Much to our surprise, Oracle’s Director for Cloud Business Development laid out the Oracle licensing scheme in virtualized environments during VMworld 2012. The resulting video (below) was published only hours before our session at VMworld in San Francisco, where we were going to explain our view of the game.
As expected, the video was soon pulled but we’ll share another copy with you.
The spokesman is (almost) completely right, supporting key elements we presented during our licensing session explaining
- that your definition is pointing out that you need to license those processors where the Oracle software is installed and/or running, and
- this is not necessarily the entire cluster (as Oracle tends to implicate)
- no whitepaper, Oracle LMS- or Salesrep should convince you otherwise
- external lawyers support our vision on this issue
Shortly after the video was pulled, Oracle tried to calm the arisen euphoria among the VMware and Oracle fans with this post, stating that:
“Oracle software is licensed per physical processor in the server or cluster where the Oracle software is installed and/or running.”
Unfortunately Oracle takes the wrong lane yet again. Why wrong? Well, if the above definition is in your contract we’ll give you an iPad. Go read your contract to understand why you won’t get one: It will be a compelling exercise to find out that even Oracle can be attempted to make revenues with make-believes. This is one of them. If you’re still not getting it 100%, visit our session at VMworld in Barcelona or contact us for help: Our clients typically don’t lose their money on this.
Update:
You may also want to look at the excellent article of EMC’s Jeff Browning. Have you ever thought about Oracle’s dilemma? If Oracle would officially concur with their own OLSA’s wording in the way it’s laid out in the video, I bet there’s going to be many clients who will want to get a LOT of their money back. I don’t expect an official change on their position anytime soon.
