17 ms·

'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

134 points by interesse 3y ago

soperj 3y ago
Oracle's favourite phrase seems to be "You're out of compliance", and their only solution is for you to pay more.
- aaronharnly 3y ago
  And if they can’t say that (ie when it’s not true), they will intimate that you might be out of compliance, and hope you’re worried enough to just pay more anyway.
  - itronitron 3y ago
    But have they got a 27B-6?
  - soperj 3y ago
    They seem to say it regardless of whether it's true or not.
- used2workthere 3y ago
  Used to work there due to acquihire (throwaway acct since regular can out me). Engineers were walked through how to interact with clients; don’t say this or that because of laws and treaties. But also to listen for customer language that suggests a customer is cheating Oracle; let Oracle know and they will send the lawyers. It was a very paranoia driven environment.
  - Zigurd 3y ago
    Many many years ago I was working on making a phone OS (no not that one, this was for VoIP handsets, no not Cisco's) where we built an app suite on a Java VM. We wanted to use a Sun VM, I forget the acronym, that was bigger than J2ME but smaller than SE for which Sun, as far as we could tell, had no actual customers. You'd think they would be happy to have customer interest, but we got a total horseshit runaround on pricing. We could not base a product on something for which we had no idea of pricing. We used an open source Java which turned out to be adequate, but only just - no JIT, for example.
    - used2workthere 3y ago
      I only stayed long enough to migrate the service to Oracle infrastructure. Looks like they still offer it but when I left work was underway to roadmap decoupling what was then a OOP heavy Java monolith. I want to say primarily to move the UI/UX to Oracles internal standards and tech stack for such, but this was 2015; uuuuh I forget man. My anecdote was based on interactions with sales, product, and senior engineering professionals. Internal culture seemed very forward thinking; work from home/anywhere Oracle had a business presence. Solid benefits, new parent leave, yoga/that kind of thing stipends. Though that may have been due to contractual obligation of the aquihire, and applied to my team only at that time. :shrug: The “problems” I saw were very much “first world problems”
BenoitP 3y ago
> Earlier last year, it made changes to the Oracle Java SE subscription model, basing it on a per-employee metric many said would increase costs for users. Would running Java under Corretto 21 change this?
- kevinherron 3y ago
  Yes, all of this Oracle Java licensing drama only applies if you're using the Oracle JDK. The vast majority of people can just use a JDK from any of the other vendors and tell Oracle to pound sand. Even if you do need paid support, you should pay Azul instead of Oracle, just out of principle.
  - matrix87 3y ago
    > Even if you do need paid support By paid support, you mean free steak dinners for middle management? After dealing with Azul people, give me Oracle. Instead of seeing Azul people shuffling a bunch of charts around and making up shit on the fly to make it sound like their garbage product performs better than OpenJDK (it didn't for us. we benchmarked it. but shame on us, because I guess the steak dinners kept rolling in). Look at this website, do you think it belongs to a legitimate company? https://www.azul.com/ https://www.azul.com/
    - kevinherron 3y ago
      We have a contract with Azul that allows us to report bugs with the expectation they are fixed. We can and do use this ability.
  - kragen 3y ago
    also they can use the openjdk from oracle
    - layer8 3y ago
      Oracle doesn’t provide LTS updates. Each Oracle OpenJDK version is only supported for six months and doesn’t receive any further updates afterwards.
krylon 3y ago
"a specialist advisory company helping clients deal with Oracle licenses" I would (naively, I know) imagine that if you need to hire a third party to help you sort out your licenses with a vendor, you would do whatever it takes to get rid of that vendor. It's almost as if Oracle wants their customers to ditch them the first chance they get.
- kragen 3y ago
  oracle products aren't really products you can ditch in most cases. generally what it takes to get rid of them is to go out of business and be replaced by a business that isn't an oracle customer. i had a very interesting thread about that dynamic on here with pamar three weeks ago, which will be very interesting reading for anyone who is wondering why people don't ditch oracle https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39397513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39397513
  - pantulis 3y ago
    Thanks for pointing that thread out!
    - kragen 3y ago
      i'm glad you're enjoying it! i found it very educational
    - le-mark 3y ago
      I think the missing piece from that exchange is the reality that a lot of surviving, legacy, mission critical applications is that they are generally internal to large companies and have grown over decades to encapsulate business processes for entire industries. Consider an application that has been under active development for 30-40 years by 10-100 developers. The cost to rewrite is staggering, and the risk of failure is huge.
      - kragen 3y ago
        i agree with that point and i would add a link to your comment if i could still add to that thread
mayoff 3y ago
A few years ago, my then-employer (a smallish company, < 150 employees) had to deal with an Oracle compliance audit. I was shocked at the time to learn that there are companies (like Palisade Compliance mentioned in this article) that specialize in Oracle license compliance. We made it through just fine (in fact I believe we managed to get a small refund!), but having been through that (though not in any way directly involved), my take is that no one should ever do business with Oracle if they can possibly avoid it.
- politelemon 3y ago
  > that specialize in Oracle license compliance Oh but it gets better. Many of them are ex oracle employees. It's a huge racket that exists for itself.
