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Comment by raesene9 | Hacker News Reader

When there are so many software options that don't involve buying from companies that use these kind of tactics, it's difficult to see how this will work out for Oracle in the long term.

Sure in the short-term they'll rinse companies for large amounts of money, but people tend to remember when that's been done to them, and aren't exactly keen to have it happen again.

Whilst I have no direct experience, a quick search indicates that IBM have similar practices. I wonder when/if that'll bleed across into Redhat.

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> Sure in the short-term they'll rinse companies for large amounts of money, but people tend to remember when that's been done to them, and aren't exactly keen to have it happen again.

The tech personnel, yes. The guys who accept corporate sales pitches, no. They only hear "Oracle" and are thinking "big name, nobody gets fired for buying that".

My first proper job involved oracle. This put me off ever using it again from a licensing, technology and ethical perspective. Just the army of clueless but certified vulture contractors explained the ecosystem. This is how you slowly burn a business but Larry’s going to be dead then so he doesn’t give a fuck.

This practice has been going on for decades. And Oracle isn't close to be the only company.

But don't worry you shouldn't feel sympathy for enterprise companies as they are often just as bad as the vendors.

Whilst I may or may not feel sympathy for the companies themselves (although not everyone who uses Oracle software is an "enterprise" by any means), I can feel sympathy for the poor IT teams who would have to deal with a surprise audit from a vendor.

Has deployments of Oracle software gone up over the long term, or are people beginning to migrate away from Oracle software?

Just from my limit experience they are very slowly migrating away as they transition from on-premise to the cloud.

Not just Oracle but pretty much anything that is standalone software.

but people tend to remember when that's been done to them, and aren't exactly keen to have it happen again.

Companies stick with Oracle and IBM for multi-decade stretches, maybe the move to cloud will be what it takes to dislodge them, but then again, in a world where Azure, AWS and GCP exist some people still choose Oracle and IBM, so there's no explaining it.

If I were a CIO I would announce that this year's bonuses will be funded from savings on Oracle licenses, then sit back and let nature take its course.

Easy, Oracle bashers keep forgetting that Oracle and IBM pay the majority of salaries on OpenJDK developers.

Then again, there are plenty of other JVMs available since the 2000's, and many customers do pay for them.

That's an interesting characterization, that people who don't agree with Oracle's approach to licensing are "Oracle Bashers"?

Do you feel that the surprise audit approach to license compliance is a good one?

Yes, it quite common in the industry to track down on piracy use, Oracle is not alone in doing surprise audits.

There are even international organizations that collaborate with national police on that regard, https://www.bsa.org/

Indeed it happens, but my question was more given your initial post, do you think it's a good way to manage licensing?

To me it provokes an adversarial relationship between software vendors and their customers and is quite likely a factor in the rise of the use of Open Source software in enterprise.

If the propietary software industry is to continue to prosper, it seems likely that annoying their customers with this approach to licensing is not a good one.

Now you could argue that this will have a knock on effect on Open source as many devs are employed by software companies, but that won't necessarily stop it happening.

The failure of pure open source, moving away from GPL and increase in dual licensing for enterprise software proves otherwise.

Ah well if we're arguing that kind of point, I'd say that in my line of work (Security tester) I'm seeing faaar more open source software than I did 10-15 years ago even in traditionally enterprise software friendly environments (e.g. banks/public sector)

The demise of proprietary unix in favour of Linux is one striking example.

another is the rise of open source products like Docker and Kubernetes. They are being heavily deployed in organizations that might once have considered more proprietary software options instead.

I mentioned failure of pure open source, the GPL dream, not open source as such.

I'm not sure I'd agree that GPL compatible licenses have failed.

To take one example Kubernetes, one of the most popular projects around at the moment is Apache 2 licensed which has been agreed with the FSF is an open source license. Other popular projects like Tensorflow also use this license

Likewise very popular projects like Visual Studio code, React Native and Angular make use of the MIT license which is also GPL compatible.

None of those licenses are copyleft, a company can pick any of those projects listed by you, sell a closed source product with their improvements, without giving even a semicolon back to upstream.

> The failure of pure open source

I see the opposite with languages and runtimes these days. If anything, I'd say there's a failure of trying to make money on the language/runtime itself instead of thinking or other parts of the company.

Languages yes, but then one starts deploying into cloud based solutions, none of them compliant with GPL ideals.

> none of them compliant with GPL ideals

That's totally fine with me and the beauty of restrictionless freedoms, you can do what you want. I license lots of my work that way, keep other parts hidden, etc. It's a healthy model instead of this rampant litigious approach often coupled with an irrational fear of theft. To be truly open sans restrictions is to take the bad with the good and recognize that what you open is not specifically where you make your money. Happily the industry continues to move towards unencumbered software especially on the language/runtime front.

That was my point about failure of pure open source, the money needs to come from somewhere and the ideals of GPL don't work across all business domains.

FACT as well (Federation Against Copyright Theft).

Personally I'm not a huge fan but if you are using copyright material then obey the law.

obey or evade or challenge the law.

BSA is a fucking joke. A couple of decades ago I -- or rather the one-man legal entity that stood firewall between me and the corporate world -- received a Letter Of Demand from BSA "requiring" a full inventory of all software in use by my "organisation". For the record it was Microsoft behind this campaign. Since I had by then already switched 100% to Linux and FOSS I had no qualms about simply ignoring there peremptory bullshit. A couple of weeks later I received a phone call from them threatening legal action and jackboots kicking down my door. I believe my response was "fuck off", with no accompanying elucidation. Never heard from them again. So much for the BSA. Rather surprised to learn they even still exist.

If Oracle wasn't involved you wouldn't need to pay as many to get involved

Oracle contributes about 90% of development (80% of the issues, and almost all new JEPs). Red Hat contributes ~5%, and IBM only 1%. So the recent Red Hat acquisition improves their position a lot, but before that Oracle and IBM paid for the majority of OpenJDK salaries the same way Bill Gates and I combined have billions of dollars.

* https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/building-jdk-11...

* https://youtu.be/wHoRBvt3U6o?t=830

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