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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

How Oracle handles Java (business-wise, not in technological terms) is one of the things that tells me that Oracle is still the toxic company it's always been.

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They also buried a call home into the VBox Guest Extensions and eventually started sending legal demands to companies as well. Because while VBox was open license, the VBox Guest Extensions have a non-commercial use license by default but that doesn't stop VBox from asking you to install them innocently on the first run.

Also 3 years ago, the guy in charge of a Oracle database we had (now migrated to MSSQL) accidentally downloaded the wrong Oracle database software from their portal. It turns out Oracle just lets you download any variant in their portal and then just send you legal demands for payment when you accidentally use a higher tier than you licensed. Something they can absolutely fix themselves to prevent. Of course we told them to fuck off since we didn't use any feature specific to the other tier and deployed the correct variant.

Assuming that you are using the Standard Edition/2 of the database, this is licensed at $17,500/core. On x86, there is a 2-for-1 core discount.

If you download Enterprise Edition and use it to perform an upgrade from your SE2 database, then you will then be on the hook for the full $47,500/core.

There are two ways to undo this license change. a) Run "catdwgrd.sql" to get back to the SE2 release, then upgrade again with the correct license, or b) unload all of the data in the database (via exp/imp or data pump), then load it into a new database that is created with the correct license.

Staying on an EE database will certainly place you on the new pricing tier.

> They also buried a call home into the VBox Guest Extensions

This is incorrect and actively misleading, because you are conflating 2 different things.

The Virtualbox Guest Additions are 100% FOSS and are included in many distros, including Ubuntu -- `apt install -y virtualbox-guest-x11` -- as well as being an optional extra with VirtualBox itself as an ISO file.