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What's the Oracle Trial Against SAP Really About?
Ponca City writes "Chris O'Brien writes in the Merucry News that Larry Ellison's lawsuit against bitter rival SAP gives Ellison the opportunity to deliver the final humiliation to his company's greatest foe of the past decade while sending a blunt message to Oracle's next great enemy, Hewlett-Packard: 'This is who you are fighting. This is how determined we are to win. Get ready.' O'Brien writes that it's a crafty bit of psychological warfare that is already having the desired effect. When Oracle decided to subpoena former SAP CEO Léo Apotheker after he was appointed president and CEO of HP, Apotheker decided to stay out of the country to avoid testifying so now we have the bizarre spectacle of the new CEO of the largest technology company in the world unable to show his face in Silicon Valley. Ellison loves to fight. In gaining control of PeopleSoft, Ellison demonstrated the love of combat and confrontation that has made him one of the wealthiest men on the planet. He waged an 18-month hostile takeover bid to acquire the company, and fought off an effort by the US Department of Justice to torpedo the deal. 'Oracle probably could have settled this case [with SAP],' writes O'Brien. 'But why pass up a glorious chance to subpoena Apotheker and send your new opponent running in circles?'"
Simply beautiful, to have your opponent by the throat, and then get a chance to show the whole world what a scoundrel they are
As a long-time Oracle developer, I have always wondered how they could afford to put so much information on their support site, and I was worried that the 'spying' by SAP was going to make them shut down access to the info.
Instead we get a show, love the theater!
Wherever You Go, There You Are
I've known a few people like that, very combative types. They tend to wind up being very lonely and pathetic later in life.
C|N>K
Oracle seems to be an EXTREMELY abusive company.
Let's route around it. One way: Use PostgreSQL.
Some billionaires only care about being able to abuse people.
I have no clue if this is important in this discussion, but SAP acquired Sybase earlier this year.
Will Ellison's douchemonkeyness detriment the people? The community? If his fights are just and his gains are pure and the losses he causes others to incur do not get passed onto the populace, cool. Otherwise, I don't think they're going to have too many friends after the dust settles.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
By what measure?
Sounds wrong to me and I cant find a measure by which they would be the largest, but maybe there is one.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women!
That is all.
Firing Hurd was one thing, but hiring Apothekar was a total disastrous. In connection to this, Jack Welsh mentioned that he wouldn't admit knowing anyone in HP board even if knew anyone. These are rather strong words coming from a neutral person who was declared manager of the century in 1999. HP was fully aware of SAP-Oracle lawsuit going on and also of the fact that SAP had accepted the blame and Apothekar was the CEO at the time TomorrowNow was stealing. HP got what it deserved or wanted.
What database does slashdot run on, by the way?
You have some serious problems with names. Their names are Léo Apotheker and Jack Welch.
These companies are situated in the center of one of the largest changes in human history. Computers and software applications have enabled numerous advances in civilization and benefitted society in countless ways. Despite all the good that has come from computers, it seems like without exception, every single large computer company is lead by a bunch of douche bags who apparently have little concern for anything beyond themselves and their vision of how they want things to be.
Rustling up a quick summary here for anyone looking for background:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Oracle_v._SAP_(2010,_USA)
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Why would anyone want Peoplesoft?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
"SAP has offered to pay $40 million for the damage it caused and an additional $120 million to cover Oracle's legal bill."
But who pays the salary of the judge and other court personnel? The courthouse building isn't free and neither are its utilities. This can't be cheap.
Ellison? I don't know him and never met him. But it has been published that he's a womanizer, likes his jet fighters, race cars, yachts, etc... which seems to support your premise.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
On /., asking how to find info (http://slashdot.org/help) on a website; "Brillant" [sic]. Their current user docs list mysql, but it's dated 2000.
Oh, and while I'm at it, that jerk who posted a complete ripoff of a BOFH http://www.theregister.co.uk/ article on with no attribution ought to be strung up by his earbeads (in comments on "Toy Robots Can Guard Your Home"; I was moderating so couldn't complain inthread).
Sigh, fsck. Carry on you shallow posters.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
I would recommend Ingres (which is GPL) for the Data Warehouse environments, PostgreSQL for the mid-sized relational databases and Drizzle for the small-scale systems. (DO NOT support MySql as it is now an Oracle product -- support one of the official forks.)
Likewise, I would recommend using Libre Office (as soon as it hits a major release) over and above Oracle's OpenOffice.
For Java, I would recommend using IBM's JVM where possible (it's largely Oracle's but getting it from IBM will still kick dirt in Oracle's eyes). Where you're running a standalone Java application that can be compiled using GCJ, eliminate the JVM entirely and go native.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
All HP has to do is focus on their knitting. Make great products and take great care of your customers. You don't need lots of sound-and-fury drama to be a great company
Hot water, good dentistry, and soft lavatory paper.
Larry Ellison is becoming more of a software terrorist every day.
I was a DBA forever, and while I loved the 10 or so years I spent supporting Oracle I noted that consultants (for what its worth) seemed to uniformly hate the place (a note, I supported Peoplesoft Installations for awhile and we saw a lot of consultants come through from Oracle among other places..).
It's really a shame, but when 9 came out and Oracle co-opted java for the first time, they screwed it up and it hasn't really gotten any better since. I think a big reason for this is that the office culture of the place is a reflection of Ellison's arrogance, which is somewhat demotivating (even if only privately) to the people who work there, and their products suffer. So here we are with Oracle now owning java and, surprise surprise, Ellison is out to monetize it. Folks, that's what he does. There's a reason he's one of the richest men alive, he finds choke points in the software market and either buys or kills (and replaces) them.
