Re: "falls to the License Management Services team –.. and the optimization team. "
I'm also left wondering how much of this would actually stand up if actively pushed back on. For example
"It becomes a bit of a horror show in very many cases when customers feel they are compliant [with the terms of the Oracle license] and are not compliant."
Not compliant according to who? Oracle? Please! Independent 3rd party or legal decision else go get fucked.
"If you're using something like VMware, then Oracle doesn't recognize that," he said. So if you're only using four cores to run our app and your organization is using 64 cores with VMware, Oracle will come and ask you to pay for 64 cores."
Cannot see how this could possibly be legal under EU law. In fact I'd wager it isn't but Oracle are yet to have their turn on the judicial circuit but their turn will come. This is like MS enforcing you having to have IE. You don't technically but the punitive financial sanction on offer essentially enforces the user only virtualising on Oracle. That is not legal, it cannot possibly be.
I don't even buy the "Oracle is a very good enterprise platform". It is generally grossly over-engineered for what the vast majority need and likely sub-optimal for those with specialist needs. It seems like a jack of all trades on steroids. Their syntax shits me, not to mention the number of conditions under which it will convert a datetime to a timestamp and then table scan instead of index, and it is generally a massive pain in the arse to use with other systems.
Bigg observed that Oracle often makes demands outside of the scope of contracts. "Oracle will routinely tell the customer they have to license every one of their VMware hosts, even if a only a portion of them run Oracle software," he said.
So, fraud essentially. Fuck me, their time in front of the EU cannot come soon enough.