Oracle demands $12K from network biz that doesn't use its software | Hacker News Reader

Oracle demands $12K from network biz that doesn't use its software

theregister.co.uk

88 pointsfauigerzigerk24 comments

History repeats:

https://github.com/chocolatey-community/chocolatey-coreteamp...

> received a bill from Oracle for $12,200 for using the company's proprietary VirtualBox Extension Pack, which provides extra capabilities for the free GPL-licensed VirtualBox hypervisor

This still means that vanilla VirtualBox is GPL, and can be (freely) used for businesses, right?

EDIT: Looking at the downloads page, apparently so, VB is licensed with GPLv2. The Extensions Pack following that is licensed PUEL. Luckily, in my case, only vanilla was installed. But with VB's nag of new version, the possibility of a licensing bait-and-switch on a newer version and Oracle having left a bad taste... I'm uninstalling VB from all PCs except one or two devices as a precautionary measure.

...also Guest Additions are GPLv2 fortunately

Major distros should modify their version of VB to not accept Oracles version of the extensions without (1) informing users about the Foss version and (2) forwarding the user to this page first.

This is what happens when your legal department is 10 times bigger than your engineering department.

Remember kids: Oracle has no customers, only hostages!

It is unfortunate that Oracle can't put this effort into fixing their horrible contract management system so that I can get Oracle support quotes on time.

All the legacy software firms are grasping for straws like this.

What are some other ones?

Gitlab is the most modern i can think of.

In what way is gitlab legacy software?

He must have misread legacy as legendary.

IBM.

IBM/RedHat, Oracle, Microsoft, Teradata to name a few.

Hmm, selling software by embedded a purchase agreement in the EULA.

That's innovation at Oracle?

Seems like scammers should be ignored. Anyone can send you a bill, doesn't mean you should pay it.

Dear Oracle,

I am ready to pay the bill. Please reply with your bank account details.

EULA:

[ Lots of boring text ] By replying to this e-mail you irrevocably agree to a $50,000 processing fee. [ Lots of other text ]

For anyone that's curious, it seems you can check whether or not you have the Extension Pack installed with `VBoxManage list extpacks` in the CLI. I get the output "Extension Packs: 0". Not sure if that's the 'right' way to check.

Not really sure what alternative people would prefer here.

DRM to ensure it doesn't run at all unless it can contact a license server? Complete with licensing related outages?

Oracle's approach here isn't especially unusual and seems better than video game style DRM. Always run, ping home and let pirates be mopped up asynchronously or (more commonly) businesses that just aren't disciplined about licensing contacted to get proper billing in place.

If you want to sell software users can run themselves, and not just rent via a cloud service, what better approach is there?

Lots of software provides base software and free trial of premium features with time limit without a paid license.

And so does Oracle. You usually only pay if it's in production. But again - at some point there needs to be some mechanism to catch people who don't pay. All other alternatives seem to be more aggressive and worse.

If my employer's C-levels saw this headline, they'd probably just ban Oracle outright and kill me several-VM lab env.

Never let a crisis go to waste. Use it as an opportunity to get buy in for time and resources to replace VirtualBox with something more open. If you write code as part of the initiative, and it's not specific to your business, try to contribute it back to the community.

What are the best alternatives to Virtual Box?

Yes .. specifically, I use vanilla VB to drive Vagrant. I noticed that libvirt seems to be an alternative .. does it work well? Any other options?

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