  - winrid 3y ago
    the revolving door of oracle consultants? :)
  - walrus01 3y ago
    I have mentally trained myself that every time I read the word "Oracle", I replace it with "Larry Ellison needs a bigger yacht". Thus far, this has worked great for me in staying away from paying that organization even one dollar.
    - estebank 3y ago
      Oracle is an acronym: One rich asshole called Larry Ellison.
    - blackhawkC17 3y ago
      He actually sold his bigger yacht (The Rising Sun) to David Geffen and settled for a smaller one (Musashi), lol
  - CobrastanJorji 3y ago
    These kinds of things are everywhere. To pick one at random, if you want to list a product on amazon.com, there's no shortage of consulting companies that will figure out how to make it happen. And then you can get a consultant for your amazon advertising (the ads that go on amazon.com to advertise other products also on amazon.com) and a consultant to help make your company the default choice when a customer clicks the buy button in the "buy box," and a few more. You can easily spend hundreds of thousands on these consultants. Honestly, the Amazon hustle is a crazy and fascinating little ecosystem in a bunch of ways.
andrewstuart 3y ago
Imagine a business in which you can treat your customers so badly that you can and do pull an audit on them.
Keyframe 3y ago
I know, I know, but hear me (far) out.. didn't Snowflake start out from ex Oracle people?
pmontra 3y ago
> "We decided that we had a minimal amount [of Java]. We came up with a non-Oracle based architecture for development and we implemented a policy that pointed towards the other development platform and we evaluated methods to discourage or prevent the download of Java software,"
zaphar 3y ago
Look, if you are already in business with Oracle then you have my condolences. But if you aren't in business with them then there is absolutely no world where you should ever under any circumstances consider getting into business with them. Nothing their database does can't be done with a different database. Even paying for a proprietary database can be done with a different party than Oracle. Do not, I repeat, do not do business with Oracle under any circumstances. If you are already an Oracle customer and you have the opportunity to drop them from your stack. Do not hesitate, Do not pause, Immediately take that opportunity. There is no downside only upside in not doing business with Oracle.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- codeslave13 3y ago
  Just dont go SAP about as bad as oracle haveing worked in both shops.
  - zaphar 3y ago
    I have no experience with SAP. But I've heard that you could just substitute SAP for Oracle in the above and it would be just as true.
    - 7thaccount 3y ago
      My father worked on a multi year project to replace their darling (but very old mainframe system) with SAP. Apparently it's just awful and basically everything required a custom and tons of SAP consultants. By the time you're done, you had to reimplement the entire system on top of SAP with a ton of workarounds. That was his experience anyway.
- whiterknight 3y ago
  How is there such a big disconnect between HN opinion on Oracle and business use? Is it maybe the least bad of all the bad options? Does it cover some edge cases which the obvious FOSS solutions don’t?
duxup 3y ago
Let's say you're going through an Oracle audit. Short of imagining some long ongoing legal action, is there really any incentive for Oracle to be truthful about anything? It seems like this entire auditing system is just a wildcard as far as time / money sunk into the auditing process and Oracle can deploy it at will...
bagels 3y ago
Why would anyone have chosen Oracle in the last... 10 years (let alone even further back)? It's expensive, and many things I read from customers hints at deep regret.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 3y ago
  20 years ago for me. I learned about the sleazy business tactics of Oracle when I started to read Slashdot at the university.
- layer8 3y ago
  Having to use a software product that requires Oracle. This is the case in some industries.
hudsonjr 3y ago
The "new contract" vs old sounds like internal problems where I work. We'll have a contract signed and everything is OK for a couple years. Then someone goes ham on inventing an approval matrix and other policy/rules to keep the offshored workers from making mistakes, and we have problems. Vendors getting paid late because of policy. Even if we provide the contract we'll get arguments that it can't be so because it says something different in their database. It's that way in their DB, because if unknown, they default to whatever is best for our company.
neilv 3y ago
How frequent are these Oracle audits? My first thought was that you'd want to have ongoing diligence to be compliant. (Just like you don't want to have a delinquent debt with a loan shark who relishes penalties.) But my second thought was that, if the audits are infrequent, some companies might intentionally violate the licenses. Or not want to know nor have a paper trail if there are inadvertent violations. (Both companies and individuals tend to like to kick problems down the road. Due to short-term thinking by businesses, and individuals who might be gone before chickens come home to roost.)
- LanceH 3y ago
  > How frequent are these Oracle audits? Frequently kicked off by aggrieved ex-employees.
juliangmp 3y ago
Any time I read anything about oracle I wonder why anyone in their right mind would ever chose to do business with them
Takennickname 3y ago
Got an email from oracle recently that said (paraphrased): "We saw downloads for virtual box from your IP address but no licenses for your organization. Please let us know when is a suitable time to meet to explain the benefits of being licensed correctly."
- everfrustrated 3y ago
  Docker also does this too for their Desktop product. If any dev downloads and installs it within your org expect an email from them to check up on your licensing.
