price and solve a simple problem, like DropBox and 1Password. Then they pivot to "The Enterprise" and you are now talking subscriptions, seat licenses, and all sorts of fancy enterprise features to justify the price. I used to see this in hotels when I travelled on business. When my clients were paying, they put me up in fairly luxurious hotels that charged me $3 for a room service coffee. When I was paying, I stayed in Motel6-type places that had free coffee in the room or at the end of the hall. I think everyone eventually offered free coffee in the room, but the last time i traveled there was a similar dynamic with WiFi: The naive would expect the cheapest accommodation to try to rent you internet access, but it was the other way around. "You have an expense account? Ha! Pay for WiFi!" Same dynamic: If you are selling to business, you have to have the sales force, customer success organization, and features business want to buy (like back-end integration with business expense and planning systems). That all costs you money, which you recoup by charging an arm and a leg. TL;DR: The moment you start selling to business, you are on a path to charging huge money for something that when sold to individuals, ought to be affordable. [1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-duckies/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-... "Camels and Rubber Duckies"

jacobr1 4y ago

kjs3 4y ago

when you need a font for a small part of your website like headers I can't get past thinking "why would you do that", especially for something you're having to pay for to use, and could break your web site if something goes wrong. That seems like the poster child for "hey, find an alternative, any alternative, that doesn't rely on a paid third party for something as trivial as how a header looks".

chihuahua 4y ago
That's true. But also, it seems absurd to me that people care enough about fonts to pay money for them. To me, there are only 5 fonts in the world: * any Serif font (Times, etc, they all look the same except for 1-pixel differences) * any Sans serif font (Arial, Helvetica, it's all the same thing) * Serif monospaced (Courier) * Sans serif monospaced (Consolas etc) * Silly unreadable fonts like Papyrus. Sure, technically, there are lots of these, and they do look different, but there's no reason to use one of these, unless you just want to make your site difficult to read.