While Oracle's existing Java corporate licensing agreements are still in effect, "the Named User Plus Licensing (user licenses) and Processor licenses (server licensing) are no longer available for purchase," reports IT World Canada. And that's where it gets interesting: The new pricing model is based on employee count, with different price tiers for different employee counts. The implication is that everyone in the organization is counted for licensing purposes, even if they don't use Java software. As a result, companies that use Java SE may face significant price increases. The change will primarily affect large companies with many employees, but it will also have a significant impact on medium-sized businesses. Although Oracle promises to allow legacy users to renew under their current terms and conditions, sources say the company will likely pressure users to adopt the new model over time. The move is "likely to rile customers that have a fraction of employees who work with Java," Oracle partners told CRN, though "the added complexity is an opportunity for partners to help customers right-size their spending." Jeff Stonacek, principal architect at House of Brick Technologies, an Omaha, Neb.-based company that provides technical and licensing services to Oracle clients, and chief technical officer of House of Brick parent company OpsCompass, told CRN that the change has already affected at least one project, with his company in the middle of a license assessment for a large customer. He called the change "an obvious overstep." "Having to license your entire employee count is not reasonable because you could have 10,000 employees, maybe only 500 of them need Java," Stonacek said. "And maybe you only have a couple of servers for a couple of applications. But if you have to license for your entire employee count, that just doesn't make sense...." Stonacek and his team have been talking to customers about migrating to Open Java Development Kit (JDK), a free and open-source version of Java Standard Edition (SE), although that was a practice started before the price change. He estimated that about half of the customers his team talks to are able to easily move to OpenJDK. Sometimes, customers have third-party applications that are written for Java and unchangeable as opposed to custom applications that in-house engineers can just rewrite.... Ron Zapar, CEO of Naperville, Ill.-based Oracle partner Re-Quest, told CRN that even without a direct effect on partners from the Java license change, the move makes customers question whether they want to purchase Oracle Cloud offerings and other Oracle products lest they face future changing terms or lock-in.

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HPE and Oracle have settled their long-running legal case over alleged copyright infringement regarding Solaris software updates for HPE customers, but it looks like the nature of the settlement is going to remain under wraps. The Register reports: The pair this week informed [PDF] the judge overseeing the case that they'd reached a mutual settlement and asked for the case to be dismissed "with prejudice" -- ie, permanently. The settlement agreement is confidential, and its terms won't be made public. The case goes back to at least 2016, when Oracle filed a lawsuit against HPE over the rights to support the Solaris operating system. HPE and a third company, software support outfit Terix, were accused of offering Solaris support for customers while the latter was not an authorized Oracle partner. Big Red's complaint claimed HPE had falsely represented to customers that it and Terix could lawfully provide Solaris Updates and other support services at a lower cost than Oracle, and that the two had worked together to provide customers with access to such updates. The suit against HPE was thrown out of court in 2019, but revived in 2021 when a judge denied HPE's motion for a summary judgement in the case. Terix settled its case in 2015 for roughly $58 million. Last year, the case went to court and in June a jury found HPE guilty of providing customers with Solaris software updates without Oracle's permission, awarding the latter $30 million for copyright infringement. But that wasn't the end of the matter, because HPE was back a couple of months later to appeal the verdict, claiming the complaint by Oracle that it had directly infringed copyrights with regard to Solaris were not backed by sufficient evidence. This hinged on HPE claiming that Oracle had failed to prove that any of the patches and updates in question were actually protected by copyright, but also that Oracle could not prove HPE had any control over Terix in its purported infringement activities. Oracle for its part filed a motion asking the court for a permanent injunction against HPE to prevent it copying or distributing the Solaris software, firmware or support materials, except as allowed by Oracle. Now it appears that the two companies have come to some mutually acceptable out-of-court arrangement, as often happens in acrimonious and long-running legal disputes.

