The Oracle-Rimini Settlement And What It Means For Oracle Customers

When Oracle and Rimini Street announced their confidential settlement in July 2025, the headlines framed the moment as the quiet close of a decade-plus copyright saga. For the lawyers who lived through the case, that was certainly true. But for the Oracle customers who have watched this litigation from the sidelines — often while writing twenty-two-percent-of-license-cost checks to Oracle each year — the settlement is not the end of anything. It is the beginning of a new round of questions about who controls the cost of enterprise software support, and who is going to pay for it.

We have written before about the litigation and the Ninth Circuit’s December 2024 opinion that forced the parties to the table. This post is about what comes next. The short version: the Ninth Circuit handed Oracle a loss on the law. The settlement handed Oracle something it arguably wanted more — a clear off-ramp for one of the largest pools of customers who had found a cheaper alternative to Oracle’s support machine. The question Oracle customers should be asking is whether that trade will show up in their renewal invoices.

A Quick Refresher

The settlement has three load-bearing pieces: Oracle returned approximately $37.8 million of the attorneys' fees the lower court awarded to Rimini Street; Rimini agreed to wind down its third-party support for Oracle PeopleSoft by July 31, 2028; and both sides dropped their remaining claims with neither admitting wrongdoing. The parties reached this deal after the Ninth Circuit vacated nearly every material copyright ruling against Rimini, reversed the Lanham Act judgment, and set aside the injunction. The court called the district court’s reading of “derivative work” “hopelessly overbroad,” and held that “mere interoperability isn’t enough” — a party must actually, substantially incorporate copyrighted material to infringe the right to prepare a derivative work. On the law, the third-party support industry walked out of the Ninth Circuit in a stronger position than it walked in. Which is precisely why the settlement terms — and the PeopleSoft wind-down specifically — are interesting.

Oracle’s Support Business, and Why It Matters Here

Anyone who has read Oracle’s recent annual reports understands a simple fact: the company’s revenue is no longer dominated by new software license sales. The overwhelming majority of what Oracle takes in every year comes from cloud services, subscriptions, and — critically for this discussion — license support. Support and subscription revenue is not a sideline for Oracle. It is the business. And it is a remarkably profitable one. Software support — the recurring fee Oracle collects in exchange for patches, bug fixes, and portal access — carries famously high margins by enterprise software standards, meaningfully above Oracle’s already-robust overall margin. When you compound those margins over decades of paid-up license bases, you see why Oracle’s investor story has for years been less about selling new software and more about keeping the existing customer base inside the paying support tent.

The mechanics are worth spelling out. Oracle’s standard Premier Support fee is twenty-two percent of the net license fee, charged annually — a figure codified in Oracle’s own published support policies, which also reserve Oracle’s right to raise that fee annually based on “inflationary” adjustments Oracle itself sets. Historically modest, those annual uplifts have in recent years trended meaningfully higher than conventional inflation. Over a ten-year horizon on a large license base, the compounding effect is substantial — the difference between a support budget that stays roughly flat in real terms and one that quietly doubles.

Why the Settlement Terms Favor Oracle, Even If the Law Did Not

Read against that financial backdrop, the 2028 PeopleSoft sunset is not a footnote. It is the point. PeopleSoft is a mature product set Oracle acquired in 2005. Many PeopleSoft customers have paid-up perpetual licenses, no interest in migrating to an Oracle cloud suite on Oracle’s timeline, and every reason to keep their existing systems running on a leaner support contract. That profile — stable, installed, resistant to re-platforming — is exactly what third-party support is built for, and exactly what is most valuable to Oracle if it can be kept on Oracle Premier Support for as long as possible. By securing a firm date by which one of the largest third-party support providers will stop supporting PeopleSoft, Oracle has effectively put a clock on a slice of the third-party support market it cares about most. Those customers will be deciding between 2026 and 2028 whether to return to Oracle support, move to another third-party provider, accelerate a replatforming project, or run unsupported.

Nothing in the Ninth Circuit opinion compelled that outcome. The court’s holding cuts the other way — it makes copyright doctrine a harder tool for Oracle to use against third-party support providers. What the settlement did is trade a legal theory that was failing in court for a commercial concession extracted at the bargaining table. A rational outcome for a sophisticated plaintiff. But worth looking at clearly from the customer’s side.

A note on Rimini: we have enormous respect for the role the company has played — and continues to play — in giving Oracle and SAP customers a meaningful alternative to vendor support. Rimini did not lose this litigation in any conventional sense. The company vindicated the legality of independent third-party support at the Ninth Circuit, survived a fifteen-year campaign from one of the best-resourced plaintiffs in technology, and continues to serve thousands of customers across Oracle, SAP, and other enterprise software product families. The PeopleSoft wind-down is a defined, manageable transition. The narrower question for Oracle customers is not whether Rimini survived — it is whether Oracle’s pricing leverage on its most captive installed base just got stronger.

The Pricing Question

There are two plausible reads on what happens to Oracle support pricing over the next three to five years.

The optimistic read: the third-party support market is bigger and more robust than ever, with more credible providers serving more customers across more product lines than when the Rimini litigation began. Competitive pressure — from Spinnaker Support, Support Revolution, Rimini itself, and others — keeps Oracle from pushing support fees arbitrarily without accelerating customer defections. The twenty-two-percent fee plus modest annual uplifts stays roughly where it is.

The cautious read: the PeopleSoft sunset is a signal. For those customers specifically, Oracle now has a defined window in which a meaningful share will be forced to make a decision, with every incentive to make the return-to-Oracle option attractive up front while positioning for price increases once those customers are back inside the tent. More broadly, if Oracle concludes that commercial-term negotiations with third-party providers can substitute for a failing copyright strategy, similar dynamics may play out in other product lines. And Oracle’s public posture is not subtle: its reliance on support and subscription revenue is increasing as its growth narrative pivots to cloud and AI infrastructure whose margins are widely understood to be thinner. When margins compress in one place, there is a natural pull on management to protect margins elsewhere.

We do not yet know which read is closer to right. But customers who assume the settlement is simply “news” — a 2025 storyline requiring no action — are taking a position that the next three years of renewal cycles may test.

What This Means for Oracle Customers

A few things flow from all of this. First, the legal ground under third-party support is firmer, not softer, after the Ninth Circuit opinion — customers still hesitant about the legal risk should understand the highest recent appellate statement runs the other way. Second, PeopleSoft customers on Rimini support should be planning now, not in 2027; a thoughtful transition takes longer than most organizations expect and benefits from being planned before leverage shifts toward the deadline. Third, every Oracle renewal conversation from here forward is a pricing conversation, and customers who want to hold the line need to build leverage well before the renewal window. Finally — and this is the piece our firm spends the most time on — the support-cost question is inseparable from the audit-risk question. Oracle’s audit practice and its support renewal practice are two sides of the same revenue engine, and serious customers have to manage both together.

The Rimini Street settlement is, narrowly, a story about one provider and one product line. Broadly, it is a story about who bears the cost of Oracle’s transition to being an AI-and-cloud company financed by a support annuity business. The Ninth Circuit made clear that copyright law is not going to do that work for Oracle. The settlement shows that commercial leverage might. None of this is reason to panic. It is reason to stop treating enterprise software support as a fixed cost line that simply renews itself each year — and to start treating it as a contract that is actively managed, aggressively negotiated, and regularly benchmarked against a growing and legally-vindicated ecosystem of alternatives. The customers who engage early keep control of their own budgets.

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