A few years ago, my then-employer (a smallish company, < 150 employees) had to deal with an Oracle compliance audit. I was shocked at the time to learn that there are companies (like Palisade Compliance mentioned in this article) that specialize in Oracle license compliance. We made it through just fine (in fact I believe we managed to get a small refund!), but having been through that (though not in any way directly involved), my take is that no one should ever do business with Oracle if they can possibly avoid it.
These kinds of things are everywhere. To pick one at random, if you want to list a product on amazon.com, there's no shortage of consulting companies that will figure out how to make it happen. And then you can get a consultant for your amazon advertising (the ads that go on amazon.com to advertise other products also on amazon.com) and a consultant to help make your company the default choice when a customer clicks the buy button in the "buy box," and a few more. You can easily spend hundreds of thousands on these consultants.
Honestly, the Amazon hustle is a crazy and fascinating little ecosystem in a bunch of ways.
Spreetail, one of Nebraska’s biggest tech startups, specializes in this area. Not only for Amazon, but other marketplaces like Walmart, eBay, TikTok, etc.
I have mentally trained myself that every time I read the word "Oracle", I replace it with "Larry Ellison needs a bigger yacht". Thus far, this has worked great for me in staying away from paying that organization even one dollar.
About 10 years ago, my then-employer had an Oracle audit and they were found to owe over $500,000 in licensing fees (the initial cost was much higher but they negotiated it down). They were blatantly violating their agreement by owning a single socket license and using Oracle on a half dozen large production servers and a bunch of dev servers. The DBA that ran the licensing script said "You know we're not in compliance right?" and the company execs said "No worries, we'll negotiate a good deal".
When I started, I asked about licensing while setting up a new production server and the CTO admitted they were under licensed and were planning to true up licenses next quarter, but over a year went by and they never did. I suggested that they work on porting to Postgres or MySQL/MariaDB and get off Oracle (or at least consolidate into fewer servers to reduce the socket count), but they never had the time to do that.
The company went out of business shortly after the bill from Oracle came due (not sure if Oracle ever got any money). I'd already left by then since I saw the writing on the wall -- as soon as they stopped providing snacks in the break room and the coffee switched from Peets to Folgers, I knew they were running out of money.
I once worked for a vendor company that sold a workstation: a computer with Linux and full-fledged Oracle server with the appropriate license and a small application written in PL/SQL.
When I suggested rewriting everything in Python, the CEO explained that on the client side, this solution was bought by MBA graduates who only knew Oracle, and everything else would be suspicious to them.
As a result, clients bought a cheaper solution from competitors - Windows and a small application written in C++.
