I get that people hate Oracle for a variety of reasons, but this is just such a ridiculous assertion. They've been one of the largest tech companies for multiple decades. Do you honestly believe that a majority of their revenue came from legal settlements from suing their own customers, at any time in their history?

Do you have a citation for this claim? I mean if the company is as absurdly litigious as you're saying, it stands to reason that you wouldn't make unsubstantiated claims about them in a public forum, right?

I'd guess it's something to do with Oracle's licensing policies. My understanding is they'd audit businesses who used their software and bill them an additional fee for violations. Maybe it's not strictly legal settlements but it's plausible that they made more money from these fees than from their regular fees at some point and even ongoing today. (That also lines up with jokes I've heard about them hiring more lawyers than software developers given someone's gotta do the audits.)

No, I do not believe it is even remotely plausible that they have ever made a majority of their revenue from licensing violation fees, especially today, when their total annual revenue is over $57 billion.

Oracle is an enormous company. I'm in my 40s, and literally every non-startup I've worked for in my career has been an Oracle customer, across multiple product lines. They're a 48-year-old company with more than 150,000 employees.

To be absolutely clear, I'm not expressing an opinion here on Oracle or its licensing and auditing practices. I'm just responding to the wild claims about revenue from lawsuits or license violations. Oracle stock has been publicly-traded for nearly four decades, so there's plenty of data available from their earnings statements. If these claims were even remotely based in reality, it would be easy to cite a source.

This is it.

Maybe a few years ago at <$megacorp> where I work, Oracle requires, as part of their licensing, the ability to scan every machine owned by the company to make sure there is no unlicensed use of any of their software. If any offending installations were found, they would charge the company the cost of the license for every machine. So, thousands of users times $thousands per license.

Even if you had a license for a Java runtime for, say, your Oracle database instance, if that was found to be used for another purpose you'd get hit. Again, for every machine in the entire company, not just the offending one.

Needless to say, there was a huge firedrill to root out any rogue installs.

> No mention of ... actually having to pay extra fees.

> If any offending installations were found, they would charge the company the cost of the license for every machine.

I don’t think you read that correctly. To use an analogy, it’s similar to Costco requiring me to pay again for every item in my cart because I forgot to ring up a carton of eggs when I went through self-checkout. Maybe you don’t call that “extra” but I think most people would.

No, I read it correctly, did you? They didn't say they ultimately had to pay any of those fees, just that the violation fees were dangled as a threat. They explicitly said "there was a huge firedrill to root out any rogue installs" which strongly implies they did not actually pay any of those extra violation fees, because they rooted out those license violations before being charged!

So $0 contribution to Oracle's revenue from fees in that anecdote, was my point. (The key word there in my comment was "actually", as in actually paying the fees, whereas you focused on the word "extra" instead. I don't debate that if the fees were actually paid, then yes that is quite obviously an extra fee.)

> And "rogue installs" essentially means "using copyrighted software in a quantity that exceeds what we actually paid for", i.e. theft.

No, that's not theft. It's a license violation.

Otherwise, I agree.

I agree that this seems unlikely.

My original assertion was just that Meta is unlikely to be 'the most ruthless and shameless [of all the tech companies].' There's so much competition out there for that title.