I referenced Larry as a proxy for his extreme wealth. Although it is true he’s one of the great businessmen of the late 20th century. Just not the sort you want to be in a business deal with in general.
Oracle has always been good at both adding helpful functions that developers rely on, making switching difficult, and also at teasing companies into using more licenses than they’ve purchased, then smacking them with audits and fees as a stick, and a ‘cheaper’ larger license as a carrot to avoid the audit fees.
In the 90s, this was tech like PL/SQL and Materialized views - I’m long out of the Oracle game, so I have no idea where they compete on features now vis-a-vis open source — but I will say that I have owned companies where the Oracle license was both HATED — and outlived all original owners of the company. It’s hard to replace once it’s in your workflow, and that is 100% by design.
I guess audits are fading away as more people move to the cloud. Audits are used by other enterprise tech sellers as well because you don't want DRM or telemetry in something like a mission critical HA DB that runs behind a firewall. So audits it is. Cloud solves all that (admittedly, whilst trading off against data privacy).
I referenced Larry as a proxy for his extreme wealth. Although it is true he’s one of the great businessmen of the late 20th century. Just not the sort you want to be in a business deal with in general.
Oracle has always been good at both adding helpful functions that developers rely on, making switching difficult, and also at teasing companies into using more licenses than they’ve purchased, then smacking them with audits and fees as a stick, and a ‘cheaper’ larger license as a carrot to avoid the audit fees.
In the 90s, this was tech like PL/SQL and Materialized views - I’m long out of the Oracle game, so I have no idea where they compete on features now vis-a-vis open source — but I will say that I have owned companies where the Oracle license was both HATED — and outlived all original owners of the company. It’s hard to replace once it’s in your workflow, and that is 100% by design.