A while back I wanted to run an Oracle database on a VMware cluster.
The point of the cluster was simple. If one machine died, the database came back up on another.
Oracle insisted I license every node in the cluster, even though the database would only run on one node at a time.
So we gave up the redundancy and put Oracle on its own dedicated physical machine.
Nobody on the team chose that design. The licence did.
I was never quite sure what the renewal would cost, either.
When Broadcom bought VMware, it stopped selling perpetual licences and moved customers onto subscription bundles. Last October, Gartner said renewals had risen to three to four times the last price paid, on average.
Different vendors, same lesson. The contract decides what you can build, and how hard it is to leave.
I don't want a contract making that call for me again. It's part of why, in August, I ran my bid-drafting pipeline on four different AI model runtimes. For that job, it didn't matter which one I used. I want to keep it that way.
Has a licence ever made a design decision for you?
Hey, let's be careful out there.