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Judge Rules Oracle Must Continue Porting Software To Itanium

Posted by samzenpus on from the stick-around dept.

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."

10 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Not an Oracle Fan by imemyself · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!
    1. Re:Not an Oracle Fan by OnlineAlias · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Neither company wants to continue down this path...HP knows no one will buy the platform with a gun to Oracle's head. This judgement merely forces Oracle to pay HP in an agreement not to have to port the code and then sales of everything will stop.

  2. Sure it's the Itanic by WiiVault · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Sure it's the Itanic by sangreal66 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      They actually made the agreement when Itanium was already dying (2010). It was (a vague) part of the settlement when HP sued them for hiring their former CEO

      At least, that is what I got when I RTFA

    2. Re:Sure it's the Itanic by bennomatic · · Score: 4, Funny

      I was going to suggest that iTunes for Windows was another good example of this, but then I remembered that it sucks on Mac OS X as well.

      --
      The CB App. What's your 20?
    3. Re:Sure it's the Itanic by Hognoxious · · Score: 5, Funny

      GNU/Hurd, please. Don't set Stallman off again.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  3. Re:Free enterprise! by the_humeister · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Silly Oracle by Black+Parrot · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  5. Re:Free enterprise! by rve · · Score: 5, Funny

    evacuate City 17 at once, if not sooner! I cannot state this without enough undue emphasis.

  6. Re:Then shouldn't HP have to support TouchPad? Pre by Billly+Gates · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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/