  - afandian 3y ago
    Maybe this is what it takes to put paid to return-to-office?
    - rokkitmensch 3y ago
      Except for the common VPN setup. Now, perhaps this is what it takes to put paid to IPV4...
- exhilaration 3y ago
  Man that's terrifying. Every business with software engineers needs make sure that the the Oracle, MySQL, Java.com, and Virtual Box domains are blocked on their network.
- walrus01 3y ago
  They have actually been scraping ARIN IP space registration data for this and sending threats to people who hold IP space that has absolutely nothing to do with the actual business end user with a DIA circuit and static /30 that downloaded virtualbox. It's a ridiculous abuse of ARIN WHOIS data. From the point of view of ISPs receiving such threats it is the most preposterous thing ever.
- RobotToaster 3y ago
  Out of interest, what happens with this sort of thing if you direct them to the reply given in arkell v pressdram?
neilv 3y ago
> A user of Oracle since the 1980s, We all know about Resume-Driven Development and hopping to another company every 18 months, incidentally avoiding the consequences. But a very different model is when people are entrenched in a shop where not only is there big legacy investment/lock-in that would be hard/prohibitive for the company to shed, but also the personnel's familiarity with the legacy setup gives job security. So there are multiple reasons to pay the Oracle Tax (and/or Microsoft Tax) and not disrupt the status quo.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- seniorThrowaway 3y ago
  For Oracle DB there are a number of viable, well built and active open source alternatives like Postgres, is there any real alternative to Active Directory? I've long considered AD to be microsoft's true killer app, especially for very large enterprises.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    Depends if you're masochist enough to run Samba. It can deal with the lower stack side pretty well, but the administration UI options available all pale in comparison to native Microsoft. In any case many are shifting towards not running AD any more and instead use JAMF and similar solutions. Less attack risk (because let's face it, it's really really easy to shoot yourself into the foot with AD), and more buzzwords for the buzzword-happy C suite.
  - ClueslessTech99 3y ago
    FreeIPA or OpenLDAP?
  - tatersolid 3y ago
    > is there any real alternative to Active Directory? Yes, it’s called Microsoft Entra ID…
bediger4000 3y ago
I worked at a phone company circa 2010 that basically had an office of Oracle compliance. They had lots of ongoing disputed. I sat in a cubicle across from the guy who worked to get projects off Weblogic Server after Oracle acquired BEA. The doctrine was that WLS cost more and used 4X the CPU and memory that alternatives did, in addition to avoiding Oracle audits.
lowercased 3y ago
Not Oracle related, but ... in the late 90s, I was at a company that was doing web stuff - number of cgi/perl projects, but they'd started doing ASP as well in 98. Had a couple clients really scale up - one client had 80 servers load balanced, all running Windows NT. A friendly MS rep stopped by because the client had been getting so much press for their ecommerce work (which we were doing) and went... "oh wow, you have 150 servers that each should be licensed at $8k/server... let's talk!". The very next day the CEO came to a big dev meeting and started ranting that we needed to optimize the hell out of the sites to get the server count down ASAP. And... we also became an 'official' MS partner, which seemed to put the kibosh (officially or otherwise) on more expansive work in to Java. We were doing a bit of Java, but I think we'd have expanded more in that direction without the MS pressure. Yes, they fed us more work... but it meant... we were doing more hands on work (fixing loads of bugs in their commerce server) while they just collected license revenue. Great business if you can get it, I guess... FWIW, I have no doubt that story was not isolated at the start of the web boom. I just happened to see inside a company when it was happening. It's also why I tend to take a FOSS-first attitude to tech.
- cyberax 3y ago
  Windows NT (just like Oracle) simply had a setting in the control panel for the number of connections allowed. You were supposed to buy licenses for all of them, but in practice nobody seriously followed that. Until they got audited by the BSA (Business Software Alliance). To be fair, though, Microsoft typically was willing to work with companies and negotiate volume discounts. They were not interested in immediate shakedowns (like Oracle), but preferred building long-term relationships. I guess this is why Microsoft is respected, while Oracle is despised.
dsign 3y ago
At my job, we have been merrily replacing Oracle products by open-source ones. You know, the common thing any employee feels morally obligated to do as soon as they realize there is an Oracle product in the stack. But the interesting bit is how those products got there: in some companies, you call it "modern stack" if the tech is less than fifteen years old. Sometimes they will replace a part of it and instead of jumping all the way to the present, they go like "Well, it's 2024 now. So, we need to migrate our stack from 2009 to 2010 this year. What version of Jboss came out in 2010? We need to update to that one. PostgreSQL? No, PostgreSQL 8 doesn't support deferrable unique constraints, which we need. We need to keep paying for OracleDB until June."
nlh 3y ago
Having gone through an IRS audit (spoiler alert: I do not recommend.), I can't imagine anyone willingly signing any sort of contract with a private company that allows them to treat you the same way.
- cyberax 3y ago
  Technically, if you buy anything in volume from Microsoft, they have the right to audit you: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/learn-more/compliance-verification-faq https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/learn-more/complia...
znpy 3y ago
As the old saying goes: oracle has no customers, only hostages.

