Re: Question about licensing for webpage...

From: Christopher Browne <cbbrowne_at_news.hex.net>
Date: 1998/12/10
Message-ID: <74nkhl$f1p$28_at_blue.hex.net>#1/1


On Tue, 8 Dec 1998 14:20:53 -0800, Ben Parrish <bparrish_at_remove.rvi.net> wrote:
>What are the licensing implications for an installation which is running a
>webpage that uses CGI scripts to access an Oracle database? All the CGI
>programs use the same actual user, and since these programs will only be
>hitting the database for a second or two (or whatever) at a time, what are
>the legal ramifications in terms of user licenses for the Oracle server?
>
>Has anyone done this? Does anybody know the answer? Does anybody know what
>time it is? Does anybody really care?

This matter is quite a big deal, and stirred rather a lot of controversy about a year ago when people figured out the potential licensing implications.

This is a matter that you probably will want to approach in a fairly circumspect manner with an Oracle rep; you would not want them to "slam" you with some unexpectedly-large licensing bill, of course :-).

The issue that the big-name RDBMS vendors do by-user licensing has been an argument in favor of using non-big-name RDBMSes as the data repositories for web applications. Royalty/license-fee-free may be of importance in some applications, which makes second-tier RDBMSes look more attractive...

(Similar questions come up if you're using an ERP system like SAP R/3; note that R/3 only uses a single Oracle user ID, and roughly one connection for each "work process," neither of which numbers represent anything anywhere near the likely number of users on the system. Similarly, if updates are pumped in by a TP monitor like Tuxedo, that may represent a "proxy" that turns many real users into a very small number of DB connections. R/3 installations wind up paying for a pretty large number of Oracle user licenses, FYI...)

-- 
"never post anything you don't want to see on your resume..." -- Martin
Minow <minow_at_pobox.com>
cbbrowne_at_hex.net- <http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/rdbms.html>
Received on Thu Dec 10 1998 - 00:00:00 CET

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