If a company is using licenses it hasn't paid for, and so isn't entitled to, why is the vendor the bad guy for catching them out?
Maybe I'm the odd one out here as an individual in paying for the movies I watch, and the music I listen to; but I would expect a business to pay for the software it's using, irrespective of your stance on "big media".
I make a serious point of doing what I can to steer my employers away from any outfit that believes adversarial relations with their own customers are ideal.
Screw that; I want to compete with my real competitors, not waste money on lawyers fighting my own supply chain.
So yeah, I want to see if they go full-Larry Ellison here, but I likely longer recommend anything Redhat and will look at moving away from the things we do use.
Sad, really.
I knew the company by reputation: that they had a habbit of suing customers for patent violations. The commute would have been easier. Bit longer (train) than the job I took (driving 15 miles opposite traffic).
The job I took pays $20k less a year, but is worth it when factoring in less unpaid overtime, shorter commute amd reduced stress. My wife wanted me to take the higher paying job, but after explaining that, per hour, I'd be making less and only home for 1 waking hour during the week, she agreed. Also have better health insurance at the lower paying job.
It would be like the police turning up to your house and demanding you have a receipt for every item in your house. Any item you do not have a receipt for is assumed to be stolen and you have to pay for it. The burden of proof is placed on you to prove you did not steal it. Normally the burden of proof is on the police to prove you have stolen, suddenly it has been turned upside down.
Can you prove you have purchased every copy of every software instance on every computer in your organization? Maybe you can because you have excellent record keeping but most are not so efficient. Maybe the invoice cannot be found because it was not forwarded to the right person. Or a paper invoice has been filed incorrectly and nobody can find it. You KNOW you paid for it but cannot prove it. Sorry, but you are guilty and have to pay $10,000 for that server license again. Try explaining that to your boss.
So, under what legal authority can Oracle or Microsoft or Red Hat or IBM _force_ you to submit to an audit?
(Of course, if you're smart you don't. I worked for a place that had a sales pitch from Oracle, wanted to use their product, but cut off all contact once our lawyers got a look at the contract they were proposing)
If you then are so disorganized at your job that you empty the trash, throw out the receipts, then sit dumbfounded as your contractual obligations come to roost, maybe that conversation with your boss should probably be uncomfortable.
It's "you enabled x feature on your database times y users oh and use this handy CPU core count chart to calculate how many cores you're using. Oh and you're running your database in a virtual machine with a clustered hypervisor so you owe us for every cpu core in your cluster".
Then they tell you how much they owe you but "it will all go away if you migrate some of your stuff over to our 'cloud'" and the process starts all over again in 2 years, or less.
Fuck Oracle.
A Microsoft shop needs licenses for each laptop/desktop running windows, but in an office using Microsoft Server to operate its LAN and the requisite services - DNS, DHCP, SMB file sharing, VPN, email, etc - basically any device that touches the Windows Server machine needs a Client Access Licences (CAL), which is available in user-based and device-based flavors.
Let's say the company operates a website and has developers. The development/QA environment requires an (expensive) MSDN account (or whatever it's called now) per-developer. In production, unlimited anonymous/unauthenticated users are allowed to hit IIS (web server). Authenticated access by employees to IIS needs a user CAL, authenticated customer access requires an External Connector (EC) license. But don't worry, the backing MS SQL Server database for the website also needs to be licensed, with per-cpu-core-per-machine licensing available. Except everything's a VM theses day, so the servers sit on top of a VM host (Microsoft Hyper-V), so there's some additional licensing intricacy there to deal with.
On top of that, there's the Services Provider License Agreement (SPLA) licensing model available for ISVs, but OEM licenses cannot coexist wth SPLA licensing on the same system (VMs + host).
Just to make it more fun, different Microsoft reps will have different answers on how some of the more subtle intricacies even apply!
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/product-licensing/...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/licensing-programs...
They’re pretty easy because you only have to do it once a year. It drives me nuts when a vendor wants me to manage individual licenses as people are coming on board. I end up having to keep extras on hand. At least let me reconcile quarterly or something. It’s even worse when each seat has its own key.
Microsoft makes the license management and reconciliation so easy. The only negative about their licensing is they double dip with the desktop OS and CAL stuff.
We've been on EA for years and the amount of complexity and shifting rules year by year is absurd. It is nearly impossible to stay in compliance. Even the companies who have "owned" our EA (partner responsible for managing it) are wrong frequently about licensing rules, later contradicted by Microsoft.
If you have a handful of licenses on a Select agreement, or O365 (I don't know, we dont use it) maybe it is simple. But a large enterprise customer? It's a fucking nightmare.
I have been through SAM audits. It is a huge pain in the ass. You will spend hours arguing with them over obscure licensing details that equate to tens of thousands of dollars in licensing costs.
For example, in one audit they charged us for Visio licenses because we paid for Pro versions of licenses but the helpdesk had accidentally installed Standard.
Their salespeople are so hyper-agressive that I can tell which vendors have ex-Oracle reps.
Mellanox?
https://www.peakindicators.com/blog/oracle-licensing-nups-pe...
It’s gotten so complicated that these vendors hire specialized firms to go after their customers, who then have to buy software to prove they’re not stealing.
This activity fills IBM’s coffers while distracting their customers.
$1B for that