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Oracle has paid $23 million to the US Securities and Exchange Commission to settle corruption charges that subsidiaries in Turkey, United Arab Emirates and India used "slush funds" to bribe foreign officials to win business. The Register reports: The SEC said on Tuesday that Big Red violated provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) during a three-year period between 2016 and 2019. The cash that was apparently surreptitiously set aside was also spent on paying for foreign officials to attend technology conferences, which breaks Oracle's own internal policies and procedures. And the SEC said that in some instances, it found Oracle staff at the Turkish subsidiary had spent the funds on taking officials' families with them on International conferences or side trips to California. "The creation of off-books slush funds inherently gives rise to the risk those funds will be used improperly, which is exactly what happened here at Oracle's Turkey, UAE, and India subsidiaries," said Charles Cain, FCPA unit chief at the SEC. "This matter highlights the critical need for effective internal accounting controls throughout the entirety of a company's operations," he added. Oracle, without admitting or denying the findings of the SEC's investigation, has agreed to "cease and desist from committing violations" of the anti-bribery, books and records, and internal accounting controls of the FCPA, said the Commission.

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A new privacy class action claim (PDF) in the U.S. alleges Oracle's "worldwide surveillance machine" has amassed detailed dossiers on some five billion people, "accusing the company and its adtech and advertising subsidiaries of violating the privacy of the majority of the people on Earth," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The suit has three class representatives: Dr Johnny Ryan, senior fellow of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL); Michael Katz-Lacabe, director of research at The Center for Human Rights and Privacy; and Dr Jennifer Golbeck, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland -- who say they are "acting on behalf of worldwide Internet users who have been subject to Oracle's privacy violations." The litigants are represented by the San Francisco-headquartered law firm, Lieff Cabraser, which they note has run significant privacy cases against Big Tech. The key point here is there is no comprehensive federal privacy law in the U.S. -- so the litigation is certainly facing a hostile environment to make a privacy case -- hence the complaint references multiple federal, constitutional, tort and state laws, alleging violations of the Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Constitution of the State of California, the California Invasion of Privacy Act, as well as competition law, and the common law. It remains to be seen whether this "patchwork" approach to a tricky legal environment will prevail -- for an expert snap analysis of the complaint and some key challenges this whole thread is highly recommended. But the substance of the complaint hinges on allegations that Oracle collects vast amounts of data from unwitting Internet users, i.e. without their consent, and uses this surveillance intelligence to profile individuals, further enriching profiles via its data marketplace and threatening people's privacy on a vast scale -- including, per the allegations, by the use of proxies for sensitive data to circumvent privacy controls.

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After layoffs at Oracle, Business Insider spoke to current and former employees, learning that some marketing teams reportedly saw their headcount "slashed by anywhere from 30% to 50%." One former marketing employee complained that "It's just a horrible environment left. It's complete chaos...." "The common verb to describe Oracle's Advertising and Customer Experience team is that they were obliterated," said a person who works at Oracle. Insider was unable to determine exactly how many ACX employees were cut, but one person familiar said it may have reached 80% of the division... "There's no marketing anymore," a senior marketing leader who was laid off on Monday told Insider. "We're not even supposed to say we're in marketing because there is no marketing division...." One recently laid off marketing leader told Insider that their team was cut in half, and no successor has been appointed to take their place. "My team is texting me; they still have no idea who they work for," the person said. "No one told them I was gone, so they're just floating in the wind...." While the company is known for cutting workers every year, some employees said they were shocked by how many senior, experienced, and high-performing staffers were let go on Monday. For example, Oracle's code base is so complicated that it can take years before engineers are fully up to speed with how everything works, and workers with over a decade of experience were cut, some employees said. Other employees who were laid off in recent months have said they're furious they were cut before their restricted stock units were scheduled to vest, costing them tens of thousands of dollars in expected compensation. "It's just deplorable," said a recently-laid off marketing leader whose primary compensation package included stock. "I know there were people on medical leave laid off. I know people on parental leave that were laid off." The article points out that in June Oracle also reported $191 million on restructuring costs for the previous fiscal year — and another $431 million for the year before. ("Oracle did not respond to requests for comment from Insider at the time of publication.") A recently laid-off marketing employee told the site that "We've been kind of working like zombies the last couple of weeks because there's just this sense of 'What am I doing here?" Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid for sharing the article.

