FBI Watching Oracle-SAP Trial

angry tapir writes "An FBI agent has been in the courtroom each day this week watching the Oracle-SAP trial, suggesting US law enforcement continues to take an interest in the case. SAP said in 2007, when Oracle filed its civil lawsuit against the company, that the Department of Justice had requested documents related to the matter from SAP and its TomorrowNow subsidiary. SAP said at the time that it would 'fully cooperate.' In a court filing in August, SAP said there was an 'ongoing investigation' by the DOJ and the Federal Bureau of Investigation into 'some facts and circumstances that are involved in this matter.'"

Comments

Hello, I'm with the FBI

[Sam_In_The_Hills]

""We have an interest in the case," the FBI agent said in court Thursday. He declined to comment further or provide his name."
If he hadn't spent the day talking into his coat sleeve maybe they wouldn't have spotted him.

What the trial is about

[Migala77]

There is a great summary at ComputerWorld. How I read it: a company bought by SAP is accused of copyright infringement by Oracle. SAP does not deny this, and the trial is basically about the height of the damages. Oracle is making a media circus of it and sues for $ 2 billion, and SAP just wants to get it over with, and is willing to pay tens of millions.

OK..

[js3]

so the FBI is watching them..how is this news for nerds or news for that matter? what's the relevance of this story? An FBI agent goes to work. that's it?

It's the Larry Ellison Parade

[christoofar]

Too bad it's not a jury of dimwits that gets to determine the award. Then they'll have to ask themselves in a conference room if Larry's crocodile tears are worth excising a large sum of money from one of Germany's largest companies and giving it to a douchebag who already has loads himself.

Maybe if there's some scarlet twist to this suit that hasn't been made public yet----like SAP had intended to modify Oracle's code to make the database columns with German identifiers like SAP's?

I cannot tell you with what joy I have going into transaction SE38, then digging through ABAP code, then trying to figure out what column identifiers (like LOGIKZW, STABPRRT) means...

Re:It's the Larry Ellison Parade

[Anonymous Coward]

That's quite an interesting way to put this... When it comes to SAP, you talk about the company as a whole, but when it comes to Oracle, you talk about Larry as an individual and characterize him as a "douchebag". What's the matter? Can't compare apples to apples?

Re:It's the Larry Ellison Parade

[hairyfeet]

While I don't think Larry is a nice guy, and figure he probably IS a giant egotistical ass, in THIS case he is in the right. You buy sioftware A you are allowed packages A-f. If you want G-Z that costs an extra "premium support" contract. What the company that SAP was stupid enough to buy out did was set up a bank of servers to crawl ALL the Oracle servers and grab ALL the files, whether their customers had paid for the Premium package or not, and then undercut Oracle by offering the Premium package (which they had ZERO rights to) at a steep discount.

In this case it would be like going to an OEM that had rights for Windows 7 Basic and offering them Ultimate for $5 a pop, simply because you were able to snatch a copy off of MSDN. Software has licenses and levels whether you like it or not, and in this case they took those that had bought the bottom tier product and gave them all the top tier goodies. I'm sorry but SAP is screwed, the only question is how big a check they are gonna have to cut. You'd think a company of THAT size would have checked out the business they were buying before shelling out the bux just to make sure it was legit.

Re:Nothing but Oracle-related news here at /.

[longacre]

Slashdot is a news aggregator...it can only link to stories that exist.

Re:Secondary Audio Program?

[leamanc]

Although there used to be several large players in the ERP software business, it basically comes down to SAP and Oracle now. Since Oracle likes to have as few competitors as possible, they filed suit in 2007 against SAP, claiming that SAP's ERP software infringed on Oracle's intellectual property in an effort to cripple SAP, in the hopes of one day being the only player in the large-scale ERP software world.