The licensing and vendor news that mattered in August 2025: Microsoft product terms and price rises, Oracle Java soft audits, the Adobe subscription case, VMware versus Siemens, and the EU Digital Networks Act.
This is the Certero Insider round-up as published in August 2025. It is kept here as a record of what mattered at the time; where the position has since moved, or where the original reporting was wrong, that is marked in the text.
Microsoft’s July 2025 Product Terms update clarified its Responsible Use of AI Services. Microsoft may provide starter templates, instructions and code samples for building AI applications, while the customer carries full responsibility for compliance with legal requirements. Third-party templates operate under separate licensing terms, outside Microsoft’s governance.
For Dynamics 365 Services, Microsoft aligned the language covering External Users with the glossary definitions.
Why it matters. The AI clauses are where responsibility is being pushed to the customer. If your teams are building on vendor-supplied templates, the licensing position and the compliance position are now two separate questions, and only one of them is the vendor’s problem.
Microsoft announced record capital spending of $30bn for the quarter — its highest ever — following strong Azure sales driven by AI demand. The company was positioned to outspend Google and Meta over the following year, as part of a broader infrastructure expansion across the sector approaching $330bn.
That capital has to be recovered somewhere. Expect it in consumption pricing, in bundling, and in the rate at which AI capability is folded into existing enterprise agreements.
From 1 July 2025, Microsoft applied a 10% increase to:
The Core CAL Suite rose 15%, and the Enterprise CAL Suite rose 20% from 1 August 2025. The effect concentrates on hybrid and legacy environments — precisely the organisations least able to move quickly.
Why it matters. CAL suite increases are easy to miss because they land on a renewal line rather than a purchase decision. The defence is knowing your true CAL requirement before the renewal, which means device CALs, user CALs and external connectors reconciled against actual access — not against last year’s number plus growth.
Since January 2023 Oracle has moved Java from predominantly free to a subscription priced on employee count, which has produced unbudgeted cost and audit exposure for organisations that had treated the runtime as free infrastructure.
Through June and July 2025, organisations reported an increase in Oracle “soft audit” emails — informal enquiries about deployment, typically timed early in Oracle’s fiscal year and often preceding a formal audit.
Why it matters. The employee-count metric means a handful of unmanaged installations can carry a licence liability out of all proportion to their use. Knowing where every Java runtime sits, and which builds they are, is the whole exercise.
Corrected. The original newsletter reported that the FTC filed suit against Adobe in July 2025. The complaint was in fact filed in June 2024, by the Department of Justice on behalf of the Federal Trade Commission, in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. It named Adobe Inc. and two Adobe executives.
The action was brought under the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act (ROSCA). It alleged that Adobe used fine print and inconspicuous hyperlinks to obscure material terms of its subscription plans — in particular an early termination fee — and that it failed to provide a simple cancellation mechanism, instead routing subscribers through a convoluted process. Relief sought included a permanent injunction, monetary judgment and civil penalties.
Since publication: in March 2026 Adobe agreed a $150m settlement, with an injunction, resolving the allegations.
Why it matters. The practice at issue affected individual and small-business subscribers, but the principle travels. Auto-renewing subscriptions with friction on the way out are a governance problem for enterprises too — which is why renewal dates, utilisation and notice periods belong in one place, visible before the window closes rather than after.
The dispute between VMware, owned by Broadcom, represents significant audit exposure and litigation risk, and illustrates how thin software asset management leaves an organisation open to vendor legal action.
Timeline
Why it matters. The trigger was a support renewal. An inventory submitted to a publisher in the ordinary course of business became the evidence in a copyright claim. The lesson is not to avoid submitting data; it is to know exactly what your own data says before the publisher does. A continuous effective licence position, computed internally, is the difference between negotiating and discovering.
In early July 2025 Atlassian announced a reduction of around 150 roles from a global workforce of about 12,000, concentrated in customer service and support. The company denied that AI-driven automation caused the cuts. Much of the coverage focused on the delivery: the announcement was made by co-founder and co-chief executive Mike Cannon-Brookes in a pre-recorded video, with affected employees receiving confirmation by email shortly afterwards.
The European Commission was preparing to replace the 2018 European Electronic Communications Code with a Digital Networks Act, addressing infrastructure investment, market fragmentation, supply-chain dependency and cybersecurity risk.
Proposed measures included accelerating fibre deployment, copper switch-off planning, streamlined spectrum licensing, and simplification of authorisation and access regulation. The stakeholder consultation closed on 11 July 2025, with a legislative proposal expected in Q4 2025 and adoption anticipated in 2026 following trilogue negotiations. That timetable was the expectation as at August 2025; check the current legislative position before relying on it.
Financial disclosures from SAP and IBM pointed to shifting priorities in cloud licensing and AI investment, with implications for pricing models and bundling.
What to plan for
Engage vendor account teams early to understand portfolio changes and reduce commercial risk. The negotiating position in every one of these conversations is the same: know your own deployment and usage position first, in detail, before the vendor presents theirs.
Other posts covering the same ground.
Six Microsoft Product Terms changes that took effect on 1 September 2025 — Copilot Chat entering the Core Online Services list, Visual Studio moving under the MCA, Windows 10 ESU through CSP, and more. What each one changes, and what to do about it.
Microsoft's Outsourcing Software Management clause turns on one definition — the Authorised Outsourcer — and one condition almost everyone gets caught by. Here is what the three sections actually say.
How to assess SAM maturity honestly, and what to do about the gaps once you can see them — whether that means switching on more of the platform, bringing in publisher expertise, or building the in-house team through skills transfer.
Everything argued above is checkable. Name the publisher, the billing account or the platform you would argue with, and the session is built around it — the reasoning attached, not a summary slide.
No gated download at the end of it.