RE: Oracle Arm Twisting?

This brings some interesting questions to mind.

John, how do you come in contact with others that have Oracle licenses for sale?

Has anyone heard of buying up dot.com Oracle licensing?

Jared

John.Whelan_at_statcan.ca
Sent by: root_at_fatcity.com
08/15/2002 06:33 AM
Please respond to ORACLE-L  

        To:     Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L <ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com>
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        Subject:        RE: Oracle Arm Twisting?

 Licensing is normally complex. Oracle licensing is more complex than most
other software.

 The following is my personal interpretation of the rules. You should double check before taking action based on this interpretation.

 One option that no one has talked about is swapping your licence. We are a
fairly large Oracle shop and internally we move licences around from one server to another and we change operating systems underneath as well. I think we pay a admin charge to Oracle for some moves. We still own a number
of concurrent licences and we shuffle these, named users and CPU licences to
make a rough sort of optimum use of the licences.

 From time to time we also buy Oracle licences from other Oracle users outside the Canadian Federal Government and simply pay Oracle an administration fee to move the licence. You have to haggle with whomever you are purchasing from but its generally cheaper than Oracle new licences.
There are companies that specialise in reselling Oracle licences.

 The other technique we use is we run multiple licences CSIs on a single server. That way if the project is smaller that we thought we can move some
user licenses onto another server. Oracle have a minimum number of users per type of server but seem quite happy if you have more than one CSI on a server. Note if you have multiple CSIs in this way you can always sell the
surplus.

 If you are using named users you can use the named user licence to access other Oracle systems in your organisation. So if you have 100 named users on the first system and are only using 20 then put in a second system you can use the spare 80 named user licences on the second system provided that
you also have the minimum number of named user licences on the second system. Watch out for Enterprise Edition and Standard edition. A named user Enterprise Edition can access any Enterprise Edition or Standard Edition database. A standard edition named user is only licensed to access
standard edition databases.

 Note this applies to database licences. For developer software Oracle upgrade path is different and much messier. They seem to rename their developer tools from time to time so I have a hard job following what the name is or what it has evolved into this year. Your annual maintenance fee
gets you the latest upgrades for the product. Switching products requires that you surrender your existing licence and then you get a credit based on
your initial purchase price of the product. This has some odd results. One
of my users wanted J developer, it turned out the software he had had an upgrade path that included J-developer so he got it at no cost. Another area wanted to purchase IDS licences. We ended up swapping licences around
to surrender those licences that had the highest initial purchase price this
also had the side effect of lowering maintenance for some users since the maintenance is based on the initial purchase price.

Cheerio John

-----Original Message-----
Sent: August 14, 2002 1:00 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

What you said is right, Oracle can dictate terms on me, because I have already implemented the system and spent a great deal in customizing it.

But the point is that I have to live with the mistakes that someone else made
in the past by overestimating the user base. e.g. For some modules we have 1000 user license, whereas the total strength of the company is around 500 only even today. Mind you, the license was bought 2 yrs back when the strength was only half as much!

I don't want to discontinue the support altogether, I just want to renew it
for lesser number of users. No point in having 1000 user license when actually only 50 people are actually using it!!

Anyways, the negotiations are still on. I hope Oracle gets willing to concede
a bit.

Naveen

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Wednesday, August 14, 2002 9:39 PM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

• Naveen Nahata <naveen_nahata_at_mindtree.com>

> Maintenance cost is much less to the purchase cost, but how can a
company
> force us to renew the support contract? I'm ready to live without the
> support because I have not implemented a few modules. Does that mean
that
> either we have to pay the support price till the time we decide to start
> using the modules(and every year thereafter too), or will have to buy it
> again?

Because you have a contract to use the product which states that Oracle can turn off the license if you do not purchase support or a given number of seats. They're Oracle, you're not. You can tell them to get lost and see if they decide to sue you for illegal use of their product; short of that you are stuck with the contract terms unless Oracle is willing to change them for you.

That or dump Oracle for another product whose vendor gives you better licensing terms. One reason Open Source software has been catching on is that people get sick of licensing issues. I am not advocating that you dump Oracle for Postgress, but this is a good example of what makes people think twice about using OS when it does meet their needs.

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