Oracle Sues Companies It Says Provide Solaris OS Support In Illegal Manner

alphadogg writes "Oracle is continuing to crack down on companies it claims are providing support services for its products in an illegal fashion. Last week, Oracle sued IT services providers Terix and Maintech, alleging they have 'engaged in a deliberate scheme to misappropriate and distribute copyrighted, proprietary Oracle software code' in the course of providing support for customers using Oracle's Solaris OS. Oracle's allegations are similar to ones it has made in lawsuits against other Solaris service providers, such as ServiceKey, as well as Rimini Street, which provides third-party support for Oracle and SAP applications."

Comments

Slowaris Delenda Est

[the eric conspiracy]

So Oracle is trying to kill off Solaris? Because nobody in their right mind would buy an OS from a company behaving like this.

Re:Slowaris Delenda Est

[fustakrakich]

Oracle is in the midst of creating a closed ecosystem, helps keep prying outsiders out. And maybe it wants all traces of anything 'Sun' that's out in the wild to be made extinct. I am sure that many of its customers, like banks and governments are very satisfied with the services they provide.

Re:Slowaris Delenda Est

[jythie]

'behaving like this?'

From the complaint it sounds like they have a subscription service they charge for, then a couple companies came along, subscribed themselves, and they are reselling it to other companies. Kinda like someone buying a cable subscription then starting 'joe's cable company' reselling the connection to other people.

Re:Slowaris Delenda Est

[postbigbang]

Branding is branding. Yes, they still killed Sun Ray a couple of weeks ago, and more Sun products will be renamed. This is about revenue, however, and you don't screw with Oracle revenue.

For the longest time, Oracle has wanted a vertically integrated stack from the plug to your play. Now they're starting to achieve that, and won't have to mess around with hardware vendors, as hardware vendors are changing from a server model to a services model. Oracle wants that services revenue, too. HP, once their odd friend, is now their sworn enemy and IBM eats Oracle's lunch. If you're Google, you know the taste of their silly legal department. They don't have many friends left. Products, like at Google, have only a chance so long as they make revenue numbers. Otherwise, goodbye. And the less dependence there is on outsiders, the better.

These are all natural courses of events for them. To the outside world, if you're not a stockholder or customer or very favored vendor, please self-fornicate and expire.

If you're looking for mirth, industrial leadership, and warmth, turn left, please.

Re:Slowaris Delenda Est

[Anonymous Coward]

I never understood the mob mentality of slashdotters! Any enterprise UNIX company barring Sun never provided free updates. Heck IBM or HP never provided AIX for HP-UX for free, leave alone providing updates for it. You need to buy AIX separately even if you buy the Power gear from them. And then pay separately if you want to run LPARs on it. Sun gave Solaris for free. And if you notice, Oracle continues to provide Solaris for free - you can download it if you sign up for OTN (which is free). And there are no asinine licences required to use any of the OS features like Solaris Zones, ZFS, DTrace you name it! You also get access to the public repository which is updated for every major update of Solaris 11. So in a way, you get the updates free too! I think Oracle is doing nothing wrong if they ask the stealing companies to stop redistributing Oracle's code.

Because nobody in their right mind would buy an OS from a company behaving like this.

Thanks for letting us know that you are a teenager living with your mom who has never seen a enterprise datacenter in life. Next time you visit a Bank to drop your mom's paycheck, do yourself a favor and ask someone to put you through someone in IT. They will tell you about why they spend millions of dollars on OS support subscriptions.

Re:Oracle claims the defendants are distrib new ve

[wisnoskij]

But the hardware, software, and drivers were all created and tested 8 years ago.
There is no reason to retest the same drivers over and over again, simply because time has elapsing in the interim.

They built those back when SUN X4500 was brand new. And it cost them nothing to have the drivers sitting in storage for 8 years. Theoretically, someone even had a maintenance contract for that exact SUN X4500, and had those exact drivers on it. When you need a maintenance contract to even use your 8 year old hardware, you don't really own it. You are just leasing the right to operate it.

Oracle being Oracle, but dumb.

[BookRead]

Is Oracle's behavior legal? Yes. Are the support companies in the wrong? Yes. Oracle owns Solaris and gets to set the rules. Is this a smart strategy for Solaris or Oracle? I doubt it. My company was a long term Sun/Solaris customer but when Oracle took over they locked down support and pretty much everything in the Solaris community and started attempting to extract as much cash as they could from us. We weren't the biggest customer but we were a pretty good customer and we weren't a tiny little startup either. Oracle did an excellent job of convincing my management to move to Windows and open source solutions. We stay as far away from Oracle as we can these days. Oracle knows the cost of everything but not the value of a community to support them.

