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Judge Rules Oracle Must Continue Porting Software To Itanium
angry tapir writes "A California court has ordered Oracle to continue porting its software to the Intel Itanium chips used by Hewlett-Packard in a number of its servers. Last year, Oracle, which competes with HP in the hardware market but shares many customers with the vendor, announced it would cease supporting Itanium. HP filed suit in June 2011, maintaining that Oracle was contractually bound to continue supporting Itanium."
Hahahahaha! Not that I really think there's any use in prolonging the inevitable with Itanium, but I just love hearing about Oracle getting fucked.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
But... FUHREEEEEE ENTERRRPRIIIIISE!!!!11 It should be perfectly fine to introduce incompatibility and leave customers without upgradws to sink a competitor! This is how true American businesses work!
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
But if Oracle was stupid enough to agree to support a chip for a long period based on Intel and HP's suggestion of everlasting server dominance, then they deserve what they get. Oracle should have bothered to do a little research, and if they had they would have realized Itanium was the turd most of us "little people" figured even at the time.The term Itanic wasn't coined yesterday or for no reason Mr Ellison.
Why does this pose a problem to Oracle?
It seems to me that the people of Oracle just needs to compile the software to Itanium and be done with it. Surely not a problem worth taking to court.
Do you *really* want to depend on a forced port?
One that the developers' heart isn't in?
One that their company puts all their least competent people on?
One were a few deliberate bugs would be just as bad for you business as not having a port at all - if not worse?
(And how are you going to prove in court that a bug is deliberate, unless some manager is stupid enough to send the order to the developers by e-mail.)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Who is going to want to use software that a company was forced to port to a dying platform?
Rehire fired workers? Or doesn't HP feel its own statements should be binding? :-)
Being a trustworthy hardware entity isn't really the HP Way since at least the late 90's. Now it's just the same shit Dell and Acer and the rest sell, but with a roll of the dice CEO and enough money from printers to pretend that they still have anything to bring to the table. Innovation is a four letter as they have selected the role of yet another OEM. HP used to be awesome, now... not so much. Still Oracle laid their bed on this one, and HP is just treating them the way they would have treated HP if the roles were flipped.
From the article:
"For approximately three decades, these corporate giants dealt on an informal basis," Kleinberg wrote in his decision. "Even when the financial consequences were in the billions, they shared resources, worked together, supported mutual customers, and with only a handful of exceptions did so without a written contract."
HP had "every reason to believe" the settlement agreement "was consistent with 'business as usual,'" Kleinberg added.
Overall, Oracle's statements amounted to a valid contract and the company is required to continue porting its products to HP's Itanium servers at no cost to HP, the judge ruled.
Those products constitute the list of software products that were offered on HP Itanium platforms as of Sept. 20, 2010, "including any new releases, versions or updates of those products," Kleinberg added.
Oracle is obligated to continue the ports until HP stops selling Itanium-based servers, the judge wrote.
Surely this will be overturned on appeal? Essentially the case seems to be:
* You guys worked together in the past
* You guys talked about your continued commitment to the platform
* Even though no contract is in place, you have to do what you said you would do and support this platform in perpetuity regardless of whether a technical and business case for continuing to do so exists.
Wow - that sounds like the end of any informal agreement and collaboration between big companies for the foreseeable future. Won't this impact open source as well?
No one in their right mind would invest money in this now and have already started porting their apps to Windows or Linux.
This reminds me of when Sun cancelled x86 solaris only to reintroduce it. Corporate customers shunned it and software vendors stopped supporting it which caused customers to shun it more in a perpetual loop.
The only people running VMS, HP-UX, and Windows on Itanium are not upgrading or buying new. Just keeping their existing infrastructure or moving or are in the process of moving to a modern more supported platform.
I hate Oracle with a passion but they are asshats in this who voided the contract in order to drum up support for their own offerings even after the lawsuit will make up in increased sales. Bastards.
http://saveie6.com/
Being a trustworthy hardware entity isn't really the HP Way since at least the late 90's. Now it's just the same shit Dell and Acer and the rest sell, but with a roll of the dice CEO and enough money from printers to pretend that they still have anything to bring to the table. Innovation is a four letter as they have selected the role of yet another OEM. HP used to be awesome, now... not so much. Still Oracle laid their bed on this one, and HP is just treating them the way they would have treated HP if the roles were flipped.
