⚖️ LAWSUIT FILED: Oracle vs. [INSERT COMPANY] — license non-compliance. Estimated settlement: your entire IT budget. 💰 SUPPORT FEES: Annual support renewal now 22% of license cost. You cannot cancel this. You signed a contract in 2004. ☕ JAVA: Oracle charges enterprises for Java SE. Free for personal use. Your company uses it. Pay up. We are watching. 🛥️ LARRY UPDATE: Ellison's 450-foot yacht "Rising Sun" docked in Hawaii, which he now effectively owns 98% of. He is fine. ☁️ CLOUD: Oracle Cloud holds ~2% of the market. We are catching up. We have been catching up since 2012. Catching up is our cloud strategy. 🤝 TIKTOK: Oracle partnered with TikTok to store US data in 2020. Larry Ellison is a Trump donor. TikTok was not banned. These facts are unrelated. 🏥 CERNER: We acquired healthcare IT company Cerner for $28.3 billion and immediately began implementing Oracle's signature "integration by chaos" methodology.

Oracle Corporation — Est. 1977

Your Data.
Our License Fee.
Their Lawyers.

Oracle provides mission-critical database, cloud, and enterprise software solutions that your company cannot stop using no matter how much it wants to. We've been the world's largest enterprise software vendor since before your CTO was born. You're locked in. That's a feature.

      * By visiting this website you acknowledge Oracle's right to audit your software estate at any time.

      * Pricing provided upon request. The request will take 6–8 weeks. Pricing will be wrong.

      * "Unlimited" license means unlimited within specific processor metrics we define retrospectively.

$50B

Annual revenue

~$20B is support fees for software you already paid for

~40%

Gross margin on support

The most profitable division. You cannot cancel support.

130+

Major lawsuits filed since 2010

Google, SAP, HP, Rimini Street, various customers

$136B

Larry Ellison net worth

↑ ticking since page load

// license compliance

The Oracle License Audit™
Experience

Oracle's License Management Services (LMS) team can arrive at your premises with 72 hours notice. Audits are written into most enterprise contracts. The average enterprise audit finds $500,000–$3M in "non-compliance." Customers overwhelmingly settle to avoid protracted legal costs. This is not a shakedown. It is a "compliance review."

oracle_lms_audit_tool_v4.2.exe — YOUR COMPANY INC

ORCL-LMS> initialize_audit --target="YOUR_COMPANY" --scope=ALL

Scanning software estate... [████████████████] 100%

Database instances found: 47

Licensed instances: 12

⚠ ALERT: Virtual machine detected. Oracle counts all vCPUs on host.

⚠ ALERT: Developer used Oracle on personal laptop in 2019. This counts.

⚠ ALERT: Java SE 8 detected on 3,400 endpoints. Enterprise license required.

⚠ ALERT: Unlimited License Agreement clause 4.7(b) retroactively applied.

⚠ ALERT: Third-party support provider detected. Your warranty is now void.

✗ VIOLATION: Processor metric undercounted by factor of 2.5x (our definition)

✗ VIOLATION: Named User Plus licenses insufficient for concurrent users

✗ VIOLATION: Oracle Forms used in cloud environment without cloud addendum

✗ VIOLATION: Support contract lapsed Q3 2022. All usage since: unlicensed.

TOTAL LIABILITY CALCULATED: $4,200,000 – $7,800,000

SETTLEMENT OFFER AVAILABLE: $2,900,000 (expires in 10 business days)

✓ Your Oracle sales rep has been notified and will call within the hour.

✓ A relationship management meeting has been scheduled for next Tuesday.

// Note: Oracle sales reps receive commission on audit settlements.

// Note: This audit is not independent. Your auditor is our employee.

Real talk: Oracle's audit program is well-documented by enterprise IT lawyers. The playbook: audit clause in contract → LMS team arrives → metrics calculated using Oracle's own definitions (which are deliberately complex) → settlement offer for less than the "liability" → customer pays to make it go away. Rimini Street, a third-party Oracle support company, sued Oracle for anticompetitive audit tactics. They won in 2023. Oracle appealed.

// enterprise pricing

Simple, Transparent Pricing™

Oracle pricing is publicly available on their website. The list prices are fictional. Nobody pays list price. Your actual price will be determined by a 3-month negotiation, your company's size, how much Oracle thinks you need them, which quarter it is, and whether your procurement team has ever heard the word "no."

