oracleOracle has switched to a new method of charging for its software, responding to growing criticism from customers that the sector has been slow to adapt to technologies that are changing the face of corporate computing.

Why don't they just go back to the good old Xerox solution to this: bolt a counter on the side of your server that ticks up the number of queries processed and you pay by the query. Even better: why not just make your server coin-op -- your ops people would have a huge bucket of quarters that they'd feed into it all day long!

Oracle revamps its software pricing