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More Court Trouble For Oracle: Now HP Is Suing Them
New submitter another random user writes "Oracle violated its contract with Hewlett-Packard (HP) after it decided that future versions of its database software would not support a line of HP servers, HP's lawyer has said in court."
The issue at hand: Oracle agreed to support Itanium, and has since pulled support. "... Hewlett-Packard estimates it should be awarded more than $4 billion in damages, based on an extrapolation to 2020 that accounts for projected losses, said the person, who didn’t want to be identified because the court document containing the damages request is confidential." Oracle is using the Itanic defense: "In cross-examination today, Oracle attorney Dan Wall asked Livermore [HP board member] if she had heard Itanium called 'Itanic,' a reference to the 'Titanic' oceanliner sinking. 'I've heard lots of terms,' Livermore said. 'I understand the reference they are making and I don’t like it. It is not done by anyone I like or respect.'"
HP filed this case a year ago. They made opening statements in the trial today.
No, not the open source project "Karma" but "Karma" in the cosmic hippie sense.
I hope HP takes them to the cleaners. And they aren't even being patent trolls, it genuinely sounds like Uncle Larry Douchebag screwed them over.
Go HP!
(Sorry HP, your products still suck... but your lawsuit is AWESOME!)
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
" 'I understand the reference they are making and I don’t like it. It is not done by anyone I like or respect.'"
'No true scotsman' argument
We have been calling it Itanic since day one, if people she knows or like aren't using that term, then shes in an echo chamber
Good-bye
Sounds about in the right ballpark to me.
*giggle*
If they really want a good defense, they need to try this:
"Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, I have one final thing I want you to consider. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it; that does not make sense! Why would a Wookiee, an 8-foot-tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of 2-foot-tall Ewoks? That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense! Look at me. I'm a lawyer defending a major technology company, and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca! Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense! None of this makes sense! And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberatin' and conjugatin' the Emancipation Proclamation, does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit!"
I am officially gone from
...die already.
Nobody wants it, nor is even interested in it anymore.
most contracts like this will have enough stipulations to make it fairly easy to pull out if things go south. i bet oracle put in all kinds of conditions like minimum sales numbers, etc
It wouldn't surprise me if Mark Hurd was a little lax in the clauses of the contract(s) with Oracle because he was dealing with his buddy Larry.
Of course, once Hurd no longer ran the ship, HP found the terms of their contracts offered them little protection from an uncooperative Oracle....
That said, I'm not convinced Itanium had a future - maybe it was time to change processors. The difference probably was that HP could have done it in a more graceful fashion if they were not being kicked in the ass by Oracle.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
It sounds like Oracle probably has some contractual obligations to live up to, and if so, HP deserves for them to uphold their end of the bargain. That said, I can understand Oracle's lack of desire to throw good money after bad. Itanic might not be dead, but it's comatose in a hospice with friends and family gathered around. Who'd want to spend much time and effort on a system that almost nobody wants?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I always wished that AMD had named their Athlon chips Atinum instead.
1. They came out roughly the same time as Itanium
2. They were 64-bit (x86-64 instead of Itanium's IA64)
3. They were touted as the next generation after x86 (as was IA-64)
4. The name started with A (for AMD, where Itanium started with I for Intel)
5. The name was a metal with the first phonem(s) removed (Pl-Atinum vs. T-Itanium)
6. Platinum is more costly and precious than Titanium
For those that lack the history, x86-64 (and the Athlon) was a resounding success; so much so that Intel begrudgingly followed AMD's lead for their consumer grade 64-bit chips. Intel's attempt to push Itanium and the IA64 architecture faltered with the much simpler and sensical upgrade path that AMD's lineup offered.
I wonder if litigious HP will sue AMD too, since the success of the X86-64 architecture contributed to Itanium's failure as a platform, and thus Oracle's withdrawal of support for it.
Go for a zillion-quagillian dollars damage.
Hire the same accounts that figure up the RIAA's damage estimates. They'll make it work.
The company that killed WebOS and seriously considered selling off their whole PC business line is desperate to hang on to their Itanium business?