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Oracle has started to lay off employees in the United States, The Information said on Monday, citing a person with direct knowledge of the matter. Reuters reports: The publication in July reported that Oracle was considering cutting thousands of jobs in its global workforce after targeting cost cuts of up to $1 billion. The company had about 143,000 full-time employees as of May 31, according to its latest annual report. The layoffs at Oracle will affect employees at its offices in the San Francisco Bay Area, Monday's report said, but it did not mention the number of employees affected. The report also said layoffs in Canada, India and parts of Europe were expected in the coming weeks and months.

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Shutterfly recently moved its photo libraries to Amazon's cloud division — and became one of the companies that stopped using Oracle for it database management, Bloomberg reports: Businesses are opting to align with newer providers such as MongoDB Inc., Databricks Inc. and Snowflake Inc. instead of Oracle, the sector stalwart, as a result of changes across the enterprise technology landscape. The move to the cloud is challenging the systems of the past. Newer providers are also making it much easier to adopt their technology directly, alleviating the need for corporate purchasers to negotiate large contracts with salespeople and allowing end users to more easily pick their own tools. Offerings from the newer software makers can also be deployed without large teams of database administrators that are typically needed to support Oracle's products, a cost-saver for organizations that would otherwise have to fight against other businesses for these in-demand engineers. The evidence of the shift is widespread. JPMorgan Chase & Co. chose Cockroach Labs Inc. as the database vendor to support its new retail banking application in Europe. Nasdaq Inc. is working with closely held Databricks and Amazon.com Inc.'s Amazon Web Services, among others, in its quest to upgrade from on-premises Oracle data repositories. Alongside AWS, database products from rival cloud vendors Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google Cloud are also growing quickly. And many businesses, like JetBlue Airways Corp. and Automatic Data Processing Inc., are tapping Snowflake to help store and analyze corporate data to power sales dashboards, among other uses.... Collectively, the initiatives are just a small fragment of the estimated $155 billion database market. But it's evidence of a tectonic shift happening within the industry, one that is threatening the leadership status Oracle cultivated over the past 43 years, ever since co-founder Larry Ellison and his team brought to market the first relational database, or one in which information was organized in tables that could be more easily accessed, manipulated and analyzed.... Oracle doesn't disclose financial results specifically for its database business. Much of that revenue comes from providing support and maintenance for existing customers versus new sales. But Oracle's influence is slowly fading. While it owned an estimated 27% of the database market in 2019, that fell to 24% in 2020, per Gartner. In the same time frame, Amazon went from 17% market share to almost 21%. Oracle declined to comment for this story. Rivals are growing quickly. At MongoDB, for example, sales rose 57% to $285 million in the most recent quarter. Those results, analysts and company executives say, indicate businesses are using MongoDB for increasingly larger projects.... Oracle makes a significant portion of its revenue on existing customers. Every few years, when companies have to renew their contracts, Oracle can raise prices for maintenance and support — a business with margins hovering around 95%, according to Craig Guarente, a 16-year veteran of Oracle who is now CEO and co-founder of consulting firm Palisade Compliance. "The entire profit of the company comes from Oracle database maintenance," he said. With each contract negotiation, "you go from paying $20 million a year, to $30 million a year, to paying $50 million a year."

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TikTok's national security clash with the U.S. government may be nearing its conclusion, without the sort of shareholder overhaul that was previously proposed. From a report: The social media company is in advanced talks with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to store all of its U.S. user information with Oracle, without Chinese owner ByteDance being able to access it, as first reported by Reuters and confirmed by Axios. Data sovereignty has been the core regulatory concern since this all began in mid-2020, at least for career staff. Certain political appointees of the Trump administration also expressed fears that the Chinese government could use TikTok to influence U.S. political or social sentiment, but content moderation seems outside the scope of current talks.

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Oracle is expected to pay more than $30 billion including debt for electronic-medical-records company Cerner, WSJ reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. From a report: The all-cash deal is expected to be announced later Monday and value Cerner at about $95 a share, one of the people said.

