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

Posted by timothy on from the larry-may-I? dept.

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."

33 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Slowaris Delenda Est by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Slowaris Delenda Est by fustakrakich · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
    2. Re:Slowaris Delenda Est by jythie · · Score: 5, Insightful

      '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.

    3. Re:Slowaris Delenda Est by postbigbang · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      ---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
    4. Re:Slowaris Delenda Est by Princeofcups · · Score: 3, Interesting

      '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.

      Completely wrong. There have been 3rd party service providers for Sun as long as there has been a Sun Microsystems. Think of it as level 2 1/2 support, anything that the actual people that wrote the code can help you with. They are often more hands on, and willing to help with configuration issues as well as actual maintenance. Or were. All our support went to Oracle this year, and we are in the midst of seeing what we can trim. When the current hardware is EOL, then that is the last we'll see of Sparc in my current shop. It's sad really. The "common" Windows/Linux admin has no idea what it's like to support "classy" hardware instead of cheap throwaway PCs.

      --
      The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
    5. Re:Slowaris Delenda Est by whoever57 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Sorry Mr. Business Owner, that IT guy you hired to run your servers is downloading our free updates, and installing them on your servers violating our copyright...

      Except that the updates are probably not free. IIRC correctly, Sun was charging for updates a few years before the Oracle acquisition.

      --
      The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
    6. Re:Slowaris Delenda Est by TCM · · Score: 2

      Isn't charging for patches a conflict of interest within the same company? They make more profit the shoddier their work is. I wouldn't touch anything from them with a pole.

      --
      Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
  2. New business model by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Post patches and upgrades to a public/semi public website behind a "user agreement." Sue anyone who downloads them in the act of providing third party support to customers who actually do have the right to use the patches and upgrades.

    1. Re:New business model by mysidia · · Score: 3, Informative

      Post patches and upgrades to a public/semi public website behind a "user agreement." Sue anyone who downloads them in the act of providing third party support to customers who actually do have the right to use the patches and upgrades.

      That doesn't work. All the service provider has to do is get their customer to sign a "letter of agency"; authorizing the service provider to act on the customer's behalf to download assets and administer the updates/patches, pursuant to their customer's entitlements.

  3. In Other News... by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 2

    ... Oracle continues to make more friends in the business world!

    Wait... what? Never mind.

  4. Oracle claims the defendants are distrib new versi by raymorris · · Score: 5, Informative

    If I'm reading that right, Oracle clams that:
    Oracle provides updated software versions for a yearly fee.
    Defendants are unlawfully distributing the updated versions to people who haven't paid the fee.

    If I'm reading that right, Oracle is being slightly non-generous by having annual payments to get updates. That's understandable, though, it costs them money to keep making new updates.

    I see nothing in TFA about Oracle objecting to services the defendants provide, just and objection to them distributing new updates that haven't been paid for. So the headline is a load of bull, right?

  5. Oracle will do just fine by rsilvergun · · Score: 2

    they're sales people are legendary, and that's all that matters. IBM doesn't even bother giving IT a thought nowadays. It's all about the sales people. Oracle realized that ages ago.

    For all the complaints, the people that matter will still choose Oracle, and techies like you and me will get stuck learning and implementing it.

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
    1. Re:Oracle will do just fine by zhrike · · Score: 5, Interesting

      they're (sic) sales people are legendary, and that's all that matters. IBM doesn't even bother giving IT a thought nowadays. It's all about the sales people. Oracle realized that ages ago.

      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.

      While it is certainly true in some cases that sleazy snake oil salesmen snow decision makers, there are also organizations that will make informed decisions.

    2. Re:Oracle will do just fine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Here, here. VERY large Oracle hardware/Solaris OS shop (many thousands of systems) plus Exadata, Exalytics, etc. Done with them. Our two really good Oracle SEs (who really did most of the honest selling) recently left Oracle. They are not alone as the real talent appears to be on exodus as the pressure to sell anything regardless of fit becomes intolerable. In addition, they have become damn near adversarial with their loyal customer base in trying to jin up license undersubscription where it doesn't exist. Screw them. We've moved a great distance into the big-data realm anyway and Oracle is kind of joke their anyhoo (late comer...poopooed it for years...Exalytics blows). Anyway, I agree with you. Mark my words, their next step will be to fire their sales staff and replace them with attractive females (that's not tongue in cheek, I'm quite serious).

    3. Re:Oracle will do just fine by aodash · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Oracle will do just fine by Mr.+Freeman · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Aside from the fact that such changes cost obscene amounts of money and aren't an option for everyone, you're working in an academic environment. Such environments can make decisions in a more rational manner with more thought given to ethics and future considerations than just about any other environment out there. Corporations, however, will make decisions based solely upon the bottom line as decided by higher-up managers. This means that sales people will control what businesses use.

