Sun Microsystems has chastised Oracle for its software pricing policies. In his Oracle Openworld address yesterday, Sun CEO Scott McNealy called on Oracle to count chips with multiple processing cores per die as a single chip in per processor licensing schemes.

Oracle, along with most of the major software makers, has decided to count dual-core chips such as Sun's UltraSPARC IV and upcoming products from Intel and AMD as two processors. Meanwhile, Sun and Microsoft have vowed to count multicore chips as single units in their pricing schemes.

Earlier this week, Oracle launched a new marketing program with Dell, Intel, Red Hat and Novell, leaving key partners Sun and HP out of the mix. This clearly caught the attention of McNealy.

"We have friends too," he said, during his Oracle OpenWorld keynote address. "You hang out with Michael (Dell); I'll hang out with Steve (Ballmer)."

McNealy, however, urged that Sun plans to stay as tight as ever with Oracle.

"We are planning to maintain that strong relationship," he said. "No matter how much Larry (Ellison) says Red Hat or Intel or Dell because we are their number one platform."

Oracle and Sun made billions together during the dotcom boom. Recently though Oracle has been encouraging customers to consider Linux clusters as opposed to Unix systems for its database. ®

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