Independent support is lawful and no United States court has held otherwise. Fifteen years of Oracle and Rimini Street litigation tested how a provider builds a fix, not whether you may buy one.
Yes. Buying third party support for Oracle software you already licensed is lawful, and no United States court has held otherwise.
What fifteen years of Oracle and Rimini Street litigation tested was narrower: how a provider may copy, build and deliver support materials. That is a question about the provider's method, not about your right to buy.
This page sets out what the courts actually decided, where the lines sit today, and the contract terms that keep the risk with the provider. It is not legal advice.
This page is not legal advice
We are licensing advisors, not lawyers. Everything below describes public court records and published vendor policy. Have your own counsel review your specific agreements, your jurisdiction and your facts before you give notice to any vendor.
Yes. You hold a perpetual license to run the software, and nothing in law or in Oracle's own policies requires you to buy maintenance from Oracle to keep running what you already own.
Support is a separate, annually renewable service. Declining to renew it is a commercial decision. Oracle's Lifetime Support Policy sets out what Oracle stops providing once you stop paying, and that is the whole of what you give up.
A perpetual Oracle license does not expire when maintenance lapses. You keep the right to run the version you are entitled to, in the quantity you are entitled to, on the terms in your agreement.
What ends is the service: new patches, new tax and regulatory updates, upgrade rights, and access to My Oracle Support. Those are real losses and they are the honest cost of the decision.
Oracle sued the provider. In the Nevada case filed in 2010 the defendants were Rimini Street and its chief executive, not the licensees who bought support from it.
That distinction matters when you price risk. Your realistic exposure is a license audit or a contract dispute, not a copyright claim. Both are managed with records and drafting.
It decided how a provider may make and use copies of Oracle software, and it did so in stages over fifteen years. The model survived every stage. Specific practices did not.
Read the sequence rather than the headlines. Both parties have issued press releases claiming victory at points where the record is more mixed than either summary suggests.
The litigation in sequence
| Stage | Forum and date | What was decided |
|---|---|---|
| Oracle files suit | District of Nevada, 2010 | Claims against Rimini Street and its chief executive |
| Jury verdict | District of Nevada, 2015 | 35.6 million dollars on copyright, plus 14.4 million on state computer access claims |
| First appeal | Ninth Circuit, January 2018 | Copyright liability affirmed on cross use; state computer access awards reversed |
| Supreme Court | March 2019 | "Full costs" limited to the statutory categories; 12.8 million dollar award vacated |
| Second case | District of Nevada, 2023 | Findings against parts of the revised support process, plus an injunction |
| Second appeal | Ninth Circuit, December 2024 | Key findings vacated, derivative works test rejected, case remanded |
A Nevada jury found in 2015 that Rimini had infringed Oracle copyrights in J.D. Edwards and Siebel software and had violated two state computer access statutes. The award was 35.6 million dollars on copyright and 14,427,000 dollars on the state claims.
On appeal the Ninth Circuit affirmed the copyright liability in January 2018 and reversed the state computer access awards. Oracle publicized the outcome in its own statement on the appeal.
The infringement finding rested on cross use. Rimini had built development and testing environments under one customer's license and then used the work product to serve other customers.
The court read the license terms as limiting copying and use to supporting that licensee. Work done for the licensee was within scope. Reusing it for a different customer was not.
The Supreme Court took a narrow procedural question and answered it unanimously. It did not review whether independent support is lawful.
In Rimini Street, Inc. v. Oracle USA, Inc., decided 4 March 2019, the Court held that "full costs" under section 505 of the Copyright Act means the categories Congress listed in the general costs statutes. A 12.8 million dollar award of other litigation expenses was vacated.
Rimini rebuilt its process and litigated again, and the second round has moved in its favor at the appellate stage. A Nevada court made findings against parts of the revised process in 2023 and issued an injunction.
On 16 December 2024 the Ninth Circuit vacated significant parts of that decision. It held that interoperability alone does not make a derivative work, and that a derivative work must actually incorporate the copyrighted work.
The panel also vacated the striking of Rimini's ownership defense under section 117(a), vacated findings on certain database environments, and sent the case back. On the advertising claims it treated most security comparisons as puffery while affirming that one "holistic security" claim was actionable and false.
Appellate courts decide the questions in front of them. Reading these decisions as a general licence for any support practice is a mistake, and so is reading them as a ban.
The boundaries sit around copying: who may make a copy, under whose license, and whom that copy may serve. Everything contested in fifteen years of litigation reduces to those three questions.
The table below is our reading of the public record. It is a planning aid for buyers, not a legal opinion, and your counsel should test it against your own agreements.
How the public record reads on common practices
| Practice | Where the record points | Buyer question to ask |
|---|---|---|
| Provider works inside your environment, under your license | Closest to the licensed position | Does our agreement permit an agent to act for us? |
| Provider hosts a copy of your software to serve you | Contested; the 2024 panel found the plain terms did not bar it in one instance | Which of our licenses does that copy sit under? |
| Work built under one customer's license reused for another | Held to exceed the license in 2018 | How do you keep our work separate from other customers? |
| Redistributing Oracle patches you no longer receive | Not available from any provider | What replaces the quarterly patch stream? |
| Provider written fixes that do not incorporate Oracle code | Supported by the 2024 derivative works holding | Who owns the fix, and do we keep it on exit? |
Ask the provider to describe, in writing, whose license each copy of your software sits under at every point in its process. A provider that has read these rulings will answer without hesitation.
