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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 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.
It is. Unless you haven't freely entered into a contract guaranteeing you won't do it.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
This is free enterprise. Oracle and HP entered a contract. Oracle disputed, and the judge said they can't back out of their contract. So there you have it.
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
evacuate City 17 at once, if not sooner! I cannot state this without enough undue emphasis.
You miss-read that. The judge pointed out that even when they *didn't* have a contract, they had (for decades) worked together in good faith on huge, and expensive projects. In the face of that past behavior, HP's belief that Oracle would *honor* the terms of a settlement agreement (which is a contract), was beyond reasonable, and Oracle doesn't have a leg to stand on with regard to reneging on that agreement.
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/
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).
It is a very expensive CPU that never even started to live up to it's considerable hype. Because of that, it never really caught on, so there's not a lot of ROI for a software vendor supporting it.