The Service Industry Association has sent the Department of Justice another complaint about Oracle’s pricing.
These are not just a bunch of schmoes in their pajamas playing with their moms’ old XP laptops. These are the heavy hitters of the service industry. Oracle’s support group is one of their sponsors!
Access to upgrades is restricted, the complaint states. Customers returning to Oracle support after trying something else are whacked with huge “return” fees. Oracle demands it must support all a customer’s Sun hardware or none at all.
It’s the most onorous and draconian policy of any hardware maker, the complaint concludes. It’s as if the Sun set over the shire and everyone’s now in Mordor. (Or, to go with the picture above, they killed all the Ewoks and blew up Alderaan. Or as they say at the Ole Miss campus, It’s a trap!)
Any sympathy for these devils? Or is it a case of boo-(insert George Carlin line here) hoo.
We are not talking about the Oracle database here. We are talking about Sun hardware. Last I checked there was competition in the hardware space. There is no monopoly here for Oracle to abuse. If a supplier wants to put its customers on the rack, they know their options.
One of those options is open source. Go open with everything you own, spend whatever you need to do to get out of the proprietary trap. Or seek support from somewhere else and promise never, ever ever to buy anything from Oracle ever again. Ever.
Of course, chances are if you’re an enterprise customer you are, in fact, tied to an Oracle database. And switching out a server farm is easier said than done.
On the other hand this reads like the biggest market opportunity IBM has gotten in ages. Or Microsoft. Or Accenture. Or Dell. Or HP. Or Amazon, for that matter. SQL can be translated, Oracle is SQL, and if there are a mess of angry customers out there your job is to go get them.
Clouds, anyone?
Of course the complainants in this case didn’t buy Oracle hardware. They bought Sun hardware. If we’re to leave them on their own in this case then anyone who buys anything has to watch their backs in case that supplier is bought by someone nasty. There oughta be a law!
Ought there?
Or ought there not?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a journalist, writer and part-time futurist for over 30 years.
