I just had a weird experience. I have a very small company in a 3rd world country that you probably never heard of. The "official" representative for our country came out and talked to our main customer -- and talked them into installing a small application that would "show them how they could save money on maintenance". Because of my skills and experience with Oracle, I was selected to install their little application and send them the data, (they couldn't be bothered to fly out to our little stinking country in person). I had to make lots of edits to get the program to run at all. Oracle refused to respond to any question, suggestion or comment. Eventaully, they send a report to the customer which said "you are underlicensed" -- please pay us for <large number> of users for license and maintenance within 30 days. In the report, they only mention one license. I sat down with the customer and checked all their licenses and they were not only fully paid up, they were "overlicensed" if you want to call them up. Oracle tried to buy us off telling us that we would get a percentage of what they earned from sales. They also made comments about how our company would be the main point of contact for Oracle licenses. We just found out that Oracle is directly calling up our customer for sales calls. We are trying to figure out what the legal ramifications are. If you buy some software and license it, but are have too many cpus or too many users, can they just come along and make you pay extra money? If they wanted us to reduce CPU's we could just yank a few out and everyone would be happy. It made a really bad impression on our customers. If they could even justify the amount of money they were asking, I could probably make more than that just switching the customers to SQLServer or something. Is Oracle now so hard up for money that they have to stoop to these kinds of tactics to make any money? I always thought they made so much from government and fortune 500 back in the US they could get along with people cheating all the time.
swstephe
@swstephe
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Sales bullies of desperation?
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RE: Official Membership Thread -- Just Reply Here!
I'll play in your club, but I can't hate Oracle -- I was an employee for 15 years and I now work with it as part of my livlihood. Maybe I hate the corporate attitude, the bad decisions and directions, more than the technical aspects. I was on the support phones for nearly 8 years. Then development got really excited when I wrote a product for the support group using one of their less popular products and I was a developer, (it was a requirement that you *must* have studied from one of the top 10 universities in America to be hired as a developer back then). Most of my fellow developers were Harvard business grads. I got sucked into what eventually became Oracle Portal, (but it was hijacked by a bunch of consultants from back east who wanted their hack turned into a product and it ended up displacing everything else). Ended up floating around marketing for a while, (because obviously marketing is the best group to maintain the website???). Then, when the waves of layoffs came in the early part of this decade, I begged my boss to add me to the list, (which has more perks than just quitting). Met a lot of interesting people. I used to hash out ideas with Ken Jacobs, (I still think read-only tablespaces were my idea), or Rick Allen on security when I met them, so it was a good experience anyway.
My advice to people working with Oracle? Just use the database, networking and tool utilities. Avoid anything written in Java like the black death, (not because there is anything wrong with Java per-se, but because Oracle couldn't keep good Java developers around for long). Use the open source stuff instead, (I wrote the first Windows port of "oraperl" which was one of the first Perl-to-Oracle interfaces and became very popular in the early days of the internet). I've had the experience of building the Oracle core and have seen some major WTF's -- one time I did a count of about 27 "strlen" functions in the NLS module.
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RE: Even Oracle hates Oracle
There was already a lot of talk that the Oracle RDBMS had fully
saturated its market. The only money to be made is in add-on features,
(which they are happy to buy from other companies) ... or support
money. Wait -- did you think they were offerring free support?