Hello All,
"We should have these discussions. We need to help each other become better
and do better."
I agree complelty, especially when the tone of the conversation has been so
good and respectful so far. And when you add the fact that every two lines
people mention it's just their opinion and not law, it's a good thing to
talk about it. DBA are often collateral damage to those audits, and even if
you could argue they should know and control their systems, putting the
topic forward and in the open is going to help.
Thanks, matthieu
On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 12:16 AM, Dimensional DBA <
dimensional.dba@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I believe we kept the conversation civil, even though it is a touchy
subject.
I believe it is also fair to call someone out if what they are doing will
cause potential damage to themselves, their company or others in the
Community.
I apologize to Mladen if anything I have said was not civil, as sometimes
my humor is not taken the way I intended. J
We should have these discussions. We need to help each other become better
and do better. Anyone can have to go through a license audit and when
errors are found you feel bad or want to be upset, normally at Oracle
because they did the audit and want back revenue for the transgression.
They are a for profit company and faulting them for that would seem to be
nonsensical.
If I were to fault Oracle for anything, it would simply be on this
statement
http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/license-management-services/policy/index.html
“When a customer licenses Oracle software, it is the customer's
responsibility to ensure that they are utilizing their licenses in
accordance with the terms and conditions of the license agreements. “
We as a customer are expected to be perfect in license management, while
we know the Oracle SW delivered to us is not perfect because of the amount
of bugs it contains. I do not think Oracle willfully puts bugs in the SW
and I believe that they should not believe that our error was a willful one
versus a simple error, especially on a topic that started this conversation
on Active Data Guard that many of us opened Support cases on when it first
came out over this problem and repeated cases over time.
If you have a good relationship with your Oracle sales folks, they
normally won’t try to squeeze the blood out of you, although as I mentioned
earlier we all have encountered the bad eggs on both sides. If we could get
rid of the bad eggs then our world would be better. 99.5% of the license
audits I have performed over my career, the findings have been simple
errors along the way, but there is that 0.5% which were significant willful
egregious violations. If we can get rid of those in our Community then it
would be easier to deal with Oracle on the real mistakes.
*Matthew Parker*
*Chief Technologist*
*Dimensional DBA*
*425-891-7934 <425-891-7934> (cell)*
*D&B *047931344
*CAGE *7J5S7
*Dimensional.dba@xxxxxxxxxxx <Dimensional.dba@xxxxxxxxxxx>*
*View Matthew Parker's profile on LinkedIn*
<http://www.linkedin.com/pub/matthew-parker/6/51b/944/>
*From:* Mladen Gogala [mailto:gogala.mladen@xxxxxxxxx]
*Sent:* Wednesday, February 10, 2016 2:40 PM
*To:* Seth Miller; Andrew Kerber
*Cc:* Dimensional DBA; Oracle-L Freelists
*Subject:* Re: Accidental Use of Oracle Active Data Guard
Frankly, I believe that Oracle audits are outrageous business practice. My
help has been enlisted on two occasions, before getting employed with my
current employer, to help limit the damage. The best description of the
process, that I've heard from my former CIO is the following: "the goal is
to squeeze as much money as possible, but not to loose customers or create
a negative publicity". However, the affected company has not purchased a
single Oracle license between the audit and the time they applied for
chapter 7. That's how I learned about DB2. I know you will probably not
believe it, but in DB2 you can range partition your table without paying
any additional licenses.
Fortunately, in my current position, I don't deal with licensing and
audits any more. I can't say that I'm sorry.
Regards
On 2/10/2016 5:05 PM, Seth Miller wrote:
Andrew,
To answer your question, Mark Bobak is the list administrator and I have
no doubt he has been following this thread.
The fact that it is a touchy subject is mostly due to its ambiguity being
silent about it will only exacerbate that. At least having a conversation
about it on this list provides experiences from a large audience instead of
relying on Oracle spin and FUD. Does that mean you get the occasional
crackpot recommendations that clearly violate licensing agreements and are
frankly, below the integrity of this community? Yes, that is going to
happen and it tends to usually come from the same individuals. But I don't
think limiting the conversation is the right answer.
