It's still the case - we had a free license from Oracle for the first 3-4 years of our company's life - We just had an account manager call us ever 6-9 months,

It's still the case - we had a free license from Oracle for the first 3-4 years of our company's life - We just had an account manager call us ever 6-9 months, see how we were doing. Eventually we got some real customers, revenues, and negotiated a several million dollar license purchase + 18%/year maintenance.