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HP Asks Judge To Enforce Itanium Contract Vs. Oracle
Dupple writes with this quote from a Reuters report:
"Hewlett-Packard Co told a judge on Tuesday that Oracle Corp should be ordered to make its software available on HP's Itanium-based servers for as long as HP sells them. Lawyers for HP and Oracle presented closing arguments in a California state court for the first phase in a bitter lawsuit between the two tech giants. ... Oracle decided to stop developing software for use with Itanium last year, saying Intel made it clear that the chip was nearing the end of its life and was shifting its focus to its x86 microprocessor. But HP said it had an agreement with Oracle that support for Itanium would continue, without which the equipment using the chip would become obsolete. HP said that commitment was affirmed when it settled a lawsuit over Oracle's hiring of ousted HP chief executive Mark Hurd. HP seeks up to $4 billion in damages."
The Itanic is sinking!
John
he extends sympathies.
--- Do you believe in the day?
HP seeks up to $4 billion in damages.
Years ago when the itanic was sinking, I heard shipping estimates as low as 200K processors annually. I'm sure its lower now. But that implies something on the order of $20K damages per processor shipped, which is astounding.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
HP sold Itanium boxes to customers who use them to run Oracle. Oracle stops supporting Itanium and the customers are stuck holding computers that don't do what they paid for them to do.
There's probably penalties in HPs contracts with their customers in the event of such a circumstance. Or maybe they just don't want their customers to feel like HP screwed them.
paintball
Because they have contracts with their customers guaranteering them continued software support. And if the main supplier stops software support, those contracts become quite shaky.
Why would you even think of damages in terms of "per processor shipped" (and, even worse, in terms of annual processor shipments)? Even assuming the estimates you refer to are accurate, the computation you make is meaningless.
Considering that ditching Itanic would mean porting HP-UX, NonStop OS, and VMS, it would be a non-trivial exercise. First, you have to port the OS. Then you have to either write a compatibility layer (similar to Apple's Rosetta), or port all of the applications, including those you didn't write yourself. Given the tendency of business to not want to spend more money than they have to, the former is more likely in the short term.
There's also the political issues involved with abandoning a significant hardware lineup. Sure, there was a seven year overlap between Itanic and PA-RISC on the HP-UX side, but no customer is going to be happy about such a move. Compare with IBM; they've been doing POWER for two decades, and no end in sight. Or Oracle and SPARC, for that matter.
In my blunt opinion, if HP tries to move HP-UX to x86, it'll mark a major marketing campaign from IBM and Oracle about a company that won't stand behind its hardware, and they will bleed (more) marketshare.
This whole thing is not going to end well.
The original Itanium was a disaster, the second generation was what the first should have been but wasn't, the third actually looks very respectable. Intel would be stupid to eliminate a product they've actually got functional.
And for high-end use, the Itanium is a genuinely useful CPU. Because the performance of a cluster is a function of the communication delays, very high-end clusters WANT to have very high-end CPUs. You can only do so much with piles of PCs before the inefficiencies due to (a) distance and (b) an inefficient architecture really set in. There's also (c) - a crap instruction set - but the Itanium doesn't help much there because although it is somewhat better, nobody has built a particularly good compiler for it yet. Optimization on the Itanium remains a challenge.
Admittedly, it's not the design I would have chosen - I far prefer many of the design decisions made in the Inmos Transputer and the Intel iWarp, since those were designed specifically for the purpose of clustering and started from that position. I also prefer the elegance of the MIPS64 instruction set over the unnecessary burden of anything Intel has done, but again I'm in the minority. I'd also have threaded compute elements and produced virtual cores, rather than threaded instructions on physical cores, since threading the compute elements would allow you to distribute the heat better, wouldn't prevent you accessing elements that are wholly independent of those in use and would reduce unnecessary swapping. But what do I know, I've only been observing what actually works vs what the customers want for 35 years. Customers are just as stupid as beancounters and pointy-haired bosses.
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)
Itanium servers are very profitable for HP and they don't really have any competition in this server space. It is very expensive for Intel as they don't sell enough of them to justify the R&D and support. Intel would like to drop it but for HP. Oracle would like to drop it for support costs. Probably HP wants to keep their profits even though it costs money for everyone else.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
If Oracle doesn't want to support it on your platform, you can do it yourself. For less than $4 billion, anyway...
Are you kidding? Sparc and PPC are plenty of competition for HP in the server space. If anything, HP/UX has always been an ugly redheaded stepchild when it comes to Oracle support.
If you're running HP, you're already trying to smash a square peg into a round hole here.
That said: Oracle should still be held to any contracts it made.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
>HP didn't pay Oracle to develop, or maintain their software for HP systems. Oracle did it because they thought it was good business.
Larry signed the contract. They're on the hook.
Just like David Boies signed a contract to prosecute SCO's lawsuits until the heat death of the universe, because he thought he was going to get a chunk of the 5 billion SCO was suing IBM for.
Greed leads to bad decisions. Who woulda thunk it.
--
BMO
It seems to me that HP would be better off sinking this money into contributions to PostgreSQL / EnterpriseDB; it already offers a ton of Oracle compatibility, and runs on HP-UX: http://enterprisedb.com/products-services-training/products/postgres-plus-advanced-server/advanced-server-oracle-features
Oracle only gets out of the contract for development if the clause on it is unconscionable or otherwise unenforceable.
Unlike your average joe, Oracle has lawyers that they pay to go over this stuff and pick out and cross out the unenforceable and unconscionable stuff for revision before signing.
IANAL, but I trust Oracle hires good lawyers.
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BMO
>I would say a $4B penalty claim in such a case is unconscionable, and not foreseeable.
No. That's not how it works. It's not whether the penalty is unconscionable. That's just HP asking for relief. They can ask for any number they want. But in cases like this, you always ask for more than what you need because it only gets adjusted down anyway.
You only get out of it if *the clause in the contract itself* is unconscionable or otherwise unenforceable. According to HP, Oracle signed a contract saying that Oracle would continue to support Itanium. HP is telling the court that to make them whole for Oracle to break the contract, it would be 4 billion to call it even, because that's what the projected damage would be, according to HP.
Whether the court agrees with that amount or not, the court has to first determine whether the clause itself was unconscionable or otherwise unenforceable. If it's a valid clause, it's just a matter of determining how much it would be to make HP "whole" for Oracle breaking the contract.
Proving the clause is unconscionable or otherwise unenforceable is a pretty high hurdle for Oracle to clear, since their lawyers are experienced in handling contracts like this and they should have known before signing that it was unconscionable. Proving this means that their lawyers were incompetent at the time of signing. Not proving it means that their current lawyers are incompetent.
THE CONTRACT IS INVALID BECAUSE I WAS DRUNK, YOUR HONOUR.
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BMO
HP already ported it to x86 as internal experiment, it can run there
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/08/hp_ux_on_x86_project_kinetic/