On March 3, I posted an article on what SAM managers need to know about Oracle licensing.  In that article, I spoke about a licensing dispute between Oracle and candy manufacturer Mars from alleged nonpayment of licensing fees by Mars.  Perhaps more interestingly, the lawsuit in part had to do with Oracle’s definition of hardware partitioning which only accepts a limited set of virtualization and partitioning technologies which many organizations have found to be confusing.

Before I go further, it does behoove me to say that I believe every publisher has the right to set its licensing terms and conditions. As every SAM manager knows, some of those terms and conditions are difficult to understand given their complexity, and others are clear and precise. The SAM manager needs to understand those terms and conditions and accept, alter or abandon the deal based on their needs and requirements.

Which brings me to my point. One week after posting my last article, one of my colleagues sent me an article with the following headline: “Microsoft waves the ‘free licenses’ flag to try to grab Oracle database users.” I read the article and had the following question: Oracle’s aggressiveness in the audit space is well known.

SOURCE: 1e.com