Subject: Re: Kent, why do you use free software From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Fri, 29 Mar 2002 03:09:12 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3226360167283753@naggum.net> * Kenny Tilton | true... true... OTOH, I did hear one bright IT guy say Oracle had been | the death of the most companies since the Great Depression. Hyperbole, | sure, but I have heard that crud is insanely expensive (both to license | and to live with since you need their $$$$$ people just to get it to | work). People seem to have a problem, in general, to see more than what stands out the most, and then they think that what they do not see is just an extrapolation of that to which they have paid attention, although the opposite is generally true -- if something stands out, it is because it is in contrast to something else -- so when I hear that Oracle is the cause of these deaths, I think it is a case of a large amount of money and a clearly visible cost center that makes it stand out, but all of us know that we are less careful with many small amounts than few large, so when you run out of money, it is probably not because of your large expenditures but the sum of the small wastes. Rest assured that people who enjoy accounting work very hard to make many small amounts just as visible as few large amounts, but still, when it comes to reducing costs, money people always look at the largest amounts first because they offer the most savings with the least amount of effort, or so humans seem to think, which would seem to give credibility to the argument that if you were heading for a financial problem, you would get rid of the most expensive things first, which means that the choice to continue to pay licenses to Oracle will be reviewed every single time anyone needs to save money, if it is such a huge factor as you claim it is. If you cannot cut that cost, what it pays for either is necessary to your business to run at all and it costs more to use any other solution that are within reach at any time. I find it utterly unlikely that any operation would fold because of such a highly visible cost. I would be much more sympathetic to a suggestion that many much smaller licenses, such as those for Microsoft's crud, would eat up everything in small bits rather than going down with one big chunk. People have been known to use smaller database servers to reduce licensing costs, but if you have such a large operation that you cannot scale down, the only possible interpretation is that you sell your goods or services at insufficient profit. It is not like this comes as a shock to anyone, though. I mean, Oracle are quite up-front about their license agreements and you do not have to go through a lengthy lawyer-enriching process to figure out what they want, right? So factoring this into the prices of your goods and services should be simple and doable. This in contrast to such variable and unpredictable costs as taxation, which, at least in this country, regularly ruins companies with random changes and interpretations and an aggressiveness in their predatory collection that is unparalleled in the entire animal kingdom. So I kind of doubt that Oracle is worse than the IRS. /// -- In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none. In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.