How Oracle May Try To Use A Software Audit To Expand Its Contractual Rights

Oracle licensees are advised to zealously guard their contractual rights and avoid ceding ground to Oracle based on overreaching software audit demands. Oracle is a master at playing the long game and has been known to use its audit findings as leverage to extract contractual concessions from its licensees, which Oracle then exploits in later audits.

For example, we know that Oracle has for years taken a very expansive view of the "installed and/or running" language of the processor definition in its Oracle license agreements. As a reminder, Oracle uses this language to claim that it entitled to a licensing fee for all virtual processors where the Oracle binaries could be installed in the future, even though they are not presently installed. Oracle cites to its Partitioning and other policies to support this argument, which policies are not expressly incorporated into the fully integrated Oracle license agreement, and thus are barred by the integration clause. We