Re:Oracle will do just fine

[aodash]

Nonsense. I work for a fairly large university in the NE. We were an virtually exclusive Sun hardware/Solaris shop. Due to Oracle's behavior, we've moved wholly away on both hardware and software since they acquired Sun. Good riddance. I also know of an enormous urban school district (where I used to work and still know many people) that has done the same. While this is only an N of 2, I doubt we're all that rare.

I work for a University out west, and our story is the same as yours. We had a large Sun/Solaris presense... not anymore.

Re:Oracle claims the defendants are distrib new ve

[Princeofcups]

But the hardware, software, and drivers were all created and tested 8 years ago.
There is no reason to retest the same drivers over and over again, simply because time has elapsing in the interim.

They built those back when SUN X4500 was brand new. And it cost them nothing to have the drivers sitting in storage for 8 years. Theoretically, someone even had a maintenance contract for that exact SUN X4500, and had those exact drivers on it. When you need a maintenance contract to even use your 8 year old hardware, you don't really own it. You are just leasing the right to operate it.

OK, more mod ups for people who have no idea what they are talking about. Sigh. There is nothing stopping you from running unsupported. We have several V490 in production for a legacy app and a few spares. When something breaks, we swap as needed. There are no OS updates for our version of Solaris, so we just live with it. You see, this isn't Windows where you need constant security patches and updates. It's a rock solid OS, and rock solid hardware. The diagnostics can tell me exactly what is misbehaving, even when the system stays up and keeps running. Windows admins just don't get this.

Loose/Loose for all

[bobthesungeek76036]

I used to work for the Big-O. Bottom-line is king there. That's why I had to quit. I understand the legalise of this situation. However, you have a bunch of folks out there still running Solaris w/o maintenance contracts. And if they don't update the OS with patches, they are vunerable to security hacks which hurts everyone in the long run. I wish Oracle would let folks update their software w/o contracts but that doesn't help the bottom-line and we all suffer for it....

Re:Oracle will do just fine

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Here, here

(sic).

There, there.

Re:Oracle will do just fine

[hey!]

Having bean a lead developer in a company that was an Oracle reseller (pretty much a necessity in some markets), your characterization of Oracle is partly wrong; the part that isn't wrong is a gross oversimplification.

I've visited some of the places where Oracle's developers work, and as you might expect I am (or rather *was*) pretty familiar with their product. Trust me, they pour an almost unthinkable amount of money into developing unique and useful technology. As you might suspect they don't do it out of the goodness of their heart; they don't even do it out of pride in the product. They do it in order to encourage large, institutional customers to make their systems dependent on features they can only get from Oracle.

There's good and bad aspects to this lock-in strategy. Some of the things Oracle simply does better than anyone else, such as transaction isolation (in an ACID environment). When you develop and test on Oracle, you can pretty much proceed like the user has exclusive access to the database -- no worrying about things like dirty reads or the like (although the DBA had better make sure he's allocated enough rollback segments). It's nice, but not critical; but it also makes switching to a different RDBMS inconvenient. Oracle has gone farther down this path than you probably ever imagined, right up to creating something they call "virtual private databases" -- super-long duration wrapping transactions that persist across database connections and function something like a fork in a source control system. I've known *very* large data acquisition and management operations (e.g. a commercial vendor of worldwide street data for GIS) that depend on capabilities they can *only* get from Oracle.

There are some things about Oracle I really like, like their transaction log management tools, which make it easy to find a past set of changes to your data and undo them with a wave of your magic wand, as if they never happened. For me that's a killer feature. On the other hand they've also done sleazy, bottom-feeder things to lock clients in, like making the way their JDBC drivers handle BLOBs incompatible with everyone else. They may have fixed that, but I don't think it was accidental this annoying incompatibility persisted so long.

I've also visited Oracle sales offices, and know about how they handle "channel" sales. It's all very numbers driven. Oracle's corporate culture is that they don't care about the customer, once he's good and locked in. Oracle's licensing is very complex, it take days of study to figure out what you're allowed to do with your Oracle installation. If a customer makes a mistake he doesn't get any slack; he's got to pay up fast. On the flip side, if a customer accidentally spends five or ten times what he needs (very easy to do), or if he licenses his installation in a way that won't allow for the growth he needs to plan for (also very easy to do), nobody is going to tell him. He's a sucker, and they've got quarterly targets to meet. It flies in the face of most people's instincts to treat customers this way.

Frankly, I find Oracle's corporate values detestable; but it's possible to work with them. They make sure it's *always* possible to work with them, because they want your money. But *don't* expect your Oracle salesman or reseller to take care of you, to look out for you, to warn you if you are about to make a mistake that's in their favor, or to have pity on you if such a mistake leaves you strapped over a barrel. Oracle's business strategy is *built* upon exploiting locked-in customers. You must approach a relationship with Oracle in a defensive posture -- as indeed you should with any agreement other than free software licenses.