Product	List Price	What You'll Actually Pay	What You Can't Do Without Paying More	Exit Strategy
Oracle Database Enterprise Edition The flagship. Runs everything. You need it.	$47,500 per processor	$18,000–$95,000 depending on who you know + 22%/yr support, forever	Partitioning. Compression. Diagnostics. RAC. Each is a $23,000 add-on called an "option."	None. You've been running this for 15 years. Migrating would cost more than the licenses.
Java SE Subscription After Oracle bought Sun in 2010 and changed the Java SE license in 2019	$15–$25 per user/month	~$150–$300/user/year For enterprise. Multiplied by every employee who has Java anywhere.	Using Java 8+ commercially. Running any JVM-based application at work. Using Android (which uses Java). Breathing near a server.	Switch to OpenJDK (free, mostly works). Oracle will audit you for past use anyway.
Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP Formerly PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel. None of them talk to each other.	$625–$1,500 per user/month	$200–$800/user/month after 18 months of "negotiation" + implementation: $5M–$40M	Customisation requires Oracle's proprietary tools. Every upgrade breaks your customisations. Oracle calls this "upgrade path assurance."	SAP. Which has all the same problems but different ones.
Oracle APEX (formerly Application Express) Low-code. Technically included with DB license. Technically.	$0 "free" with database	$47,500/processor for the database it runs on So: not free	Anything interesting requires the Enterprise Edition options that each cost $23,000/processor.	There are good free alternatives. Oracle's sales team will call you before you research them.
Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud. Self-driving. Self-securing. Self-patching. Mostly.	$0.3408–$1.0000 per OCPU/hour	"Talk to sales." OCPU is Oracle's own compute unit. Direct AWS comparison is deliberately difficult. Their math: always cheaper. Your math: usually not.	Running on non-Oracle cloud. Getting your data out. Leaving.	Data egress fees. Lots of them.
Annual Technical Support Premier Support. You cannot run Oracle without it. This is how Oracle makes half its money.	22% of license per year. Forever.	Non-negotiable. If you drop it, you lose all patches, security updates, and rights to re-purchase at current price. This is the gun to your head.	Everything. Without support you cannot legally patch your Oracle software. Your security team will not let you run unpatched Oracle.	Rimini Street offers third-party support for less. Oracle sued them for 12 years. Rimini won most counts in 2023.

// the chairman

Lawrence Joseph Ellison
Founder, CTO, Executive Chairman, Sole Reason Oracle Exists

🧔

Larry Ellison

// KING OF ENTERPRISE

Age: 80 (still in the office)

Net worth: ~$136B (12th richest person)

Voting control: ~40% of ORCL shares

Marriages: 5 (confirmed)

Yachts: 5+ including 450-ft Rising Sun

Aircraft: MiG-29, Marchetti S.211, Boeing 194

Island owned: Lānaʻi, Hawaii (98% of it)

Competitive hobbies: America's Cup sailing, tennis tournaments he hosts himself, and suing Google

Role at Oracle: CTO (the "T" is for Tenacious)

🏝️

He Bought an Island

Ellison purchased 98% of Lānaʻi, Hawaii's sixth-largest island, for $300 million in 2012. He has since been building infrastructure, running the water company, and funding experimental wellness projects. The remaining 2% includes a Buddhist religious site and two roads. He does not own those. Yet.

⛵

The America's Cup Obsession

Ellison has spent hundreds of millions on yacht racing, including bankrolling Oracle Team USA's America's Cup campaigns. In 2013 his team won from 8-1 down in one of sport's greatest comebacks. The boat was later found to have cheated in a preliminary series. Oracle accepted a 2-point penalty. They still won.

✈️

The Fighter Jet

Ellison owns and flies a MiG-29, a Russian supersonic fighter aircraft. He was banned from flying it near San Jose airport after noise complaints. He moved it to a different airport. The aircraft is one of very few privately owned supersonic fighter jets in the US. This is legal.

🏠

The Japanese Village

Ellison's primary residence in Woodside, California, is a 23-acre compound he spent 12 years and $200 million building to resemble a 16th century Japanese feudal village. It includes a man-made lake, a teahouse, and a koi pond. Local building inspectors were involved more than once.

