They offered a free tier and forced me to choose a shape. I chose the smallest of the two “shapes” but it was apparently not free. This was not especially clear until I got my first bill (it was extortionate; like 60eur/mo for 1cpu/2g ram) so I stopped/removed the instance.
This did not prevent me from being billed the next month, or the next month. They charged me until my card expired- then they finally cancelled the account and I paid the last bill manually. They then added another 0.1SEK charge (which is not payable, as 1SEK is the lowest denomination of currency).
I still get extremely high quantities of A4 paper through the mail box, at one point it was 29 pages of the same invoice.
I could have done something wrong here, but there is a distinct dark pattern on sign up and there are definitely bugs in the billing system.
Similar problem to me when they acquired apiary. I was in a free tier of apiary which became a paid tier under oracle. They then charged me for months. I finally had to write a letter (yes snail mail) stating that we were going to report them for deceptive trade practices to the attorney general of Texas. They got back to me after a few weeks. They promised a refund…never got that and it’s just not worth fighting.
I will never choose to do business with oracle directly.
It's almost as if now that SCO is fully defunct, they are trying really hard to take the crown of most litigious and absurd *nix related software company in the USA.
Some might think this is a joke, but the IT manager at one place I worked was almost fooled into thinking he had to pay licenses for our MariaDB databases running on AWS after Oracle had got his name from a web form.
This is a different company than the other one I mentioned elsewhere where we resold Oracle and they still tried to extort us.
I figure that info is out there in the wild in the hands of criminals after countless data breaches.
And I'm less worried about those criminals having my data than Oracle. I think they only see the world in two colors: 1) Current customers 2) people to sue. And lots of #1 are in the second category as well.
I wonder what happens if you sign up with a fake name, semi-disposable email address and a prepaid visa gift card that has $3.50 remaining balance on it.
And they do an excellent job as Java’s language steward. Java was revived and has many excellent research and development going for it. Project Loom, Panama, Valhalla came to mind. They also made a low-latency GC.
Did you miss the part where they tried to burn the entire computing industry to the ground so they could get a few bucks out of Google? I wouldn't touch anything related to Oracle with a fifty foot pole, that shit is radioactive.
Except while building the language into a nicer language, they also took the time and effort to rebuild the licenses around it so that it is harder to feel safe using it
The code is GPL, but the official Oracle binaries are not (since Oracle owns the copyright, they are free to release under multiple different licenses) and they use Oracle's predatory "free" licensing - you când download and run for free for 6 months, but you owe them money if you keep running those binaries after the moment the new version is released. There is no explicit enforcement mechanism - it's up to you to be careful, otherwise their lawyers will notice at some point and bill you for all the times you weren't.
> The code is GPL, but the official Oracle binaries are not (since Oracle owns the copyright, they are free to release under multiple different licenses) and they use Oracle's predatory "free" licensing...
And once they started doing that, everyone switched to some flavor of OpenJDK, many distributions of which are backed by organizations of at least Oracle's size.
For the past 2-3 ( may be 4 ) years there is a narrative / movement that Open Source doesn't just mean the sourced code are opened, open source means the "community". And the result of that community must be both free in beer and free as speech.
You've never programmed until you program in assambler. Only than can you start contemplating the path to true mastery, imputting software into tha machine as binary using switches.
We were a paying customer, and the same thing happened. I expect it was lack of competence more than dark patterns, although strategic incompetence is always possible with O. Oracle is not a credible cloud vendor.
This is SOP for Oracle. Company I work for got stung by them to the tune of a couple hundred thousand dollars over a similar deal with Oracle DB licensing. I wouldn't enter into any kind of contract or license with Oracle at all, and if I had to, I'd hire a specialized consultant and a lawyer to go through everything with a fine tooth comb first.
Goodness, for those who don't know, 1 USD ~ 10 SEK. They printed a page to charge someone 10 öre or 1¢. Maybe I don't need that free account after all.
I've been using it for about 3 years without issue, but you're right - you do have to be careful to set it up properly. I've also never gotten any related (or unrelated) physical mail from them about my account.
I had the same experience with AWS ec2 free tier that ran out after a year and started billing me. They bill me $17/mo now even though the machine was shut down and AWS account was closed 2 months ago
What is shape? Reading the doc doesn't make it clear why it is a paid thing. I just signed up for oracle cloud for free account and how to check if I accidentally bought anything?
According to them, it's impossible to accidentally use something that's not free; you have to deliberately upgrade to a paid account. Freshness not guaranteed, salt to taste
Do you not need to provide card details to create an account? Serious question, as I thought you did for AWS, GCP and Azure (with some exceptions for "special" Azure account types).
They offered a free tier and forced me to choose a shape. I chose the smallest of the two “shapes” but it was apparently not free. This was not especially clear until I got my first bill (it was extortionate; like 60eur/mo for 1cpu/2g ram) so I stopped/removed the instance.
This did not prevent me from being billed the next month, or the next month. They charged me until my card expired- then they finally cancelled the account and I paid the last bill manually. They then added another 0.1SEK charge (which is not payable, as 1SEK is the lowest denomination of currency).
I still get extremely high quantities of A4 paper through the mail box, at one point it was 29 pages of the same invoice.
I could have done something wrong here, but there is a distinct dark pattern on sign up and there are definitely bugs in the billing system.
Caveat Emptor.
EDIT: in case someone thinks I am joking. This was one of the packs: https://imgur.com/0fbsR3E