If there’s controversy in the enterprise software industry, chances are Oracle is somehow involved. It’s cheaper than advertising, after all.
Today, Forbes reported that Intel is still trying to get Oracle to reconsider its dual-core licensing policy, and Oracle is holding firm that two cores = two processors = $ x 2. (For more on dual-core licensing issues, see this earlier post.) What was interesting to me about the Forbes piece was not that Intel wants Oracle to change its mind– no surprise there, they want to push dual core chips– or that Oracle won’t, but the way BEA approaches dual core licensing. They charge a 25% premium for software running on such machines, which they claim hasn’t exactly made customers happy, but hasn’t hurt sales, either. This seems a more reasonable approach, if you’re going to use CPU-based licensing in the first place, since it ties much more closely to the performance gains of the systems.