"When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for everyone telling you you're nuts." — Larry Ellison, who sued Google for $9 billion for using Java in Android, lost the damages claim, and still considers this a win because it "established principles." — Various Oracle earnings calls, 2012–2022

💊

The Longevity Project

Ellison has donated over $430 million to anti-aging and longevity research through the Ellison Medical Foundation and other vehicles. His stated goal: to not die. He has described death as "not fair." He is currently 80 and shows no intention of stopping.

🏛️

The Trump Connection

Ellison held a fundraiser for Donald Trump in 2024 at his Lānaʻi estate. He is a significant Republican donor. Shortly after, Oracle won a major US government cloud contract and the TikTok deal advanced. The Oracle campus in Texas received significant investment. These events are presented without comment.

// legal department (largest division by headcount)

Oracle Litigation: A Selected History

Oracle is widely considered the most litigious major technology company in the world. The company has sued customers, competitors, former employees, governments, and the company that tried to help customers pay less for Oracle support. This is not an exhaustive list. An exhaustive list would require its own website.

1992

Oracle Corporation vs. Itself (SEC Enforcement)

The SEC charged Oracle with securities fraud after the company overstated revenue by booking deals that hadn't closed and recording fictitious sales. Oracle agreed to a $100M restatement. Larry Ellison was not charged personally. Oracle stock dropped 80% in one day in 1990 during this period.

◆ SETTLED — $100M accounting restatement

2010

Oracle vs. SAP (TomorrowNow)

Oracle sued SAP for $4 billion, alleging its subsidiary TomorrowNow downloaded millions of Oracle support documents without authorization to support customers. SAP admitted its subsidiary did this, apologised, and shut it down. Oracle initially won a $1.3B jury verdict — later reduced.

◆ SETTLED — $356M (SAP paid)

2010–2023

Oracle vs. Google (Java / Android)

Oracle claimed Google's use of 37 Java API packages in Android infringed Oracle's copyright. Oracle sought $9 billion in damages. Google argued APIs are not copyrightable. The case went to the Supreme Court twice. The Supreme Court ruled 6-2 for Google in 2021 on fair use grounds. Oracle announced it was "disappointed."

◆ LOST — Supreme Court ruled for Google, 2021

2014

Oracle vs. HP (Itanium Servers)

Oracle announced it would stop developing software for HP's Itanium servers, which HP claimed was breach of contract — Itanium customers ran Oracle and were now stranded. HP sued. Oracle countersued. A jury found Oracle breached its contract and awarded HP $3 billion.

◆ LOST — $3B jury verdict against Oracle (later settled on appeal for undisclosed amount)

2010–2023

Oracle vs. Rimini Street (Ongoing Saga)

Oracle sued third-party support firm Rimini Street for copyright infringement for how it delivered Oracle support to customers. Rimini Street argued Oracle's auditing and support restrictions were anticompetitive. Rimini won major rulings in 2023. Oracle has refiled and continued litigation. This has been going on for 13 years.

◆ ONGOING — Multiple rulings, Rimini won key 2023 counts. Oracle appealing.

2022

FTC vs. Oracle (Data Privacy)

The FTC investigated Oracle's data broker practices — specifically the Oracle Data Cloud which holds profiles on ~5 billion people globally, including purchase history, location data, and inferred political and religious views sold to advertisers and governments. Complaints were filed by privacy advocates citing GDPR-equivalent concerns.

◆ ONGOING — Settlement discussions. Oracle paid $115M in a separate class action in 2022.

Every year

Oracle vs. [Oracle Customer] — License Audits

Oracle's License Management Services team conducts hundreds of audits per year. Customers found non-compliant (by Oracle's definitions) typically settle for between $500K and $10M. Customers who refuse settlement are sued. Multiple enterprise customers have sued Oracle in return for audit practices described as "in bad faith." Results vary.

◆ ORACLE USUALLY WINS (or settles for enough to call it a win)

// intellectual property

Java: We Own That Now

Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010 for $7.4 billion, inheriting Java — the most widely-used programming language in the world. Sun had maintained Java as largely open and free. Oracle changed the Java SE license in 2019 to require a paid subscription for commercial use. The developer community reacted with the kind of fury reserved for people who've just had a free thing taken away.

