You can be an Oracle and audit your customers and develop that adversarial relationship. The idea is that that sort of thing makes you rot in the long run.
Pretty poorly actually, people avoid Oracle products like the plague. Nobody is buying a JVM from Oracle or buying their DB - they're using open source solutions that are both free and provide more features.
They have a lot of inerita, but that's it. If you're in Greenfield development, there is a close to 0% chance you will choose Oracle as your RDBMS.
Hey, personally I agree. Why would I ever go with Oracle.
But that's A) me personally and B) me in Cloud/Startup type companies, so of course we don't got with Oracle.
But like you mentioned, inertia. So my previous gigs that were large multi-national of course were all Oracle. And they were all huge and had zero reason to not just buy the Oracle tax. Which is why Oracle is going strong.
Despite all the rage, Oracle can still survive quite some time on running boring things like I don't know, many large banks and other boring old businesses. Which of those is really gonna go "AWS Aurora MySQL" when the have had an in-house "Oracle Exadata" run their entire business operation "just fine" for longer than those Cloud providers have even be around?
I am sure everyone making shareware in the early 1990's would have loved to spy on people to know how many used their software for free (and have a way to spam those users to try to sell more licenses), but they couldn't and just did without that.
