OpenEuphoria

Do you want to run Oracle on one virtual machine with two vCPUs on your VMware cluster? Got six sockets in your cluster? With eight cores each? You'll need to pay for all forty-eight cores, because you could use any of them! And the real kicker? The licensing is $25,000 per core! Do the math! So we're running Oracle 12c on a crippled machine with a single 8-core Xeon CPU so that we only have to pay $200,000 in extortion licensing fees.

I liken it to racketeering because it seems like some shifty mobster saying, "gee, sure is a nice VMware cluster you got there. Would be a shame if you had to use all those cores. Better pay me forty-eight times my normal protection fee just to be sure." One of my colleagues also put it this way: "It's as if Oracle owns a parking lot and they charged you $5 per space for all one hundred spaces, because you could park in any one of the spaces."

Here's an article from just last week showing the extreme difference in cost between Microsoft and Oracle:

I assure you my company will be taking up Microsoft on that offer to migrate to SQL Server 2016 as soon as possible.

-Greg