134 points by interesse 3y ago

soperj 3y ago

Oracle's favourite phrase seems to be "You're out of compliance", and their only solution is for you to pay more.

aaronharnly 3y ago
And if they can’t say that (ie when it’s not true), they will intimate that you might be out of compliance, and hope you’re worried enough to just pay more anyway.
- itronitron 3y ago
  But have they got a 27B-6?
- soperj 3y ago
  They seem to say it regardless of whether it's true or not.
used2workthere 3y ago
Used to work there due to acquihire (throwaway acct since regular can out me). Engineers were walked through how to interact with clients; don’t say this or that because of laws and treaties. But also to listen for customer language that suggests a customer is cheating Oracle; let Oracle know and they will send the lawyers. It was a very paranoia driven environment.
- Zigurd 3y ago
  Many many years ago I was working on making a phone OS (no not that one, this was for VoIP handsets, no not Cisco's) where we built an app suite on a Java VM. We wanted to use a Sun VM, I forget the acronym, that was bigger than J2ME but smaller than SE for which Sun, as far as we could tell, had no actual customers. You'd think they would be happy to have customer interest, but we got a total horseshit runaround on pricing. We could not base a product on something for which we had no idea of pricing. We used an open source Java which turned out to be adequate, but only just - no JIT, for example.
  - used2workthere 3y ago
    I only stayed long enough to migrate the service to Oracle infrastructure. Looks like they still offer it but when I left work was underway to roadmap decoupling what was then a OOP heavy Java monolith. I want to say primarily to move the UI/UX to Oracles internal standards and tech stack for such, but this was 2015; uuuuh I forget man. My anecdote was based on interactions with sales, product, and senior engineering professionals. Internal culture seemed very forward thinking; work from home/anywhere Oracle had a business presence. Solid benefits, new parent leave, yoga/that kind of thing stipends. Though that may have been due to contractual obligation of the aquihire, and applied to my team only at that time. :shrug: The “problems” I saw were very much “first world problems”

BenoitP 3y ago

> Earlier last year, it made changes to the Oracle Java SE subscription model, basing it on a per-employee metric many said would increase costs for users. Would running Java under Corretto 21 change this?

