Another example of Oracle apparently ignoring all business ethics and charging a customer €300,000.- for an environment where common sense leads to a more reasonable license fee of €4,000.-
I always wonder why customers (even very large and powerful ones) accept this behaviour without a fight and pay the fines or avoid it by buying into Oracle’s stack – while they would prefer a technical superior solution from another vendor. I don’t mind competition – it’s healthy for everyone – but I’ve seen too many examples where customers knowingly go for the mediocre solution because they are scared of the bullying by their database vendor if they go for the best one.
But this time it seems one (Dutch!) customer actually does not accept being pushed around and starts a legal battle with Oracle on insane licensing rules.
Copy/paste from the Linkedin article of Licenseconsulting:
“Some time ago we created a review report for a rather new and small Oracle client, who purchased Oracle software licenses in order to run them on a VMware platform. According to the client the (additional) cost of running Oracle on vCenter would be €4000.-. Oracle’s legal counsel confirmed in writing that the cost would be almost €300.000.- using VMware vCenter, and just a fraction of that cost if the client would use OracleVM instead.”
A must read if you are concerned with Oracle on VMware license issues.
