"Another revelation in the document is that NASA paid $4.36 million in software license violation penalties during FY 2021 alone. NASA was able to negotiate some fees down to zero but sent $3.85 million to SUSE and $415,000 to SAP. The auditor suspects other payments may have been made over the last five years – probably to the tune of $20 million."
Does SUSE also have hostages?
The Reg's story seems pretty reasonably written. The problem here is not with the vendors, who ultimately just want to get paid in the way NASA already agreed to pay them. The problem here - and even the Reg is a bit too polite to point it out - is that NASA's managers are aware that NASA is routinely engaging in software piracy and contract violations, yet apparently prefer to [make the taxpayer] pay fines rather than fix it.
$35 million, damn that's nearly 0.03% of their budget over the past 5 years.
To be clear, I'm all in favor to switch to Postgres for most workloads, but rather for new systems as migration old ones is either impossible or much more expensive than paying licensing fees.
