And what does Larry Ellison’s request to fire a university professor have to do with it?
If you’ve ever been frustrated by the lack of objective enterprise software benchmarks, now you know why.
"The DeWitt Clause" in the terms of service of major software products prohibits a customer from benchmarking a licensed product and/or publicly disclosing results.
In the early 1980s, database researcher Dr. David DeWitt published a benchmark showing poor performance in Oracle’s database. Larry was reportedly unhappy, and Oracle introduced contractual restrictions preventing customers from publishing benchmark results without vendor approval. The full story
Over time, these clauses spread far beyond databases and are now common across enterprise software, making the industry opaque by design and leaving buyers with:
- Sales-driven demos
- Vague qualitative claims
- Analyst two-by-two charts
- A heavy reliance on trust and referrals
To compensate, vendors deploy armies of salespeople, while customers spend time and money running POCs to reduce uncertainty in purchasing decisions.
That’s why I genuinely appreciate initiatives like the Definitive EDR Solution Comparison Platform by Kostas Tsialemis, which provides vendor-neutral, practitioner-focused comparisons. See the comments below
And I’ll leave debates about the legality and morality of the DeWitt clauses to people far more qualified than me.