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.

I worked for a company that brought Oracle customers.

Didn't prevent them from trying to extort us too.

Oh my god. Oracle having my address and credit card number is a nightmare scenario.

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.

Late, but I should mention he is a seriously bright guy, Oracle just is that good at scaring people.

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.

Afaik AWS and GCP refuse visa gift cards, although it's been a while since I tried. Wouldn't surprise me to hear Oracle is the same.

Signed up with Revolut disposable cards, will see

accounts get cancelled after a few weeks!

Man this is exactly the kind of dystopian bullshit I would expect from Oracle.

They ruin everything they touch IMO (Java came to them ruined already to be fair)

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.

Oracle is not a homogeneous entity.

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.

That might be due to https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts (I know it's a joke and the drawing is getting old, but it still rings somewhat true).

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

> rebuild the licenses around it

Isn't it all GPL?

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.

https://adoptopenjdk.net/

https://aws.amazon.com/corretto/

https://developers.redhat.com/products/openjdk/overview

https://www.microsoft.com/openjdk

Oracle's OpenJDK binaries are GPL; the Oracle JDK has a better license as of a few months ago (v17): https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/post/introduci...

So build it yourself or get someone else to build it for you.

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.

So it can be avoided by compiling the code yourself?

Or just using a package manager like a normal person.

> Java was revived

Java probably should have had a DNR on file.

Sorry, Java is outdated, young people aren’t even interested in learning Java anymore. It’s the “old language”.

Try React. Angular. Anything NPM is sexy. Leave Java for the generation Y.

I have seen hell, and it is node-modules.

NPM has less reason to exist than Java

React and Angular are out of date already, surely, being JS frameworks?

I tried writing my last project in React but its Postgresql libraries are basically non-existent.

Java is disgusting. So is all the stuff you just mentioned.

What are good technologies then?

Rust, obviously.

Kids these days and their toys.

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.

Won't work, they have 5x the lawyers to sue you even if the contract is ironclad.

I wonder where they rank in the "largest staff of lawyers" in the fortune 500.

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

Was the machine shut down, or was the instance deleted?

I have mentally trained myself so that whenever I see the name "Oracle", related to any new product, I think "Larry Ellison needs a bigger yacht".

Be extremely wary of Oracle anything IMO

if they only print on one side of the A4 paper you may never need to buy paper for rough notes again

Obligatory Bryan Cantrill rant on Oracle: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s

Oh my god, lmao

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?

Shape just means instance sizing.

I was presented two options:

1: 1vCPU 2GiB ram

2: 2vCPU 8GiB ram

(Or something, my memory is awful and it was a long time ago now. I remember a friend of mine who works at oracle was walking me through.)

Oh. So can't you delete the VM after being charged once?

whenever you sign up for some one-time use trash, use [email protected] as your email to get them back :)

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).

Use a virtual card for everything, block it if you don't like something.

What do you mean "virtual card"?

Some credit cards come with a feature where you can generate (and revoke) multiple numbers that charge your account.

So you could generate a new one to use with a shady business, and then revoke the number after you are done with the business.

I have wanted this.

Privacy.com offers this service. It's good! Combine that with Firefox Relay for the emails and you're good to go!