They still support old mainframe boxen from a different era running VMS, HP-UX, Non-stop and I think Tandom? These things run nuclear power plants, air traffic control systems, financial markets, and things that IBM still makes money today. These are not your typical XP to Windows 7 migration issues upgrading boxes but are part of decades old infrastructure. HP acquired some hardcore players like Digital back in its day.
True I have not even seen opensource software work on VMS ports of perl and apache since the beginning of the century. No new customers and my guess is they are supporting old.
But still you are right with new purchases and this pulling of Itanium has scared the crap out of customers who are already investing in crappy wintel or lintel replacements in clusters for many things that are not industrial scale.
http://saveie6.com/
And all that considering Oracle started out on Itanium's "grandfather" (of sorts), VAX/VMS.
Decency would suggest Oracle support Itanium as long as it exists.
They likely have big enterprise customers that have spent oodles of money customizing the software. It's not just a matter of recompiling at that point.
While I found it somewhat surprising, it isn't totally amazing. The Judge reviewed the totality of the joint corporate history and ruled. While it's inevitable that Oracle will appeal, IANAL but successful appeals usually require there to be an error in Law, not in "Fact". It seems to be a finding of "Fact" (there's little doubt that if there was a valid contract, it's a contract ;>).
As for Oracle then producing intentionally buggy software that would be unprofessional and begging for suits from the customers (who tend to be Fortune 100 companies, with their own nasty Legal departments).
It is not clear to me from the media coverage if Oracle is required to do the work for free (or, if like Intel, HP can/must pay for the work done on their behalf). Or if Oracle still has to do the work, how many boxes will HP have to ship Oracle for Development and Testing (that's another way to potentially extract pounds of flesh from HP).
I thought that the remedy for breach of contract in common law systems was for the parties to be restored to the position they would have been in had the contract not existed. Hence, I'm very surprised that in this case the judge reportedly is compelling someone to do something against their will other than pay damages. Is this standard practice in California, is this really a voluntary settlement, or will it be overturned on appeal?
Google case, now this one... wow. Oracle is not my favorite company, extremely dislike their support services etc...
They still support old mainframe boxen from a different era running VMS, HP-UX, Non-stop and I think Tandom?
As a mainframe sysprog, recently escaped from HP, I can assure you that at least the boxen I was working on wasn't 'old'. It was a state-of-the-art Z196, capable of running thousands of linux images under VMS with essentially cross-memory comms between the images and the the z/OS LPARs, and virtually 100% uptime.
Give me a mainframe running linux images to front end the mainframe over a swarm of crappy, consumer grade X-Boxes any day.
In other news Oracle is actively recruiting the services of Robert Ballard.
I can see it now: Oracle does a quick and dirty (read: half-assed) job of porting their RDBMS to Itanium, and assigns an intern for bug fixing.
What could possibly go wrong (for HP).
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Last time i had a problem like that was probably 10-13 years ago...... Don't like most branded systems for totally different reasons..
From TFA: "Oracle is obligated to continue the ports until HP stops selling Itanium-based servers, the judge wrote."
*Selling*? How about supporting? Oracle should be required to continue supporting Itanium for as long as the contract stipulates or there are still HP customers *using* (not buying, using) Itanium machines (until whichever ends first of course).
Making the support contingent on HP just selling Itanium will tank HP's Itanium sales, since who is going to buy one at the risk that they are the last one to buy one and the very next day Oracle stops porting to them?
And now what's Oracle's punishment for being douche-bag dicks and not holding up their end of the contract? They can't just be required to do what they were supposed to do in the first place and that's all, otherwise they never have an incentive to hold up their end of a contract as soon as they decided they want out.
Think about it. Who would ever do what they are supposed to do when the only punishment for not doing it is having to do it. One would never have anything to lose trying to not do what one is supposed to. Everyone would constantly just not do what they are supposed to do and wait to be called out on it.
I say Oracle should have to pay HP 1 billion dollars just for being dicks.
