You’ve got to take your hat off to Oracle. Just when you thought they couldn’t make their pricing model any more ridiculous they come up with this gem. I guess we should be grateful that they’ve conceded this much. Prior to this announcement a single dual core processor was charged the same as two individual processors, even though it didn’t have the same performance.
Of course nobody pays list price for Oracle, but it is used to calculate the support and updates costs, so it’s in their interest to keep it artificially high.
I always find the TPC pricings a laugh. Oracle sounds real cheap until you realize they’ve only included a 3 year license. I’ve worked with Oracle products for over 10 years and I’ve yet to work for a company that has bought Oracle this way. They have all bought perpetual licenses for some serious wonga! Maybe we’re living in the dark ages in the UK 🙂
We’ve got some 3rd party applications running on mySQL and they work really well. Nice and cheap too. Well actually it’s free. We’ve got a few 3rd party applications running against SQL Server and they do the job nicely too. We’re looking to switch another project from Oracle to SQL Server part way through the implementation after some confusion over the Oracle licensing costs. It doesn’t take many incidents like this within a company before some momentum builds up and people start opting for cheaper alternatives.
Whenever anyone mentions licensing costs to me I hide under the desk. I’m a grunt, not an accountant!
Cheers
Tim…
I owner Oracle stock.
Double the licensing fees 🙂
Well, I’d sell the Oracle stock if I had any!
(Still hold a few shares, but that’s just so Oracle can’t kick me out of any of their meets…)