Kevin, Oracle counts on support to make the client declare the licences they use. If you're in production and you really care about your data you would want support for your DB, and hence have to purchase the license. That does not mean that a big part of Oracle clients does not 'cheat', I mean they use more licenses than they pay for (usually on dev or test machines). But your point is still valid: Neither IBM nor MS will let you download a really usefull copy of their software (DB ones, I mean) without paying for the licence. Oracle does, and they do not seem to be bothered by the undisclosed use. The end of it, as you said, is that paying customers pay for all (themselves and cheaters). On 2/9/07, Kevin Closson <kevinc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
And in every IT department I have ever worked in theft has been rampant, obviously IT people tend not to call not paying license fees for software, or accounting correctly for numbers of copies of software installed, ...great point Niall! And I'll tell you who gets ripped off as collateral damage: good paying customers. The fact that Oracle permits downloads of their database to run on freely downloadable OS platforms astounds me. If only there was a way to discern how many production Oracle deployments are running on Linux unlicensed throughout. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