☕ ORACLE JAVA SE — LICENSE CHANGE NOTIFICATION v2019.01

EFFECTIVE

January 2019. Retroactive auditing may cover prior use.

WHAT CHANGED

Java SE 8 update 211 and later requires a paid commercial license for use in production environments. Prior versions remain free for now. Future versions: also paid. OpenJDK remains free under GPL. Oracle will audit you for using the wrong one and claiming it was OpenJDK.

WHO'S AFFECTED

Any company using Java SE for commercial purposes. 3 billion devices run Java (Oracle's own 2023 marketing claim). Industry estimate: 60–70% of enterprise Java deployments are now technically non-compliant since 2019. Most CIOs do not know this.

HOW TO COMPLY

Option A: Pay Oracle $15–$25/employee/month for Java SE Universal Subscription.
Option B: Switch to OpenJDK (free, maintained by the community Oracle sued).
Option C: Hope Oracle doesn't audit you.
Note: Option C is not a compliance strategy. Oracle knows.

ORACLE'S POSITION

"We invest billions in Java. Commercial users should contribute to that investment." — This is technically true and completely ignores that Sun gave Java to the world for 15 years under Oracle's predecessor. The community built much of the ecosystem Oracle now monetises.

DEVELOPER RESPONSE

Mass migration to Amazon Corretto, Eclipse Temurin, Microsoft's OpenJDK builds — all free, all based on OpenJDK. Oracle's Java market share in new projects has declined significantly. Oracle's revenue from Java licensing has increased significantly. Both things are true simultaneously.

// cloud infrastructure

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure™
We are definitely catching up. Any day now.

Oracle launched its second-generation cloud in 2016, after its first attempt (Oracle Cloud v1) was largely unsuccessful. OCI has genuinely improved and offers competitive pricing in some categories. Oracle's cloud market share remains approximately 2–3%. Amazon Web Services has ~32%. Here is a visual representation.

Amazon Web Services~32% market share

AWS — Earth's Cloud

Microsoft Azure~23% market share

Azure

Google Cloud~12% market share

GCP

Alibaba Cloud~4% market share

Alibaba

Oracle Cloud (OCI)~2% market share

OCI ← we are here

Growing at 45% YoY. Oracle insists this is fine. Also: they made a deal with Microsoft to run OCI inside Azure datacenters. This means some of Oracle's "cloud" growth is literally running on Microsoft's cloud. Oracle considers this a partnership. Observers consider it telling.

The AI angle: Oracle signed a deal to host OpenAI workloads and has invested heavily in GPU infrastructure. OCI's price per GPU-hour is genuinely competitive with AWS and Azure. The AI boom may be Oracle's actual cloud growth driver. This is the most legitimate positive thing on this entire page about Oracle cloud. Enjoy it.

// growth by acquisition

Oracle's Acquisition Strategy:
Buy, Integrate Poorly, Charge More

Oracle has completed 130+ acquisitions since 1994. The pattern: identify a market-leading product, acquire it, integrate it into the Oracle suite (which takes 5–8 years), raise prices, restrict customisation, and eventually force customers to migrate to Fusion Cloud ERP which also doesn't work well yet.

Company
Details
Price
Outcome

PeopleSoft

HR & ERP software

Oracle launched a hostile takeover bid in 2003. PeopleSoft's CEO Craig Conway called it "predatory" and "illogical." Conway was fired by his own board months later. Oracle won after 18 months of hostility. PeopleSoft customers were told their product would be maintained. It was "maintained" until Oracle Fusion Cloud replaced it.

$10.3B

Absorbed into Fusion. PeopleSoft-as-was: sunset.

Siebel Systems

CRM pioneer

Siebel was the dominant CRM vendor before Salesforce. Oracle acquired it in 2006. Oracle's version of Siebel CRM is still used by large enterprises. It has a UI from 2003. Oracle is aware. They are working on it. They have been working on it since 2006.

$5.85B

Still running. Technically.

Sun Microsystems

Java, Solaris, MySQL

Oracle beat IBM to acquire Sun in 2010. Sun was the creator of Java, Solaris, MySQL, and OpenOffice among others. Oracle proceeded to: monetise Java aggressively, let Solaris decline, neglect MySQL (causing MariaDB fork), and kill OpenOffice (Apache OpenOffice lives on without Oracle). Sun employees described Oracle's culture as "everything we hated about corporate software."