kevinherron 3y ago
Yes, all of this Oracle Java licensing drama only applies if you're using the Oracle JDK. The vast majority of people can just use a JDK from any of the other vendors and tell Oracle to pound sand. Even if you do need paid support, you should pay Azul instead of Oracle, just out of principle.
- matrix87 3y ago
  > Even if you do need paid support By paid support, you mean free steak dinners for middle management? After dealing with Azul people, give me Oracle. Instead of seeing Azul people shuffling a bunch of charts around and making up shit on the fly to make it sound like their garbage product performs better than OpenJDK (it didn't for us. we benchmarked it. but shame on us, because I guess the steak dinners kept rolling in). Look at this website, do you think it belongs to a legitimate company? https://www.azul.com/ https://www.azul.com/
  - kevinherron 3y ago
    We have a contract with Azul that allows us to report bugs with the expectation they are fixed. We can and do use this ability.
- kragen 3y ago
  also they can use the openjdk from oracle
  - layer8 3y ago
    Oracle doesn’t provide LTS updates. Each Oracle OpenJDK version is only supported for six months and doesn’t receive any further updates afterwards.

krylon 3y ago

"a specialist advisory company helping clients deal with Oracle licenses" I would (naively, I know) imagine that if you need to hire a third party to help you sort out your licenses with a vendor, you would do whatever it takes to get rid of that vendor. It's almost as if Oracle wants their customers to ditch them the first chance they get.

kragen 3y ago
oracle products aren't really products you can ditch in most cases. generally what it takes to get rid of them is to go out of business and be replaced by a business that isn't an oracle customer. i had a very interesting thread about that dynamic on here with pamar three weeks ago, which will be very interesting reading for anyone who is wondering why people don't ditch oracle https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39397513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39397513
- pantulis 3y ago
  Thanks for pointing that thread out!
  - kragen 3y ago
    i'm glad you're enjoying it! i found it very educational
  - le-mark 3y ago
    I think the missing piece from that exchange is the reality that a lot of surviving, legacy, mission critical applications is that they are generally internal to large companies and have grown over decades to encapsulate business processes for entire industries. Consider an application that has been under active development for 30-40 years by 10-100 developers. The cost to rewrite is staggering, and the risk of failure is huge.
    - kragen 3y ago
      i agree with that point and i would add a link to your comment if i could still add to that thread

mayoff 3y ago

A few years ago, my then-employer (a smallish company, < 150 employees) had to deal with an Oracle compliance audit. I was shocked at the time to learn that there are companies (like Palisade Compliance mentioned in this article) that specialize in Oracle license compliance. We made it through just fine (in fact I believe we managed to get a small refund!), but having been through that (though not in any way directly involved), my take is that no one should ever do business with Oracle if they can possibly avoid it.

politelemon 3y ago
> that specialize in Oracle license compliance Oh but it gets better. Many of them are ex oracle employees. It's a huge racket that exists for itself.
- winrid 3y ago
  the revolving door of oracle consultants? :)
- walrus01 3y ago
  I have mentally trained myself that every time I read the word "Oracle", I replace it with "Larry Ellison needs a bigger yacht". Thus far, this has worked great for me in staying away from paying that organization even one dollar.
  - estebank 3y ago
    Oracle is an acronym: One rich asshole called Larry Ellison.
  - blackhawkC17 3y ago
    He actually sold his bigger yacht (The Rising Sun) to David Geffen and settled for a smaller one (Musashi), lol
- CobrastanJorji 3y ago
  These kinds of things are everywhere. To pick one at random, if you want to list a product on amazon.com, there's no shortage of consulting companies that will figure out how to make it happen. And then you can get a consultant for your amazon advertising (the ads that go on amazon.com to advertise other products also on amazon.com) and a consultant to help make your company the default choice when a customer clicks the buy button in the "buy box," and a few more. You can easily spend hundreds of thousands on these consultants. Honestly, the Amazon hustle is a crazy and fascinating little ecosystem in a bunch of ways.

andrewstuart 3y ago

Imagine a business in which you can treat your customers so badly that you can and do pull an audit on them.

