Not sure if this is true any more, but they used to make a majority of their revenue by suing their own customers.
Do you have a citation for this claim? I mean if the company is as absurdly litigious as you're saying, it stands to reason that you wouldn't make unsubstantiated claims about them in a public forum, right?
Oracle is an enormous company. I'm in my 40s, and literally every non-startup I've worked for in my career has been an Oracle customer, across multiple product lines. They're a 48-year-old company with more than 150,000 employees.
To be absolutely clear, I'm not expressing an opinion here on Oracle or its licensing and auditing practices. I'm just responding to the wild claims about revenue from lawsuits or license violations. Oracle stock has been publicly-traded for nearly four decades, so there's plenty of data available from their earnings statements. If these claims were even remotely based in reality, it would be easy to cite a source.
Maybe a few years ago at <$megacorp> where I work, Oracle requires, as part of their licensing, the ability to scan every machine owned by the company to make sure there is no unlicensed use of any of their software. If any offending installations were found, they would charge the company the cost of the license for every machine. So, thousands of users times $thousands per license.
Even if you had a license for a Java runtime for, say, your Oracle database instance, if that was found to be used for another purpose you'd get hit. Again, for every machine in the entire company, not just the offending one.
Needless to say, there was a huge firedrill to root out any rogue installs.
> If any offending installations were found, they would charge the company the cost of the license for every machine.
I don’t think you read that correctly. To use an analogy, it’s similar to Costco requiring me to pay again for every item in my cart because I forgot to ring up a carton of eggs when I went through self-checkout. Maybe you don’t call that “extra” but I think most people would.
So $0 contribution to Oracle's revenue from fees in that anecdote, was my point. (The key word there in my comment was "actually", as in actually paying the fees, whereas you focused on the word "extra" instead. I don't debate that if the fees were actually paid, then yes that is quite obviously an extra fee.)
No, that's not theft. It's a license violation.
Otherwise, I agree.
My original assertion was just that Meta is unlikely to be 'the most ruthless and shameless [of all the tech companies].' There's so much competition out there for that title.