...Oracle only ever does the latter.

What's the point? asks Craig Guarente

I'd have thought that was blindingly obvious to everyone that's ever followed how big corporations deal with their customers over licensing. The big corporation does not want it's customers to be compliant on their own, they make more money if the customer can be non-compliant in spite of herculean efforts to understand the complex web of requirements - that way there's sales and "punitive prices" to be raked in. Alternatively, the customer errs on the side of caution and buys more than they actually need - which also rakes in more money. Either way the big corp wins - so why would they do anything at all to help their customers ?

I believe the word you're looking for is "extortion".

Namely, one cannot be legitimately fined or penalised for licence non compliance unless suitable tools for verifying said compliance are openly available; and/or a set of licence conditions written in the sort of language a reasonably well educated person would understand, and not relying on specific narrow legalese interpretations of particular words (especially if they have other looser meanings to normal people).

Yeah but this would be common sense and it can't be allowed.

Generally it's the rich who get to write the laws.

They're all rich, though. Who do you think Oracle's customers are, the winos on skid row? The great majority of Oracle's business is with the Global 2000 corporations, not mom-and-pops and certainly not individuals.

Namely, one cannot be legitimately fined or penalised for licence non compliance unless suitable tools for verifying said compliance are openly available

Sure they can. It was right there on page 374 of the T&C.

Oracle are like drug dealers, you get a few hits for free, you're encouraged to use as much as you like and then they pull out the bill and if you haven't got the cash then "Big Harry" will be round to escort you to the nearest ATM and make you pay up under threat of watching your kneecaps being prized out using a rusty screwdriver!

Seriously, don't dance with the red devil, there's plenty of viable alternatives. Before you have a pop at me I was a proud Oracle DBA of 25 years, I love Oracle's products but the world has changed but when MariaDB and PostgreSQL ( pretty damned close to Oracle! ) are as good if not better for most production uses unless you need some serious grit in your IT set up, then why sign up to pay for Larry to buy another huge yacht.

Seriously, don't dance with the red devil, there's plenty of viable alternatives

Not true across the board as Oracle doesn't just sell the the Relational database - there are hundreds of applications in its portfolio too, many without alternative.

Can any one remind me why, in $DIETY's name, would I ever chose to use Oracle products?

You might under these circumstances:

* if you've died in a tragic blimp accident over the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day;

* have ever volunteered for a lobotomy after several too many beers;

* be a politician and will therefore have had your common sense surgically removed;

* be called Larry.

Otherwise, no.

I know it's a rhetorical question, but it has a real answer. Usually it's laziness; you find that Oracle has bought up most of the companies that made software that serves some niche aspect of your business process. Maybe it's something specific to your vertical or maybe it's just something that fits especially well into an existing process. Maybe you were already using it when Oracle bought the supplier, which is Oracle's preferred way of adding to their portfolio as they don't really have much of an engineering culture. Because your company is probably like most large corporations, it's forbidden you the IT director to hire people because headcount/salary comes out of a different (poisoned) budget bucket from capex and "other opex" like software licenses, contractors, and services. And capex is off-limits too. So while you'd like to hire a few engineers to build the thing you really need, which you would then own free and clear forever, you can't. So you decide to license Oracle's software.

But Oracle won't just sell you one license for the one thing you need. Some combination of "technical requirements" (real or otherwise), bundling, and discounting will be used to force you to take a large collection of Oracle products whether you need them or not. If you won't buy them, you either won't be sold the software you do want or you'll get it only at a ruinous price -- often a price much higher than the price of the entire package. This is one of Oracle's basic sales strategies.

The intent is that since you're paying for this stuff anyway you'll conclude that it's silly to pay for other stuff that does more or less the same things. They'll also do this in such a way that you're signed up for many years with no way to get out of the deal if, say, the person who negotiated this gets fired for costing the company billions of dollars on useless toxic Oracle products. Your beancounters won't sign off on the more-expensive point solution deal, because the multi-year subscription package both costs less in total and doesn't have to be capitalised. So now you're an Oracle shop. One license audit, coming right up!

Oracle understands their customers very, very well. It takes advantage of the shortsighted defects in corporate structure, budgeting, and risk management very effectively. The hallmark of the devil is that he knows your weaknesses, and goes right after them.

[Larry Ellison] BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

" third-party tools that have been verified by Oracle do not help users in terms of license compliance "

It's not just Oracle. It's widespread in principle. I was involved a while back in development of a tax accounting application. We found that strict adherence to the HMRC specifications for tax accounting software did not guarantee compliance as far as they were concerned. Nor do HMRC assure that the (obligatory) independently developed tax calculation applications comply with their requirements. However any errors are always by default the responsibility of the taxed party.

It's called 'being in a position of power' that allows you to show with impunity how corrupt you've always been.