Keyframe 3y ago

I know, I know, but hear me (far) out.. didn't Snowflake start out from ex Oracle people?

pmontra 3y ago

> "We decided that we had a minimal amount [of Java]. We came up with a non-Oracle based architecture for development and we implemented a policy that pointed towards the other development platform and we evaluated methods to discourage or prevent the download of Java software,"

zaphar 3y ago

Look, if you are already in business with Oracle then you have my condolences. But if you aren't in business with them then there is absolutely no world where you should ever under any circumstances consider getting into business with them. Nothing their database does can't be done with a different database. Even paying for a proprietary database can be done with a different party than Oracle. Do not, I repeat, do not do business with Oracle under any circumstances. If you are already an Oracle customer and you have the opportunity to drop them from your stack. Do not hesitate, Do not pause, Immediately take that opportunity. There is no downside only upside in not doing business with Oracle.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
codeslave13 3y ago
Just dont go SAP about as bad as oracle haveing worked in both shops.
- zaphar 3y ago
  I have no experience with SAP. But I've heard that you could just substitute SAP for Oracle in the above and it would be just as true.
  - 7thaccount 3y ago
    My father worked on a multi year project to replace their darling (but very old mainframe system) with SAP. Apparently it's just awful and basically everything required a custom and tons of SAP consultants. By the time you're done, you had to reimplement the entire system on top of SAP with a ton of workarounds. That was his experience anyway.
whiterknight 3y ago
How is there such a big disconnect between HN opinion on Oracle and business use? Is it maybe the least bad of all the bad options? Does it cover some edge cases which the obvious FOSS solutions don’t?

duxup 3y ago

Let's say you're going through an Oracle audit. Short of imagining some long ongoing legal action, is there really any incentive for Oracle to be truthful about anything? It seems like this entire auditing system is just a wildcard as far as time / money sunk into the auditing process and Oracle can deploy it at will...

bagels 3y ago

Why would anyone have chosen Oracle in the last... 10 years (let alone even further back)? It's expensive, and many things I read from customers hints at deep regret.

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 3y ago
20 years ago for me. I learned about the sleazy business tactics of Oracle when I started to read Slashdot at the university.
layer8 3y ago
Having to use a software product that requires Oracle. This is the case in some industries.

hudsonjr 3y ago

The "new contract" vs old sounds like internal problems where I work. We'll have a contract signed and everything is OK for a couple years. Then someone goes ham on inventing an approval matrix and other policy/rules to keep the offshored workers from making mistakes, and we have problems. Vendors getting paid late because of policy. Even if we provide the contract we'll get arguments that it can't be so because it says something different in their database. It's that way in their DB, because if unknown, they default to whatever is best for our company.

neilv 3y ago

How frequent are these Oracle audits? My first thought was that you'd want to have ongoing diligence to be compliant. (Just like you don't want to have a delinquent debt with a loan shark who relishes penalties.) But my second thought was that, if the audits are infrequent, some companies might intentionally violate the licenses. Or not want to know nor have a paper trail if there are inadvertent violations. (Both companies and individuals tend to like to kick problems down the road. Due to short-term thinking by businesses, and individuals who might be gone before chickens come home to roost.)

LanceH 3y ago
> How frequent are these Oracle audits? Frequently kicked off by aggrieved ex-employees.

juliangmp 3y ago

Any time I read anything about oracle I wonder why anyone in their right mind would ever chose to do business with them

Takennickname 3y ago

Got an email from oracle recently that said (paraphrased): "We saw downloads for virtual box from your IP address but no licenses for your organization. Please let us know when is a suitable time to meet to explain the benefits of being licensed correctly."

everfrustrated 3y ago
Docker also does this too for their Desktop product. If any dev downloads and installs it within your org expect an email from them to check up on your licensing.
- afandian 3y ago
  Maybe this is what it takes to put paid to return-to-office?
  - rokkitmensch 3y ago
    Except for the common VPN setup. Now, perhaps this is what it takes to put paid to IPV4...
exhilaration 3y ago
Man that's terrifying. Every business with software engineers needs make sure that the the Oracle, MySQL, Java.com, and Virtual Box domains are blocked on their network.
walrus01 3y ago
They have actually been scraping ARIN IP space registration data for this and sending threats to people who hold IP space that has absolutely nothing to do with the actual business end user with a DIA circuit and static /30 that downloaded virtualbox. It's a ridiculous abuse of ARIN WHOIS data. From the point of view of ISPs receiving such threats it is the most preposterous thing ever.
RobotToaster 3y ago
Out of interest, what happens with this sort of thing if you direct them to the reply given in arkell v pressdram?