If the Oracle employees that participate in this list don't know better
(they do) than to respond appropriately on these subjects (they will),
their contractual agreements with their employer will guarantee it.
Besides, they're big boys and girls, they can handle it.
Seth Miller
On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 2:51 PM, Andrew Kerber <andrew.kerber@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Who is the moderator for this list? I think we might want to limit this
topic in the future since it is touchy, and also very prone to
misinformation. Obviously no information from a mailing list can ever be
accepted as gospel, but I think anything beyond recommendations for
companies who might help with an audit defense should be forbidden.
Also, those on the list who are Oracle employees may feel constrained to
respond with the official Oracle statement, which may or may not be
accurate.
On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 2:35 PM, Mladen Gogala <gogala.mladen@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
This is my personal opinion. I am not using my Commvault email address,
and everything I write on this group is my personal opinion and has nothing
to do with my employer. Commvault doesn't deal with the client Oracle
licenses.
As I have said, I have seen the cases when people got away with it., when
I was a DBA.
On 2/10/2016 2:51 PM, Seth Miller wrote:
Wow. It's pretty amazing that you would post something like this in a
public forum and continue to defend it.
Does Commvault actually tell its customers that this is an acceptable form
of use or is this just your personal opinion?
Seth Miller
On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 1:32 PM, Mladen Gogala <gogala.mladen@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
The question is about the 30 days. Here is the excerpt:
http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/olsa-gr-v020703-070544.pdf
*Trial Programs You may order trial programs, or Oracle may include
additional programs with your order which you may use for trial,
nonproduction purposes only. You have 30 days from the delivery date to
evaluate these programs. If you decide to use any of these programs after
the 30 day trial period, you must obtain a license for each program from
Oracle. If you decide not to obtain a license for any program after the 30
day trial period, you will cease using and will delete the applicable
programs from your computer systems. Programs licensed for trial purposes
are provided “as is” and Oracle does not provide technical support or offer
any warranties for these programs.*
Essentially, I am in compliance with the license, as long as my DB is less
than 30 days old. Technically, if I drop the database and create a new
copy, I am starting a new 30 days trial. You will have to prove that this
is not so. As you yourself have said, you shouldn't be complying with
everything that auditors ask for. I have seen people getting away with the
trials. And, for the record, license audits did not create too many friends
to Oracle Corp.
Personally, I advise everybody to take a look at DB2 for Linux. Excellent
database, 3 times cheaper than Oracle and works just as well for majority
of purposes. One of the ways of coping with exorbitantly expensive Oracle
licenses is not using them, whenever possible. That might even motivate
Oracle Corp. to reconsider their licensing policy.
On 2/10/2016 1:28 PM, Dimensional DBA wrote:
Sorry, I had to get on the road for a bit. I asked you to read the
licensing agreements, so let me help you here
http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/databaselicensing-070584.pdf
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/licenses/standard-license-152015.html
“Subject to the full terms of the OTN License Agreement, this limited
license allows the user to develop applications using the licensed products
as long as such applications have not been used for any data processing,
business, commercial, or production purposes.”
I am not a lawyer and I did not stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night J,
but I can read plain English and I have negotiated enough contracts over
the last 23 years with multiple Chief Legal Counsels to understand that
copying a database from prod to development by any means so that you can
continue development on that app that is being used in prod is a license
violation by that sentence above.
Then you have the next statement in the licensing agreement
“Test Environment: All programs used in a test environment must be
licensed under an OMA, OLSA, or other appropriate Oracle (or Oracle
authorized reseller) license agreement”.
You can claim that you are only doing development on something but if you
do not have a test and dev environment separate then the licensing folks
will consider it to be test also and it would be a license violation if the
app hadn’t made it to production yet. Also you must be very careful here
relative that no portion of the app (think reusable libraries) is being
used in your production environments or your app from a services
perspective is not touching other apps that are in production use. Just for
the sake of lawyers think in terms of are you using the a single DNS/AD
server for prod and development that under a total application perspective
could be considered the app is in prod.
