Re: vmware & Oracle

On Jul 20, 2007, at 1:22 PM, Baumgartel, Paul wrote:

> Agreed. Think about it--why in the world would Oracle charge for
> the use of its software only in production systems?

Because a company that writes software to sell might not be willing to pay for Oracle licenses just so their application will work with it, but Oracle will stand to make many more sales if that software product becomes popular. I don't think it's crazy at all, especially now that Postgres is a decent alternative for small and medium installations. It seems to me that in this situation it's in Oracle's best interest to give up a few license sales, which they probably would not have made anyway, in exchange for possibly making many more.

The recent free version of Oracle, whatever it was called, obviously changes this argument (unless the application needs some features it doesn't include), but at the time of the conversation I posted about earlier that product didn't exist.

Now, I'm not claiming at all that Oracle is actually doing this, just that IMHO this is why it would not be a silly thing for them to do. I don't actually expect them to be that far-sighted. ;)

janine

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