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The Oracle JDK "is available free of charge for production use again," reports InfoQ, under a new "Oracle No-Fee Terms and Conditions" license. The move, announced in mid-September, "reverses a 2018 decision to charge for Oracle JDK production use and does not affect Oracle's OpenJDK distribution," they write, noting that the new license "applies to the recently released version 17 of Oracle JDK and future versions." Donald Smith, Senior Director of Product Management at Oracle, explained the reason for this decision in a recent blog post, writing: "Providing Oracle OpenJDK builds under the GPL was highly welcomed, but feedback from developers, academia, and enterprises was that they wanted the trusted, rock-solid Oracle JDK under an unambiguously free terms license, too. Oracle appreciates the feedback from the developer ecosystem and are pleased to announce that as of Java 17 we are delivering on exactly that request." Smith explicitly stated that the No-Fee Terms and Conditions license "includes commercial and production use" [although the license does not seem to highlight this fact] and stated that "redistribution is permitted as long as it is not for a fee."

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The U.S. Supreme Court turned away a lingering appeal by Oracle stemming from its challenge to the now-scrapped $10 billion cloud-computing contract the Pentagon awarded to Microsoft in 2019. From a report: The rejection was a formality given the Defense Department's decision in July to drop the contract and divide the work among multiple bidders, potentially between Microsoft and Amazon. Oracle's appeal centered on alleged conflicts of interest involving Amazon, and on claims that the Pentagon violated its own rules when it set up the contract to be awarded to a single firm.

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The Supreme Court of California has thrown out Oracle's appeal against a decision to award $3 billion damages to HPE in a case which dates back a decade and relates to Big Red's commitment to develop on Itanium hardware. From a report:On Wednesday, the court denied a review of Oracle's appeal against a summary judgement, apparently without comment or any written dissents. The decision follows a ruling made in the California Court of Appeal that affirmed HPE's $3.14bn win for alleged contract violation, stating that an agreement between the firms had created a legal obligation for Oracle to support software on HPE's Itanium server. The case hinged on the companies' statements that they had a "longstanding strategic relationship" and a "mutual desire to continue to support their mutual customers." The agreement stated that Oracle, for its part, "will continue to offer its product suite on HP platforms" while HPE "will continue to support Oracle products (including Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM) on its hardware." The ruling reads: "We conclude that the second sentence, moreover, does more than declare an aspiration or intent to continue working together, as Oracle claims. It commits the parties to continue the actions specified (Oracle offering its product suite and HP supporting the products)," as it had done previously.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: With great fanfare last week, 44 attorneys general hit Google with two antitrust complaints, following a landmark lawsuit the Justice Department and 11 states lodged against the Alphabet Inc. unit in October. What's less known is that Oracle Corp. spent years working behind the scenes to convince regulators and law enforcement agencies in Washington, more than 30 states, the European Union, Australia and at least three other countries to rein in Google's huge search-and-advertising business. Those efforts are paying off. Officials in more than a dozen of the states that sued Google received what has been called Oracle's "black box" presentation showing how Google tracks users' personal information, said Ken Glueck, Oracle's top Washington lobbyist and the architect of the company's antitrust campaign against Google. Glueck outlined for Bloomberg the presentation, which often entails putting an Android phone inside a black briefcase to show how Google collects users' location details -- even when the phones aren't in use -- and confirmed the contours of the pressure campaign. "I couldn't be happier," said Glueck about the barrage of lawsuits. "As far as I can tell, there are more states suing Google than there are states." Oracle has fallen behind the tech giants in the marketplace, yet is notching one legal and regulatory win after another against them, Google especially. In response, Google spokesman Jose Castaneda denounced Oracle's "cloak-and-dagger lobbying campaign," saying "while Oracle describes itself as the biggest data broker on the planet, we're focused on keeping consumers' information safe and secure."

