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