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."

Comments

Re:damages per processor

[Anonymous Coward]

Where I work, we use Alpha, and have investigated moving to Itanium, but with this debacle, we won't make the move, as we use also Oracle. I won't discuss actual numbers, but $20,000 per CPU is in the ballpark of our annual support costs (if you include hardware and software). At some point we will either port or rewrite, and in either case, it won't be an HP platform we land on, but we may still use Oracle for the database. This case has very real implications for HP, and hurts them more than it hurts Oracle.

Re:HP Itanium Support

[bmo]

>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

Re:Existing Customers

[Bert64]

HP have been screwing their customers for a while already...
Killing PA-RISC and Alpha, forcing customers onto IA64 which now looks like it will die soon too...
With each processor transition, customers at the very least have to recompile their code or run it under slow emulation...

Sun and IBM snapped up a lot of customers from HP over the IA64 transition, and i fully expect them to do the same when HP finally abandons IA64 and moves its customers onto something else.

Introducing a new, incompatible CPU was never going to work...

Too much code is only available in binary form, and so ran on ia64 very slowly under emulation. Vendors had no incentive to port their code because there were so few users, and users had no incentive to buy into the architecture because there was no software. Who wants to pay 5 times more for a cpu that when saddled with emulation is actually slower than the cheaper cpus?

The hardware was never cheap enough to attract hobbyist developers, so even open source code was often not well tested on them (nor are new risc cpus from other vendors, but old ones can be had cheaply). Had the hardware been cheap, it would have gained a lot more traction in the linux market at least.