I’m not sure it was a joke. I had to deal with Oracle 9i years ago and I still have the emotional scars of being buggered hard for some licenses for it. The only way we could circumvent a lot of cost, allowing us to keep humans on budget, was reusing an older oracle upgraded license but this was only licensed to work on a SPARCstation LX and the tool was Java and took 11 minutes to start and no one complained because they were so depressed and demotivated from the job that it hurt to do so.

I quit and slithered off to work with SQL Server 2000 and I’m sure my soul slipped back in one night.