      --
      -1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
    5. Re:Oracle will do just fine by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Here, here

      (sic).

      There, there.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    6. Re:Oracle will do just fine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You're not alone and the move is not confined to education.

      Us: "Hi, we'd like to move all of our hosts from 20 different patch levels of Solaris 8, 9 and 10 to just 3."
      Oracle: "That'll be $1 million in license fees please."
      Us: "No thanks."
      Us: "Hello Redhat, when can we book in half a dozen guys to do RHEL training?"

    7. Re:Oracle will do just fine by jbolden · · Score: 2

      What planet do you live on? Oracle's sales people kinda suck and they are often underfunded to boot. Oracle sells because of features and depth. You can make a very good case,, that the areas where Oracle is ahead in 2013 are areas that 98% of the databases don't need and thus many companies should explore moving down market. But at least understand what you are arguing against. Oracle sells databases because they arguably make the best database for companies that have a dedicated staff of whose full time job is administering the database, with no application authoring responsibility.

      IBM's sales people are amazing absolutely.

    8. Re:Oracle will do just fine by hey! · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
  6. Re:Oracle claims the defendants are distrib new ve by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Normally i'm pretty pro-opensource and not really a fan of Oracle. In this case, it looks like they are right here. They do give Solaris for non-prod use for free (sans updates). If you want the updates you need to sign up for a maintenance contract. Flip side, they do douche moves all the time. Case in point I have an old SUN X4500 and wanted the drivers for it. Their website prevents you from downloading these without a "maintenance contract". On what, 8 year old hardware? You cant give a small download away on obsolete hardware?

  7. /. title could mean the suit itsel is illegal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Sometimes I get a bit tripped up by bad grammar, but the title of this slashdot article "Oracle Sues Companies It Says Provide Solaris OS Support In Illegal Manner" as well as the link text "Oracle is continuing to crack down on companies it claims are providing support services for its products in an illegal fashion" are both ambiguous as to where the illegality is.

    How I read it: "Oracle sues (companies it says provide Solaris OS support) in illegal manner." How I think it's supposed to read: "Oracle sues (companies it says provide Solaris OS support in illegal manner)."

    Very subtle difference in how it's read, very substantial difference in how it's interpreted. Either Oracle is filing an illegal lawsuit (which I doubt) or Oracle is filing a lawsuit against companies with illegal Solaris OS support services. Perhaps a better phrasing would be: "Oracle sues companies who allegedly offer illegal Solaris OS support."

    (Hm, maybe I should RTFA.)

  8. illumos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    The illumos project provides the basis for a Solaris-like operating system. Many distributions of illumos are now available, just like Linux. I think OmniOS and SmartOS are particularly worthy of your consideration, and ready for enterprise-scale production use, big data, DevOps, and all the other buzzwords.

  9. Re:Oracle claims the defendants are distrib new ve by wisnoskij · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
  10. Re:Oracle claims the defendants are distrib new ve by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    The "software" I wanted to download (SUNWhd) hasn't been updated since 04-Nov-2011. Its a small utility to "map" drives to their slots and offline drives.
    So, where is this "testing, building, etc" costs come from, storage space on their download servers?
    When they sold the gear (new) it was fairly pricey and people paid a small fortune for the maintenance.
    All things considered i cant see why they would "guard" this so much.

  11. Re:Oracle should focus on supporting their own stu by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    Oracle is more-or-less trying to kill Solaris. Of what new hardware they sell, it's extremely expensive and geared towards suckers with big wallets who don't comparison shop and/or are easily wooed by sales pitches. Otherwise, Oracle is more interested in milking more money out of legacy Solaris users who don't have time/resources to jump ship to x86/Linux (i.e. $50,000/year for maintenance on current Solaris environment vs. $500,000+ to code/port existing applications/buy new solution for Linux). They have no interest in providing "good" support simply because anyone who is STILL using Solaris today is probably doing so for the reason I stated.

    People will get off of Solaris eventually, but they have quite a number of years left in which they can greedily milk money away from their install base until Solaris becomes unprofitable to sustain.

  12. Oracle being Oracle, but dumb. by BookRead · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Oracle being Oracle, but dumb. by Attila+Dimedici · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Is Oracle's behavior legal? Yes. Are the support companies in the wrong? Yes.