$7.4B

Java: monetised. Solaris: dying. MySQL: neglected. OpenOffice: killed.

Eloqua

Marketing automation

Acquired to compete with Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Became Oracle Marketing Cloud. Several rounds of UI redesign. Integration with the rest of Oracle's CX suite took approximately 7 years and is considered "mostly done."

$871M

Exists. Used.

Cerner

Healthcare IT

Oracle's largest ever acquisition. Cerner provides EHR (electronic health records) to most major US hospitals. Oracle's stated plan: run Cerner on OCI, add AI, modernise. Cerner's actual situation since acquisition: mass layoffs, executive departures, customer complaints about project delays, the Indian Health Service contract facing scrutiny. Integration: ongoing.

$28.3B

Turbulent integration. Still ongoing.

TikTok (partial)

US data partner, 2020

Oracle became TikTok's "trusted technology partner" in 2020 to store US user data on OCI, as part of the Trump administration's pressure on ByteDance. Oracle received a 12.5% stake. The deal was never fully consummated. TikTok was not banned. Oracle's relationship with TikTok and its political adjacency have been subjects of ongoing scrutiny.

N/A (stake)

Complicated. Ongoing.

// customer support

Oracle Support Plans
You will pay. The only question is how much.

Oracle's support model is legendarily controversial. Premier Support is mandatory for most products and costs 22% of license value per year. "Sustaining Support" — the cheaper alternative — does not include new fixes, patches, security updates, or tax/regulatory updates. It is support in name only. Many customers pay Premier Support for decades for software they can't afford to migrate away from.

Premier Support

22% of license/year

Security patches and critical fixes

Tax and regulatory updates (ERP)

Access to My Oracle Support portal

Telephone support (hold time: varies)

You cannot cancel without losing all patch rights

Pricing increases 8% every 3–4 years ("inflationary")

Resolving a ticket: average 14–90 business days

Assigned support engineer: rarely the same person twice

MANDATORY — you signed the contract

Sustaining Support

10% of license/year

Access to existing fixes (no new ones)

Existing patches (none from the last update cycle)

No new security patches (your CISO will not accept this)

No new regulatory or tax updates

No new upgrade scripts

Oracle will use this tier to encourage you to upgrade to the cloud

You lose access to Premier Support benefits permanently if you drop down

TECHNICALLY AVAILABLE — practically unusable

Rimini Street Support

~50% of Oracle's price

Third-party support at roughly half Oracle's cost

Custom fixes for your specific version

Named engineers who know your system

Tax and regulatory updates (custom-built)

Oracle sued them for 12 years

Oracle will audit you more aggressively if you switch

Your Oracle sales rep will call you repeatedly

Oracle may change license terms to make this harder

ORACLE HATES THIS — they sued. Rimini won. Mostly.

"Just Leave Oracle"

$10M+ migration cost estimate

No more license audits (eventually)

No more support renewal emails

Competitors: PostgreSQL (free), MySQL (free), SQL Server, Snowflake

Data migration: 2–5 years

Re-training all staff and DBAs

Rewriting custom PL/SQL procedures

Oracle will audit you for the period up to migration

Your board will ask why this wasn't done 10 years ago

OPTIMAL LONG-TERM — agonising short-term

// founder compensation

Larry Ellison Wealth Accumulation
Since You Loaded This Page

$0.00

estimated net worth growth since page load (~$1,900/second based on Oracle stock + dividends + holdings)

$136B

Current estimated net worth

$67M

2023 annual compensation package (salary + stock)

Major yachts including the 450-ft Rising Sun

98%

Of Lānaʻi island, Hawaii, that he owns

$400M+

Donated to longevity / anti-aging research

For scale: Ellison's net worth is approximately equal to the GDP of Ecuador ($115B). Oracle's annual technical support revenue alone — the fees you pay every year just to keep your Oracle software patched — exceeds $10 billion. Ellison founded Oracle with $1,400 in initial capital in 1977, modelled on a CIA database project spec he read about in a computer science journal. He did not build the original product himself; his co-founders did while he sold it.

Your Data.Our License Fee.Their Lawyers.

🧾 Oracle Quote Request

Your Data.
Our License Fee.
Their Lawyers.