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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

For years it was a license violation to use Microsoft development tools to build a word processor or spreadsheet. It was also a violation of your Oracle license to publish benchmark results comparing Oracle to other databases.

If you compete with a vendor, or give aid and comfort to their competitors, do not expect the vendor to play nice with you, or even keep you on as a customer.

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>For years it was a license violation to use Microsoft development tools to build a word processor or spreadsheet.

source?

You have to go pretty far back, it was in the Visual C++ 6.0 EULA, for instance (for lack of a better link):

https://proact.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Visual-Basic-En...

It wasn't a blanket prohibition, but a restriction on some parts of the documentation and redistributable components. Definitely was weird to see that in the EULA for a toolchain. This was removed later on, though I forget if it's because they changed their mind or removed the components.

Doesn’t the ban on benchmarking Oracle still stand today?

Given the law firm in question which just happens to develop an RDBMS, I wouldn't want to find out

Besides, lol, who cares how fast a model-T can go when there are much nicer forms of transportation that don't actively hate you

Hmm so "because you split spending between us and a competitor, we'll force you to give the competitor the whole share instead!"

Certainly a mindset befitting microsoft and Oracle, if I ever saw one.

Well, the customer has to choose to give your competitor the whole share or give you the whole share, and these companies are betting on being important enough the customer chooses the latter.

Don't forget a lot of their appeal is about (real or perceived) liability. If you use Postgres and you fuck up, you fuck up. If you use Oracle and you fucked up, you can blame Oracle and save face.

I can understand the benchmark issue. It often happens when someone benchmarks something, it’s biased or wrong in some way.

I don’t believe it should be legal, but I see why they would be butt-hurt

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