      Your answer to the first question is most likely correct (although not necessarily). The answer to the second question is not so clear cut. At least one of the support companies claims that their clients have legal licenses and credentials to download the updates and that they are merely acting as their clients' agent in doing the download. I have come across several references (including overheard conversations by colleagues responsible for internal support of Oracle products at a previous employer) that suggest that in addition to the license fee for updates Oracle charges customers who need support installing those updates. If that is the case, Oracle may be suing these support companies because, while clients of the support companies have paid for the license to download the updates, Oracle wants them to pay Oracle for the support they need to install those updates without disrupting their ongoing operations. Considering that Oracle's approach seems to be "pay us huge sum of money per hour while our guy figures out how your database is configured (since we can't be bothered to assign the same guy to your account every time you need to update) and installs the update, which will probably take several days since the first couple of times he will break your database," it is no surprise that companies would rather hire a third party to handle this (a third party that carefully documents how the database is used and configures the update on a test server before rolling it out to production).

      --
      The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
  13. Re:Oracle claims the defendants are distrib new ve by hjf · · Score: 4, Funny

    Sounds a lot like Cisco.

    Me: Hi Mr. Cisco, I need a Catalyst 4500, how much is it?

    Cisco: Sure, fill in this form, send a copy of your last quarterly report, bank statements, and a letter of recommendation from some of your customers, and a sales executive will contact you.

    Me: But i only want a switch?

    Cisco: Please, we need that information.

    Me: Okay...

    (weeks later)

    Cisco: HI THIS IS COCAINE JOE YOUR OVER ENTHUSIAST ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE, THE PRICE FOR THE CISCO CRS YOU ORDERED IS $3M AND A SUPPORT CONTRACT OF $5M

    Me: Hey but I only asked for the price of a Catalyst 4500

    Cisco: YES BUT WE HAVE DETERMINED IT WILL NOT MEET YOUR COMPANY'S REQUIREMENTS SO IN ORDER TO SUPPORT YOU WE HAVE TO SELL YOU OUR LATEST AND GREATEST AND MORE EXPENSIVE!!!

    Me: never mind, I'll find another vendor.

    I especially love it when sales people try to sell you a $50,000 solution for a small business and claim that TCO is always lower. It seems, the higher the up-front cost, the lower the TCO is!

  14. Re:Oracle claims the defendants are distrib new ve by gstoddart · · Score: 2

    There is no reason to retest the same drivers over and over again

    If you're rolling out changes to the OS, you have to test, no? So I'm pretty sure that if they do have any updates, they do need to do testing. The drivers may have been written 8 years ago, but the other changes they're making are new and still need to work.

    You are just leasing the right to operate it.

    That is exactly Oracle's business model these days. They locked down even the documentation unless you have a support contract.

    Oracle will only sell you something with a ridiculous support contract, and they won't give you anything for Solaris without one.

    There's a reason I was once told by an Oracle consultant that it stands for "One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison".

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  15. Re:Slowaris Delenda Est? I disagree. by mmell · · Score: 3, Interesting
    No more than they tried to kill off MySQL or OpenOffice. Okay, so they're not actively trying to make any of these things go (please spare me the flames to the contrary - I'd rather believe my own eyes TYVM), but let's remember two things: 1) Oracle OWNS Solaris and the SPARC architecture - they were never free to begin with, they have always been owned, and 2) Oracle is a DATABASE company. OS/free/end-user software was never their core and center.

    Now, is this a wise move on their part? Unfortunately, yes. Evil on a par with MicroSoft, International Business Machines and Hewlett-Packard, but not unwise. You don't like it? Neither do I - which I why I stopped actively marketing my Solaris 2.4/2.5/2.6/8/10 skills some time ago. Nowadays when I look for work I look for an incredibly popular flavor of Linux which has a two-word name starting with "R". Still can't argue with their logic - they spend money and time to create software which they intend to sell at a profit. They can't very well make money while letting someone else undercut them with their own product now, can they?

    Just a final point - Oracle (and Sun before them) are in business. Their business model is the proprietary software sales/support model. It has worked, it is working and as far as they can tell it will continue to work.

    Now, their absolutely worthless technical support combined with their arrogance - these are likely to kill Solaris and SPARC. Not their business model (which is actually pretty much par for the course for the large IT software providers in the game), but their widely perceived inability to provide quick, accurate correct support for their existing (non-database) products.

  16. FOSS developer here. Oracle's code, not mine by raymorris · · Score: 2

    Same here. I support open source, I helped write a lot of it. I wrote one package from scratch that was distributed with Solaris. I wouldn't BUY their product, but that means I won't USE it. I wouldn't steal it, as these defendants allegedly did.

    I wish Oracle released all of their stuff as open source, but they don't. I expect them to respect the license on my software (GPL), and people should respect their license.

  17. Loose/Loose for all by bobthesungeek76036 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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....

    --
    Karma: Bad