According the the linked articles (haven't read the actual suit/complaint), HP is claiming that Oracle committed to continued support at part of the settlement of HPs suit over Oracle hiring former HP CEO Mark Hurd who resigned in the midst of a scandal for which HP would have almost certainly fired him.
There is no suggestion that HP paid Oracle any amount to develop or continue support of their software on HP's Itanium systems. So, if you cut through all the distractions and boil it down the the basics, HP is claiming the Oracle owes $500M to $4B for hiring Mark Hurd, the very same CEO HP would probably have fired.
Livermore acknowledged under questioning that Intel demanded $488 million over five years to keep up production of Itanium in a waning market for the chip. She said that to her knowledge, Oracle was never told about the arrangement with Intel.
Which helps explain why she "doesn't like" people who refer to it as Itanic.
Wow, that's the second time this week I've backed Oracle's position in a lawsuit (the other is against Lodsys, not the Google case)
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
For me, this is a very simple issue. I like to put the Itanium issue aside here. After all it's still the CPU HP uses in it's HP-UX and VMS boxes. It's just a successor to the PA-RISC that Oracle happily supported (and still does?). What really happened IMHO here was that Oracle bought SUN and discovered that they where nowhere near the top 3 in the *nix sales for their Database. So lets take the player at the top of that list (HP) and just drop them :) Oh, and to the customers using that platform, here is a nice offer on our SUN boxes for you to migrate to :)
Same is happening on the Linux front. We have Unbreakable Linux 6 (rebranded Unfakable Linux 6 (RHEL)) and Oracle supports that as a platform for the DB but the original (RHEL 6) is not supported, unless that has happened rather recently. Wonder why that is.
Its a question that has been kicking around in my head for some time but with x86 already pretty reliable, fast and cheap as hell, why is Itanium still around? I understand its pretty much limited to big iron systems where up time is critical for customers like banks and military but what is so special about its design?
Is there any technical advantage to the Itanium architecture that enables it to run more reliably than a Xeon or Opteron? The only feature I can recall is the ability to run two CPU's in lock-step for high reliability but I don't see why they couldn't introduce this feature in x86. Why hasn't x86 replaced it in big iron systems?
Why would a Wookiee, an 8-foot-tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of 2-foot-tall Ewoks? "
Umm, midget and or furry fetish?
Why only sue them, if you can threaten them with lasers. On the moon!
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
then they should either do what they said or else pay out whatever penalties were specified in the contract.
If there was no contract or nothing specified in it, then it goes to the courts...which is exactly what has happened.
Likely there's a bunch of Itanium code out there and people don't want to spend the money rebuilding it for x86.
No, look, if Oracle wanted to deal with whatever they would have had to pay for hiring Hurd, they shouldn't have made a deal with HP to give something up to drop that lawsuit -- they should have just fought that lawsuit in court. Whatever they are now liable for as a result of breaching a contract with HP to continue support for Oracle DB on Itanium is something they owe for breaching that contract, not for hiring Hurd.
..does Mr UnShaved Old Fuck Pay You for that ? Old Fuck made a fortune (literally billions) by HP salesmen selling his product bundled with HP hardware. First PA-RISC, then Itanium. Every single Itanium CPU is probably more mission-critical than the MySQL toy databases you and your friends run in your bedrooms.
I am not the greatest fan of HP, but considering that they were a major, if not THE major part of his success, he is a disloyal, geriatric SCUMBAG. You don't treat your loyal, decades-long business partners like that. Did it ever occur to you that real humans are behind the Itanium business ? These people lose their jobs because of Mr Unshaved Old Fuck. Nice fucking of the 99% by a Mr 1% Larry Geriatric.
...I would hire any competent Postgresql developer on the market and add all the missing bits to make it an Oracle RDBMS killer. Full PL/SQL support, tested in real-world customer settings. Benchmarking it in real-world customer scenarios. Tuning it until it is at least as well-performing as Oracle. Kill every known buy. Subject it to fuzzing to find even more bugs.
