Oracle customers fear its reaction if they use Amazon's or Microsoft's cloud

The core thesis is that Oracle customers fear license audits if they use a non-Oracle cloud platform. On the face of it, that fear seems reasonable enough, since this is the kind of anti-competitive behaviour that a company could reasonably be capable of.

However:

* That "fear" is based on a report from a single survey, and the survey results are locked behind a register-to-read e-book.

* That survey was sponsored by a company in the business of migrating customers to Oracle cloud services (on arbitrary clouds), and the e-book -- presumably with marketing intent -- describes how to manage licensing issues. This firm has unclean hands, since it financially benefits from assuaging customers' licensing fears.

Furthermore, the article punts on the question of whether this fear is reasonable. It provides a confirmatory opinion only from a CEO of a company providing audit defense services, who obviously has a very direct, financial incentive in sparking fears to assuage for money. Furthermore, despite this CEO having previously worked for Oracle, he is not quoted as asserting that Oracle actually engaged in audits for anticompetitive purposes -- at most he speculates that Oracle's sales team would raise licensing FUD.

Finally, despite this story being of no urgency, it appears the journalist has not waited to give Oracle a reasonable time to respond. The article states that "Oracle did not immediately respond to a request for comment," yet evidently the inciting e-book was only publicly released this morning (https://twitter.com/AppsAssociates/status/111053306358133145...).

I'm disappointed. In my book this is borderline unethical journalism, since the article insinuates practices that would be sensational if proven, without evidence that there's any substance behind the story.