Let's face it: this has little to do with the relative quality or potential lifeline of the Itanium family. Oracle simply wants to force folks to use Oracle hardware. Not supporting Itanium is just another way to eliminate competition for their Sun/Oracle servers.
What's to stop Oracle from taking the Homer Simpson solution? ("When you don't like your job, you don't strike. You just go in everyday and do a half-ass job.") In other words, the judge can order them to port their software to Itanic, but can the judge really order them to do a good job of it? How would this even be measured? Is the judge really going to be acting as a de facto project manager, holding Oracle in contempt of court if there are too many bugs? (Imagine how much they'd have to pay people to work on that project.)
Ummm, what?
Z196 isn't HP, it's IBM.
VMS doesn't run on z/OS LPARS; VMS is HP and z/OS is IBM.
What the hell are you talking about?
You mean MVS (as in now called zOS) not VMS which is the ex Digital / Compaq OpenVMS.
zOS / MVS is IBM not HP....
Not to say that Oracle database doesn't already suck, but now Oracle is being forced to maintain their database for a platform they see as unprofitable. Oracle cares only about profit, remember, and Itanium is, objectively, not a profitable platform. And not to say that they already have much incentive to do a good job, but now for Itanium, they have even LESS incentive to do a good job. So if you thought Oracle was a nightmare already, just wait until you see what a horror show it'll evolve into over the next few years on Itanium. Oracle for Itanium will consistently lag behind on security patches and new features. Even old features will mysteriously exhibit buggy behavior that never existed on other platforms. Oracle will be able to weasel out of any definitive claim that they're doing a bad job, and they won't care about what it does to their reputation because few customers buy Oracle for Itanium in the first place. Dollars to donuts, Oracle is going to act like a passive-aggresive three-year-old.
But I really don't blame them. By court order, they're being forced to invest in development that will cost more than it earns. So they're going to cut corners as much as possible, within the letter of the law. I don't like to waste my time, despite the fact that I have some altruism, and Oracle, being a psychopathic corporation, REALLY doesn't want to waste its time. I have complaints about Oracle's handling of Sun's assets like SPARC, Solaris, Java, and OpenOffice. In many ways, these are mind-share assets that can make people have positive feelings about a corporation that ultimately lead to more profit, because people are more likely to buy your profitable products. Oracle has squandered this opportunity. But in the case of Itanium, the whole thing is a completely pointless exercise. There is nothing to be gained by supporting it.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
MVS (now z/OS) does not "run thousands of linux images." In fact, it doesn't run even a single image of any type - it is not a VM hypervisor. The product that runs linux guests is z/VM.
I think that the AC just picked up a bunch of jargon (sysprog, LPAR, z196, VMS, etc) from an article on mainframes, threw them together, and got the clueless slashdot mods to mark him "insightful". Pretty pathetic.
The companies using Oracle on Itanium are mostly large companies, and they are customers of Oracle (obviously). A number of those customers are probably already looking to move to a vendor that won't abandon them like Oracle tried to. The ones that aren't looking to change vendors now surely will be driven to change vendors if Oracle exhibits behavior like you suggest.
Oracle may have tried to quietly drop support for Itanium, and hoped that only the few Itanium customers would notice. HP did not let that happen. Now, the whole world knows that Oracle will happily abandon customers if a particular product is not profitable enough for them. Having the whole world also know that when you can't just abandon customers you treat them like ugly stepchildren is not good for business.
Just as importantly, Oracle's partners now know that what Oracle says is worthless.
Oracle had better clean this mess up right, or they are going to have a lot bigger problems than having to support an unprofitable product. I imagine their are some very happy salesmen at IBM and Microsoft right now.
> There is nothing to be gained by supporting it.
But they *thought* there was something to be gained back when they *promised* to support it. That's why we have contracts.
Let's say you gave me money yesterday in exchange for a promise that I will write you some software today. There's "nothing to be gained" for writing the software, so I should just "walk away", right?
The use of "boxen" for the singular form of the noun is another dead giveaway.
Absolutely. If you're a crook, then you'll take the money and run. From the sociopath's perspective, there's little or nothing to be gained by doing the actual work. Oracle, like any other big company, is sociopathic.