He reminds me of the Wall Street people who see no moral issues with destroying everything in their path to turn a profit. It's sick, it's wrong, and this is America where for better or worse its legal. Ultimately, these super-arrogant folks will be the death of software as an industry because they simply have no concept of 'enough'. One guy told us (unconfirmed personally, but I have no reason to doubt it) that at Oracle, if you weren't in a position to replace your boss after the first year, your career there was basically over. Ellison calls this 'samurai management' or some such nonsense, but I call it bad business. It's this kind of crap that leads to workplace incivility, and this grudge-holding shit Emperor Larry is famous for is plain old simple hubris. It's ok though, he's getting too old to do it for much longer, and Oracle is rapidly becoming a product worth 1k$ instead of 100k$ per installation. Not that he'll ever be poor, but boy wouldn't it be fun to watch him be humbled.
Imagination is the silver lining of Intelligence.
Lets face it, Java is dead (it is, really), and Postgres is not only faster than MySQL but safer with very large datasets.
Also, this is not a gearing up for further war. On the contrary, this will damage Oracle. They will spend a huge amount of money, and the other players will have very little trouble stringing them along forever in the courts, BHP/Microsoft style. It will also exhaust key players inside the company that will get jack of the giant amount of stress this is doubtless causing internally. And as an aside: it will piss off lots of developers.
All HP has to do is bide its time, build its resources, and then strike a weakened Oracle like Michael Ironside dispatching Louis Del Grande in Scanners.
Kaboom (Splat).
Actually asshole, it was only part of the BOFH article. I would have thought most people who came here would know where it came from. You obviously did. So go fuck yourself.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
America and capitalism are providing you choices: buy something or from someone else.
I find this lawsuit particulary funny simply because their offices in Burlington, MA, are next to each other on the same street, Van De Graaff Drive, which is basically just the driveway for those buildings. You easily hit a golfball from one to the other. I wonder if they make dirty faces at each other? (Sun's up a different road, at least a half-dozen par 5's away.)
Michael J.
Root, God, what is difference?
Ah, an excellent riposte, sir. So, you only ripped them off for half of their article, and couldn't be bothered to educate the unwashed masses as to where you stole it from. I stand corrected.
I'm saying you're just freaking lazy, and ought to do better in the future. You're not damned for all time. Just get it right. Constructive criticsm?
Nice work with the A-word there. I think you've got that down.
Idiot.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Couldn't he somehow get marooned on a desert island for five years, a la "Castaway"? And then when he came back, he wouldn't be such a prick? Maybe?
What I really don't understand is if you're running a a database company, do you really want to trumpet how lousy your internal security is in federal court?
I see Taco is keeping his usual high editorial standards.
After all these years he still can't spellcheck? Christ, in my browser it's underlined in red.
And nobody gave it to Mr. Ellison. He did what he felt he had to do and still does. I doubt if any other way would have yielded better results.
Shiz! What a write up. I'm quivering in my jump boots. Too bad Halloween already passed. Michael Myers versus Lawrence Ellison, a blockbuster in the making.
It seems to me that Gates gives money because, if he didn't, he and his wife would be bored. I've never seen anything that would indicate kindness or warmth or friendliness in Bill Gates.
and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men. (Lord Acton)
Not that I would call Ellison "great". He's just an deranged bully with a distended ego.
Another take on the first idea is of course "Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it" (Pitt the Elder).
I think its best if we just consign all the products Oracle control to the dustbin of technological history and move on.
made. That is a side effect of creating a great business. All three created. Better yet, they created something that other people wanted. They influence millions through their work and some of them through their charity (see Gates, not so much the other two). To say they did not have influence in your life is absurd. Granted it is not on the level of your parents but all three influenced industry. All three pushed forward this business many of us work in.
I would be that many of their problems are not as bad as many make it out to be. It is common for people to tear down others, assign them issues, all to justify our position in life relative to theirs. somehow it make us feel better than people in higher positions somehow are defective or bear burdens we can claim to not want. Frankly, I would be happy to have created something even 1% of the people they influenced liked. People like the three you mention didn't get there without sacrifice, the difference between them and many of you/us is that they realized that getting there isn't done with 40 hour a week jobs and bitching on message boards.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I thought Acorn did rather well.
They developed a CPU for their Archimedes PC and then licensed the design to everyone who wanted it.
Even Intel license Acorns CPU design they did that well.
Your iPod as a little tiny Acorn CPU inside it.
ARM - originally stood for Acorn Risc Machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture
would say: "Wow, Larry Ellison is a real a-hole".
This is one of, if not the most, informative posts that I've read on the subject. I burned up my mod points yesterday, unfortunately. :(
They did brilliantly for a while - but at some point they stagnated and abandoned ARM, followed by the Acorn PC (which was never finished).
RiscOS was infinitely superior to any other GUI of the time, but failed to keep pace. For whatever reason, Acorn became too insular.
When they did finally abandon their entire IT division, a breakaway group tried to continue to develop the Acorn PC. I don't know what happened there, but suspect Acorn got stubborn, given the press releases of the time from them.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I worked at Peoplesoft during the hostile takeover. It was brutal and devastating. For me, Peoplesoft was the best job I ever had. There was excellent compensation and more importantly esprit d corps. It was the happiest place I have ever been. I truly enjoyed going to work every day. I did the best work of my career there. The group I worked with had their stuff together, we were incredibly productive. The internal BBS, was a great resource for all things from tech support to Giants tickets. Yesterday I was travelling from SF through Pleasanton on 580. I passed HQG and was overcome by sadness. I fucking hate Oracle and Larry Ellison.
And the funniest thing of all was that all these decades, the FOSSies and MS haters whined that Bill Gates was the "most evil person" in computing.
Now the reality is shown to not only be far from their claims, but they were actually being used as tools by one of the most evil people in computing!