Then there are support agreements and your base license MSA and their
licensing sentences that we will skip for now.
I have seen too much in this space. This is why when I worked at Amazon
and a variety of other customers that before we downloaded Oracle software
to test with to see how it worked and if we wanted to buy it, we would go
through legal counsel to negotiate a contract with Oracle on the use of
their software for a specific limited period of time without charge because
in most cases besides using canned benchmarks we wanted to actually
develop/test with the real production applications to test the features.
Once you are a customer of Oracle or really any software vendor there are
many places for you to trip over licensing issues and in most cases that
trip is because of us technical people doing something we shouldn’t.
*Matthew Parker*
*Chief Technologist*
*Dimensional DBA*
*425-891-7934 <425-891-7934> (cell)*
*D&B *047931344
*CAGE *7J5S7
*Dimensional.dba@xxxxxxxxxxx <Dimensional.dba@xxxxxxxxxxx>*
*View Matthew Parker's profile on LinkedIn*
<http://www.linkedin.com/pub/matthew-parker/6/51b/944/>
*From:* Malden Gogala [mailto:gogala.mladen@xxxxxxxxx
<gogala.mladen@xxxxxxxxx>]
*Sent:* Wednesday, February 10, 2016 5:45 AM
*To:* Dimensional DBA
*Cc:* oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
*Subject:* Re: Accidental Use of Oracle Active Data Guard
Is anything I said inaccurate?
Sent from my iPhone
On Feb 10, 2016, at 8:35 AM, Dimensional DBA <dimensional.dba@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
It is recommendations like this, trying to skirt Oracle licensing that
will cause a license audit for a company and makes it harder for companies
who make simple mistakes versus willful mistakes to deal with Oracle LMS.
You really should read the Oracle licensing document for software
downloads from OTN/Oracle.com <http://oracle.com> and read the oracle
licensing documents relative to customers who own licenses versus simply
being the single developer in the wild downloading software to learn or do
development on while not owning any licenses.
Your activities as an individual in a company and using any company
equipment for these activities puts the company at risk and makes life
worse for us in the Oracle Community.
*Matthew Parker*
*Chief Technologist*
*Dimensional DBA*
*425-891-7934 <425-891-7934> (cell)*
*D&B *047931344
*CAGE *7J5S7
*Dimensional.dba@xxxxxxxxxxx <Dimensional.dba@xxxxxxxxxxx>*
*View Matthew Parker's profile on LinkedIn*
<http://www.linkedin.com/pub/matthew-parker/6/51b/944/>
*From:* oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [
mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx ;<oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>] *On
Behalf Of *Mladen Gogala
*Sent:* Wednesday, February 10, 2016 5:02 AM
*To:* oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
*Subject:* Re: Accidental Use of Oracle Active Data Guard
On 02/10/2016 07:42 AM, John Hallas wrote:
How true that is.
It is often very difficult to work out what we have got and who controls
the licenses.
The best site as regards license management (and many other things) I
worked at had a very simple rule – if a server was not listed on a central
spreadsheet which was managed by Purchasing then you could not install any
Oracle software on there.
It did not matter how much anybody shouted or how important the project
was – that was the rule.
John
www.jhdba.wordpress.com
*From:* kathy duret [mailto:katpopins21@xxxxxxxxx ;<katpopins21@xxxxxxxxx>]
Where I have seen it fall down is that management doesn't always involve
and/or communicate what is licensed effectively to staff.
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Another good trick to remember is that you have the right to use database
30 days for free, as a trial license. Consequently, if you keep re-creating
your development database every 30 days, using some form of "duplicate
database", you don't have to pay for the license. That is where SAN
snapshot technology pays off.
--
Mladen Gogala
Oracle DBA
http://mgogala.freehostia.com
--
Andrew W. Kerber
'If at first you dont succeed, dont take up skydiving.'
--
--
Mladen Gogala
Oracle Consultant
http://mgogala.freehostia.com
DISCLAIMER: I am solely responsible for any opinion expressed in this email
