Mars v. Oracle was dismissed at Mars’ initiative six years ago today. In those very long 72 months, Oracle has taken no legal action against any Oracle on VMware customer to affirm its licensing assertion. Oracle often claims that its customers are obligated under Oracle license agreements to license the customer’s VMware servers that are not hosting Oracle program virtual machines because of the capability of live migration to those servers. We disagree and believe that Oracle’s assertions are baseless. Apparently Oracle does too, which is why we have never seen Oracle sue out to enforce their dubious interpretation of this aspect of the Oracle license agreements.
Of course, Oracle doesn’t hesitate to go after customers where Oracle’s VMware claim is not involved, even for relatively small amounts. See Oracle America, Inc. vs. AlliantGroup, L.P., Et Al.
Four years ago, Tactical Law Group’s principal Pam Fulmer wrote a landmark blog post VMware Virtualization and the Oracle Audit: What Every Oracle Customer Needs to Know About the “Installed and/or Running” Language of the Processor Definition. In her closing paragraph, Pam wrote:
“…if you have been audited by Oracle and have purchased additional software or paid money based upon Oracle’s assertions around VMware, you may have legal options to recoup some of those costs.”
Pam meant every word when she wrote that. She means every word today.
There’s a better way than stressing over Oracle’s licensing assertions. We have backed our knowledge of Oracle licensing by the contract into our OpsCompass License Manager. OLM will detect actual licensing deficiencies as they arise.
We’ll see you all next December.
- 2017 blog post: The Sound of Silence: Celebrating the Two-Year Anniversary of the Dismissal of Mars v. Oracle.
- 2018 blog post: … Three-Year Anniversary …
- 2019 blog post: … Four-Year Anniversary …
- 2020 blog post: … Five-Year Anniversary …