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Oracle said on Friday it's moving its headquarters from the Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas. CNBC reports: "Oracle is implementing a more flexible employee work location policy and has changed its Corporate Headquarters from Redwood City, California to Austin, Texas. We believe these moves best position Oracle for growth and provide our personnel with more flexibility about where and how they work," a spokesperson confirmed to CNBC. A bulk of employees can choose their office location, or continue to work from home part time or full time, the company said. "In addition, we will continue to support major hubs for Oracle around the world, including those in the United States such as Redwood City, Austin, Santa Monica, Seattle, Denver, Orlando and Burlington, among others, and we expect to add other locations over time," Oracle said. "By implementing a more modern approach to work, we expect to further improve our employees' quality of life and quality of output." Oracle is one of Silicon Valley's older success stories, founded in Santa Clara in 1977. It moved into its current headquarters in 1989. Several of the buildings on its campus there are constructed in the shape of a squat cylinder, which is the classic symbol in computer systems design for a database, the product on which Oracle built its empire.

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Dave Knott quotes the CBC: The owner of TikTok has chosen Oracle over Microsoft as its preferred suitor to buy the popular video-sharing app, according to a source familiar with the deal. Microsoft announced Sunday that its bid to buy TikTok was rejected, removing a leading suitor for the Chinese-owned app a week before President Donald Trump promises to follow through with a plan to ban it in the U.S. The Trump administration has threatened to ban TikTok by mid-September and ordered ByteDance to sell its U.S. business, claiming national-security risks due to its Chinese ownership. The U.S. government worries about user data being funnelled to Chinese authorities.

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A U.S. appeals court rejected Oracle's challenges to the Pentagon's disputed $10 billion cloud-computing contract. From a report: Oracle had raised a number of issues, including allegations of conflicts of interest with Amazon.com, and claims the Pentagon violate its own rules when it set up the contract to be awarded to a single firm. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a lower court ruling that Oracle wasn't harmed by any errors the Pentagon made in developing the contract proposal because it wouldn't have qualified for the contract anyway. Oracle was fighting its exclusion from seeking the lucrative cloud-computing deal, known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI. The Pentagon awarded the contract to Microsoft in October over market leader Amazon Web Services. The project, which is valued at as much as $10 billion over a decade, is designed to help the Pentagon consolidate its technology programs and quickly move information to warfighters around the world.

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President Trump voiced support on Tuesday for Oracle to buy the U.S. operations of TikTok, adding a fresh wrinkle to the bidding for the Chinese-owned video-sharing app. From a report: Oracle is a new entrant in the negotiations for TikTok, whose owner ByteDance is facing a fall deadline from the Trump administration to divest itself of its U.S. operations. Oracle, a giant in business software, has had preliminary discussions about teaming with some of ByteDance's existing minority investors to buy TikTok's U.S. operations but it isn't clear how advanced the talks are, said people familiar with the matter. Microsoft said earlier this month it was in negotiations with ByteDance, and that it was coordinating with the White House. Twitter is also exploring a bid, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. Oracle has closer ties to the White House than most other parties involved in the bidding. Larry Ellison, the company's co-founder, chairman and largest shareholder, earlier this year threw a fundraiser at his house for the president. Chief Executive Safra Catz also worked on the executive committee for the Trump transition team in 2016. Asked Tuesday if Oracle would be a good buyer for TikTok, President Trump said, "Well I think Oracle is a great company and I think its owner is a tremendous guy, a tremendous person. I think that Oracle would be certainly somebody that could handle it."

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phalse phace writes: Oracle has entered the race to acquire TikTok [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], the popular Chinese-owned short video app that President Donald Trump has vowed to shut down unless it is taken over by a US company by mid-November, people briefed about the matter have said. The tech company co-founded by Larry Ellison had held preliminary talks with TikTok's Chinese owner, ByteDance, and was seriously considering purchasing the app's operations in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the people said. Oracle was working with a group of US investors that already own a stake in ByteDance, including General Atlantic and Sequoia Capital, the people added. Microsoft has been the lead contender to buy TikTok since it publicly said in early August that it had held discussions to explore a purchase of the app's US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand businesses. Microsoft has also seriously considered a bid to take over TikTok's global operations beyond the countries it outlined this month, people briefed on the company's thinking have said. The Redmond, Washington-based company is particularly interested in buying TikTok in Europe and India, where the video app has been banned by Narendra Modi, Indian prime minister. ByteDance is opposed to selling any assets beyond those in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, said a person close to the company.

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