I came across this post about Oracle partitioning licensing a couple weeks ago (yes I'm catching up with all the blogging). In it, Mathias basically doesn't think that partitioning should be separately licensed at all, and included in ALL versions of Oracle.

For those of you who haven't had the pleasure:
To use partitioning, you have to pay for the Enterprise Edition of the database at $40,000 per CPU and then pay an additional $10,000 for the partitioning option. That is a lot of money if all I really need is SE One (at $5,000 per CPU) with Partitioning. Unfortunately, that is not an option.
As we used to shout at band camp, "$10,000? WHAT A SCREW!" Same thing goes for the Diagnostic Pack, one of the greatest inventions of mankind.

I'd at least settle for making partitioning included in EE and a pay-for-play option in SE. Of course, then who would pay for all of this?