And then, release it as HP Itanium Database For Free. Hand out free conversion programs Oracle->Itanium Database. Spend three billion dollars to kill off Oracle's RDBMS business. This scumbag needs to be taught a lesson about loyalty to those who have helped him most during his miserable life.
..that is your post. Oracle was still making excellent money with Itanium - it clearly was a matter of helping the sick SPARC business Mr Larry acquired. And a matter of vendetta regarding his buddy Hurd.
Itanium processors are very much like mainframe processors and simply cannot be compared to a beige x86 box. Yes, the business was declining, but didn't HP and their salesforce literally make Oracle ? Now he is backstabbing them for his own, very egotist reasons ? What a piece of shit !
..dozens of millions of customers of fortune 500 companies who could be served without expensive and rock-solid HP-UX/Itanium machines humming along in those large, well-cooled datacenters. Very much like IBM mainframes. Isn't it crazy to provide a reliable service to all these 78 million little fuckers ? Can't we screw them over by slapping their data into a Mysql toystore running on some beige x86 boxes ? That would be much cheaper, I tell you !
..they would turn around and grind Mr Larry into the ground for that. But they are only spineless MBA Cowards at the top. The grunts who did tens of thousands of HP/Oracle database server implementations - they will be screwed over for their hard work in developing millions lines of PL/SQL code. They will be screwed over for sitting long hours in front of terminals getting those Oracle-based database applications running. Ms Whitman will soon get her golden parachute and 50000 more HP employees will get the boot for helping to build the billion dollar empire of Mr Larry.
Mr Larry's next Yacht will be named "One Percent" on one side and "Screw Over" on the other side.
Yeah, a said story of a proud company. My best guess is that Compaq got paid by WIntel to finish them off. They were a capable competitor to both Intel and Microsoft (after all. VMS is even today much better than Windows) and they had to be eliminated.
...actually was leading-edge in the 1990s. Their machines were rock-solid, except for some HP-UX bugs, maybe. So your negative tone is entirely unjustified. HP once was a cornerstone of American industry, until the MBA Rubbish invited MS and Intel to have a lunch in HP's customer base. All the Wintel crap started with Lew Platt and Fiorina definitely made it worse. These cowards would always put out the white flag if some shitty little amateur like Ellison or Gates came along with loud noises. They could have priced HPUX/PA RISC workstations like PCs, but that would have hurt some quarterly results, so they chose short term gain for long-term defeat to Wintel.
We, the customers, now have greatly inferior products. Yeah, the excellent work of American capitalism - let the inferior crap win.
HP outsourced their CPU development and manufacturing to Intel. Everybody knew this. Now we know how expensive it exactly was. It does not give Larry $hit an excuse to fuck his most important business partner and their common customers.
..that is Itanium. This CPU contains lots of essential features for enterprise customers so that their systems have minimal downtime. That is why HP is still making excellent dollar with Itanium systems and why they can pay huge sums to Intel. All 100% legitimate if you don't accept the $hitty propaganda of that egotist tycoon Ellison who screws over tens of thousands of HP employees who made his success possible. The recent layoffs are directly related to HP losing one of their best partners. HP literally made this guy Ellison and now he thinks they can be doublecrossed in short order. And with them, doublecross HP/Oracle customers who have often spent dozens of millions on large Itanium-based systems.
Larry Ellison is very much like Pakistan - suck money out of America with the right hand and give weapons, ammo, food, shelter and intelligence to the Taleban with the left hand. I hope he will rot in hell for that 1% behaviour.
Clearly Oracle has demonstrated lately that they like lawsuits. Hp was just jealous that they weren't incurred to the party with google.
Also, if oracle said they would supportItanium, then they should - popular or not
... but Itanium being Itanic is much more than one year old
The Itanium chip is a damn sick joke
Someone ought to put it out of its own misery a long, long time ago !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
that live by litigation, shall perish by litigation
Microsoft and RedHat aren't supporting your platform. Intel's latest compilers don't support Itanium either and they make the bloody thing you pay them not to EOL.