You are not buying the answer for its own sake. You are creating a record that you asked, which is what a reasonable buyer does and what your own counsel will want to see.
You keep the right to run what you own and you cut the annual fee by roughly half. You lose the Oracle delivered update stream, and that loss is permanent for the period you are away.
Oracle support versus third party support
| Dimension | Oracle support | Third party support |
|---|---|---|
| Annual cost | About 22 percent of net license fees | Roughly half of that |
| New patches | Yes, while in Premier or Extended | No new Oracle patches |
| Version upgrades | Included rights | Not provided |
| Tax and regulatory updates | Standard, vendor written | Provider written, often tailored |
| My Oracle Support access | Yes | Ends with the contract |
| Cost to return | Not applicable | 150 percent reinstatement under Oracle policy |
| Best fit | Active roadmap and upgrades planned | Stable mature release run for years |
The reinstatement figure is not a rumor. Oracle's Software Technical Support Policies state that where support lapsed, the reinstatement fee is 150 percent of the last annual fee paid for the relevant programs.
Four clauses do almost all the work. Negotiate them before price, because a discount cannot buy them back later.
Ask for the indemnity cap as a multiple of annual fees rather than a fixed number. A cap set at one year of fees is not an indemnity, it is a refund.
The standard account team line is that leaving Oracle support is legally risky and that you will be exposed without the latest patches. We disagree with how that risk is framed. In the exits we have advised, the patch argument only bit on products with an active security roadmap, while stable mature releases ran for years with no functional gap. The real risk is a sloppy license position that invites an audit, and it has nothing to do with copyright law. The buyer side move is to leave from a clean, documented entitlement baseline so the only thing Oracle can challenge is your commercial decision, not your compliance.
Most buyers cut the annual Oracle support line by 45 to 60 percent, and the realized figure depends on what else moves with it. Oracle Premier Support runs at about 22 percent of net license fees each year.
Model five years, not one. A three year view flatters the move because it excludes the point at which an upgrade would have been due and the point at which a return would be priced.
Four controls, run in order, take almost all of the risk out of the move. None of them is legal work, which is the point.
Build a defensible entitlement baseline before you give notice: contracts, order documents, deployment data, and the reconciliation between them. Do this while you still have Oracle support access.
Serve notice against the support anniversary with the contractual notice period counted backwards from it. A missed date usually buys another full year at 22 percent.
Ask the provider how its process changed after the 2018 appeal and after the December 2024 decision. A serious provider will have a clear answer and will put it in writing.
Roughly one exit in four in our file drew a license review. Every one of them was defended, and the defense was always documentation prepared in advance rather than argument invented afterwards.
Source: Redress Compliance advisory engagement file, 2024 to 2025, and the public court record.
The legality of third party support is not the hard part. The hard part is leaving from a license position so clean that an audit has nothing to find.
Run these in sequence. The first three are the ones that decide the outcome.
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Yes. You hold a perpetual license to run the software and you are not required to buy maintenance from Oracle to keep running it. The litigation between Oracle and Rimini Street tested how a provider may create and use copies, not whether a licensee may buy support elsewhere. This is not legal advice.
It decided method questions in stages. The Ninth Circuit affirmed copyright liability in January 2018 where work built under one customer's license was reused for others, the Supreme Court decided a costs question in March 2019, and in December 2024 the Ninth Circuit vacated significant findings against Rimini and rejected an interoperability test for derivative works.
No licensee has been held liable in this line of cases for buying independent support. Oracle sued the provider and its chief executive, not the customers. Your realistic exposure is a license audit or a contract argument, which is why the entitlement baseline matters more than the case law.
No. A perpetual license does not expire when maintenance lapses. You keep the right to run the version and quantity you are entitled to, and you lose the service: new patches, new regulatory updates, upgrade rights and access to My Oracle Support.
It happens in roughly one exit in four in our engagement file. Every one was defended successfully where the buyer left from a clean, documented license position. Treat an audit as a planning assumption rather than a surprise, and prepare the response before you give notice.
Ask for defense costs and settlement covered for claims that the provider's support method infringes, with no carve out for that method, survival past termination, and a cap expressed as a multiple of annual fees. A cap set at one year of fees is a refund rather than an indemnity.
Stable, mature releases suit it best, which in practice means applications such as PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel, and database estates frozen on a version that already carries the patches you need. Products with an active security roadmap or a planned upgrade are weaker candidates.
Align termination with the Oracle support anniversary and count the contractual notice period backwards from it. Missing the date usually costs another full year at 22 percent, which is the single most common avoidable expense in these moves.
The legal boundaries, the savings math, what you keep and lose, exit timing, and the buyer side moves across the Oracle support decision.
Used across more than five hundred enterprise engagements. Independent. Buyer side. Built for procurement leaders running the next renewal cycle.
Third party support is legal and proven. Treat the switch as a licensing project, not a leap of faith, and the savings are real and durable.
