Oracle-L: RE: Oracle Hungry for Money

From: MacGregor, Ian A. <ian_at_SLAC.Stanford.EDU>
Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 12:28:59 -0800
Message-ID: <F001.00427E31.20020313122859@fatcity.com>

While I agree Oracle is avaricious and sales reps are a smarmy lot, I don't see any entrapment here. If you believe you are licensed for an option and you are not, it is perfectly legitimate for Oracle to ask for you to pay for that license and any maintenance costs. $23,800 is cheap, must be a 20 named user license. They are not asking for payment for all the years it had been illegally installed? Consider yourself very lucky and Oracle anything but greedy.

"Feeling tricked" implies that had you known that you were not licensed, you would not have divulged it to Oracle. If so, you are lower than a smoldering heap of parrot droppings. However, as it was indeed an innocent mistake and no such characterization is necessary.

For some reason there has been a great confusion over whether the partitioning option costs extra. Even some of the most knowledgeable DBA's in the world were mistaken on this. The height of this misunderstanding was a two to three years ago. I expect there were hundreds perhaps thousands of sites who have installed partitioning without a license because they believed it to be free.

Ian MacGregor
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
ian_at_slac.stanford.edu

-----Original Message-----

Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2002 11:03 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Watch out! I just got off the phone with our Oracle "sales rep". He was asking me if I needed information on Partitioning or OLAP for our data warehouse project. I told him that we are on 8.1.7, so the OLAP option isn't available. To keep him from going into a long speil on Partitioning, I told him that I have already implemented that, which is true.
He jumped on that and told me that we aren't licensed for it. He followed up with sending me a quote for $23,800 to cover the fact that we are using the option, which we didn't pay for. I was always told that we have a "site" license (higher ed), and he said that our license was purchased prior to Partioning being available, so that doesn't count.

I'm telling everyone about this as a heads-up. It appears that Oracle is digging for money, and I feel that the approach that was used was done to trick me into admitting that I had implemented the feature.

--

Scott Canaan (srcdco_at_rit.edu)
(585) 475-7886
"Life is like a sewer, what you get out of it depends on what you put into it" - Tom Lehrer

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Author: Scott Canaan
INET: srcdco_at_ritvax.rit.edu

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Author: MacGregor, Ian A.
INET: ian_at_SLAC.Stanford.EDU

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