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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday August 06 2015, @06:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the paying-for-how-many-licenses dept.

The Cabinet Office is understood to have formally contacted central agencies within the last month and asked them to look for ways to “get rid of Oracle".

No. 10 is believed to be concerned about the amount civil servants are spending on the database giant’s applications and software.

A Cabinet office spokesperson told The Register: "As part of our continuing digital transformation and efficiency programmes, we regularly review technical requirements within a department to see how they may have changed."

The chief problem is the sheer number of Oracle licenses in the UK government, not just their price, although the public sector spent £290m on Oracle in 2013, according to TechMarketView.

Individual IT chiefs will have their own relationship with Oracle and pay for licenses rather than re-use licenses of those within their own department.

In January The Reg reported that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), which has around 10,000 staff, was forking out for two million Oracle licenses at £155 per employee, for an annual cost of £1.3m per year. (That worked out at 200 licences per civil servant in the department.)

That’s contrary to the Cabinet Office’s own guidelines of £93 on licenses, with a view to reducing that down further to £52.

Meanwhile, the mighty Home Office has tried to slash its Oracle budget by moving an ERP contract to a shared-services platform run by Steria. A Register source told us: “Nobody has a holistic view or how Oracle is used across the whole government or looking at economies of scale.”

The source described the the central communication as an “edict” that has been interpreted as an order to move away from Oracle.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by opinionated_science on Thursday August 06 2015, @11:37PM

    by opinionated_science (4031) on Thursday August 06 2015, @11:37PM (#219318)

    It is public money and should serve public good. If Postgresql (or your DB of choice) doesn't do the job, fund it until it does. The changes go back to the public.

    Let Oracle sell to other corporations or private interests. But the public software infrastructure should not be held hostage by profit making enterprises.

    Just think of how many small IT companies could be funded to improve the FOSS software necessary to run a country...

    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @12:29AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @12:29AM (#219342)

    It is public money and should serve public good. If Postgresql (or your DB of choice) doesn't do the job, fund it until it does. The changes go back to the public.

    Nice theory. But reality is more complicated. People go with Oracle for a variety of reasons, most of which boil down to not having enough money today. It is easier to spend less money today and worry about getting maintenance funding as part of the yearly budget than it is to spend a bunch of money up front for potential savings down the road.

    • (Score: 2) by Common Joe on Friday August 07 2015, @04:46AM

      by Common Joe (33) <{common.joe.0101} {at} {gmail.com}> on Friday August 07 2015, @04:46AM (#219429) Journal

      PostgreSQL is completely free (both in money and in source code) and runs very well. Very competitive to Oracle when starting up or maintaining. How does that translate to spending more money than Oracle?

      If you're talking about making improvements in the PostgreSQL code base (which I think you are), then the government can hire people or contractors in the "maintenance phase" who know how to code in C and make PostgreSQL do what they want... and then submit those changes to the project for public consumption. It should be no different than hiring Oracle to do this kind of stuff. I believe there are companies that specialize in doing just this for PostgreSQL. And if it doesn't exist and if the government absolutely has to waste money by throwing it at a private company, it should be trivial for someone in the PostgreSQL community to make one and roll in the big bucks. It's quite obvious to me that any government has its head bolted on backwards when dealing with Oracle.

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @05:56PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @05:56PM (#219644)

        PostgreSQL is completely free (both in money and in source code) and runs very well. Very competitive to Oracle when starting up or maintaining. How does that translate to spending more money than Oracle?

        It isn't just about the database, it is about everything surrounding the database. Developer knowledge, tools, software components, off-the-shelf applications. Practically no one starts from scratch with just a database.

        • (Score: 2) by Common Joe on Friday August 07 2015, @07:11PM

          by Common Joe (33) <{common.joe.0101} {at} {gmail.com}> on Friday August 07 2015, @07:11PM (#219657) Journal

          I tossed you a point for insightful even if I don't agree with you 100%. You've presented good food for thought.

          I think developer knowledge would be about the same between the two, although there are certainly more Oracle database people to choose from. Software components would be interesting to compare. Are tools the same between the two these days? I don't know. I think most applications these days would let you choose the database you work from. Are there applications that are not home-grown which require Oracle? If it is home-grown, wouldn't it be "just as convenient" to work with PostgreSQL?

          I don't really have good answers to these questions. Someone else with more knowledge, experience, and brain cells would have to do a more thorough answer.

  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday August 07 2015, @12:46PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday August 07 2015, @12:46PM (#219544) Journal

    I would mod you higher, but you're already maxed. What you said ought to be the gold standard for govt IT.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @03:17AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @03:17AM (#220130)

    You have it backwards: Businesses (Fortune 100 and some Fortune 500 in particular) *OWN* Government! That's how that mess mentioned with our DoD most likely happened, and why Oracle is a *VERY* profitable company. Their shit is overpriced, but not any more so than $400 nails and toilet seats.

    I'm sure you also know this applies inside and between companies as well, which I know for a fact is why we're stuck at my job with a proprietary piece of crap that's just begging to be cracked.