Oracle Caves on Multicore Licensing

Well, I called their previous policy as stupid. Now it's stupid AND weird.

Oracle Caves on Multicore Licensing: "Oracle has finally caved�a little�to industry outrage over its refusal to get in line with competitors IBM and Microsoft and update its licensing policy to accommodate multicore chips.

Licensing terms for the Oracle Store Web site now state that, for the purposes of counting how many processors need to be licensed, a multicore chip with 'n' cores will be multiplied by 0.75. Oracle will then round up fractions to the next whole number."

For the record, Microsoft and IBM make no special terms for multi-core processors. One processor is one processor. The article has some more detail, my prediction is they'll go farther. It also touches on the multi-core vs. virtualization question.

It isn't unusual now to see IT departments using VMWare Server, and running a dozen or more virtual machines on it. Ever wonder how the software is licensed in those cases? To the letter of license agreements, software is licensed to the hardware capabilities... period. As this article explains:

Right now, Microsoft charges based on hardware capabilities irrespective of software partitioning or virtualization. A user site might have 1,000 virtual machines running 1,000 instances of the same application, deployed on a four-processor computer, he said. Under current policy, the user would be charged for four processors, not for running the application 1,000 times.

So, the savings on operating systems alone offset the cost of hardware for a nice VM server. It's a no-brainer.