Re: Oracle personal edition?

Hi Galen: I agree: mindshare is important, and anything which increases that is surely a good thing, I would have thought. But what you or I might think "reasonable" is not necessarily the legal position (and the difference between the reasonableness and the legalities of a situation is one I've learnt at first hand).

It's obvious that, like any other major software company, Oracle Corporation has bigger fish to fry than chasing up every Nancy Schmo with an address book in the database that might be out there ...and they'd look complete pillocks (ie, corporate thugs) if they did, which is presumably one reason why they don't (the other being the excessive costs compared to any possible benefit). But their refusal to take action in one or one thousand cases doesn't mean they don't have a right to do so in the thousandth-and-first.

Nevertheless, it remains the height of idiocy to scare people off the free download with talk of "piracy" and "illegality", because Oracle Corp. has built plenty of lattitude into their license agreement already permitting extensive learning, development and prototyping time. So I'm with you: pretty much anything goes, except earning mega-bucks from a freebie.

Regards
HJR "Galen Boyer" <galenboyer_at_hotpop.com> wrote in message news:uvg3xvi5i.fsf_at_hotpop.com...
> On Sun, 20 Oct 2002, howardjr2000_at_yahoo.com.au wrote:
>
> > So if Nancy Schmo has developed a recipe or CD collection for her own
> > personal use, and uses it regularly to prepare Saturday night dinners
> > or a choice of relaxing classics to play in the background at such
> > dinners, yes -she is violating the agreement.
> >
> > But she can use the software for as long as she needs to learn *how*
> > to develop a recipe or CD collection. And the mere existence within
> > the database of a cd_table or a recipe_table would not be a problem,
> > since she has to be able to prototype with something.
>
> At least I've never been in violation. The companies I have been
> working in have downloaded Oracle and developed against it and then
> deployed to a purchased version.
>
> Hm... saving one's address book in a local Oracle database is a
> violation. Why should Oracle care if every home in the US has people
> using a local copy of its database for saving their recipes and address
> books? They don't have to support them, they don't lose any money and
> they might get a few more people who end up as developers and therefore
> more mindshare.
>
> --
> Galen deForest Boyer
> Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground.
Received on Sat Oct 19 2002 - 22:04:15 CDT