neilv 3y ago

> A user of Oracle since the 1980s, We all know about Resume-Driven Development and hopping to another company every 18 months, incidentally avoiding the consequences. But a very different model is when people are entrenched in a shop where not only is there big legacy investment/lock-in that would be hard/prohibitive for the company to shed, but also the personnel's familiarity with the legacy setup gives job security. So there are multiple reasons to pay the Oracle Tax (and/or Microsoft Tax) and not disrupt the status quo.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
seniorThrowaway 3y ago
For Oracle DB there are a number of viable, well built and active open source alternatives like Postgres, is there any real alternative to Active Directory? I've long considered AD to be microsoft's true killer app, especially for very large enterprises.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  Depends if you're masochist enough to run Samba. It can deal with the lower stack side pretty well, but the administration UI options available all pale in comparison to native Microsoft. In any case many are shifting towards not running AD any more and instead use JAMF and similar solutions. Less attack risk (because let's face it, it's really really easy to shoot yourself into the foot with AD), and more buzzwords for the buzzword-happy C suite.
- ClueslessTech99 3y ago
  FreeIPA or OpenLDAP?
- tatersolid 3y ago
  > is there any real alternative to Active Directory? Yes, it’s called Microsoft Entra ID…

bediger4000 3y ago

I worked at a phone company circa 2010 that basically had an office of Oracle compliance. They had lots of ongoing disputed. I sat in a cubicle across from the guy who worked to get projects off Weblogic Server after Oracle acquired BEA. The doctrine was that WLS cost more and used 4X the CPU and memory that alternatives did, in addition to avoiding Oracle audits.

lowercased 3y ago

Not Oracle related, but ... in the late 90s, I was at a company that was doing web stuff - number of cgi/perl projects, but they'd started doing ASP as well in 98. Had a couple clients really scale up - one client had 80 servers load balanced, all running Windows NT. A friendly MS rep stopped by because the client had been getting so much press for their ecommerce work (which we were doing) and went... "oh wow, you have 150 servers that each should be licensed at $8k/server... let's talk!". The very next day the CEO came to a big dev meeting and started ranting that we needed to optimize the hell out of the sites to get the server count down ASAP. And... we also became an 'official' MS partner, which seemed to put the kibosh (officially or otherwise) on more expansive work in to Java. We were doing a bit of Java, but I think we'd have expanded more in that direction without the MS pressure. Yes, they fed us more work... but it meant... we were doing more hands on work (fixing loads of bugs in their commerce server) while they just collected license revenue. Great business if you can get it, I guess... FWIW, I have no doubt that story was not isolated at the start of the web boom. I just happened to see inside a company when it was happening. It's also why I tend to take a FOSS-first attitude to tech.

cyberax 3y ago
Windows NT (just like Oracle) simply had a setting in the control panel for the number of connections allowed. You were supposed to buy licenses for all of them, but in practice nobody seriously followed that. Until they got audited by the BSA (Business Software Alliance). To be fair, though, Microsoft typically was willing to work with companies and negotiate volume discounts. They were not interested in immediate shakedowns (like Oracle), but preferred building long-term relationships. I guess this is why Microsoft is respected, while Oracle is despised.

dsign 3y ago

At my job, we have been merrily replacing Oracle products by open-source ones. You know, the common thing any employee feels morally obligated to do as soon as they realize there is an Oracle product in the stack. But the interesting bit is how those products got there: in some companies, you call it "modern stack" if the tech is less than fifteen years old. Sometimes they will replace a part of it and instead of jumping all the way to the present, they go like "Well, it's 2024 now. So, we need to migrate our stack from 2009 to 2010 this year. What version of Jboss came out in 2010? We need to update to that one. PostgreSQL? No, PostgreSQL 8 doesn't support deferrable unique constraints, which we need. We need to keep paying for OracleDB until June."

nlh 3y ago

Having gone through an IRS audit (spoiler alert: I do not recommend.), I can't imagine anyone willingly signing any sort of contract with a private company that allows them to treat you the same way.

cyberax 3y ago
Technically, if you buy anything in volume from Microsoft, they have the right to audit you: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/learn-more/compliance-verification-faq https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/learn-more/complia...

znpy 3y ago

As the old saying goes: oracle has no customers, only hostages.