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I'm no fan of oracle's audit approach but it sounds like you were expecting special leniency to not pay for their stuff - for decades - because you are a govt agency/ live in a low income place. Not how business works. If you're playing by the rules, no one can force you into any long term contracts you don't need.

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I'm also a government Oracle dev. I have no way of knowing what I'm licensed for and they don't disable the features we're not licensed for. I literally have to talk to my director to talk to our account rep to figure out that I'm not allowed to use table partitioning.

Agreed that Oracle licensing is byzantine, probably deliberately. But devil's advocate says that any organization should be aware of what they are actually licensed for, even if that means contracting a third party to ensure compliance.

We have a small IT department and are running on extremely limited funds. We literally had two unlicensed dev databases, and Oracle threatened to sue us for millions of dollars, unless we bought a subscription to their shitty cloud product.

The whole process was shitty, predatory, and abusive.

portions of Salesforce are the same way. You don't know you're out of compliance until an audit happens and you get the "sure would be a shame if something happened to your instance..." speech.

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