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Oracle Broadens Legal Fight Against Third-party Solaris Support Providers
angry tapir writes "Oracle is continuing its legal battle against third-party software support providers it alleges are performing such services in a manner that violates its intellectual property. Last week, Oracle sued StratisCom, a Georgia company that offers customers support for Oracle's Solaris OS, claiming it had 'misappropriated and distributed copyright, proprietary software code, along with the login credentials necessary to download this code from Oracle's password-protected websites.'"
I swear we all should hate Oracle more than MS or any other company out there. They are the next trolls of the IT industry since SCO lost.
http://saveie6.com/
people with vast amounts of money, use it to get any other money that anyone else might get ...
O.R.A.C.L.E.
One Raging Asshole Called Larry Ellison ;)
As someone who used to work with their databases, they're pretty darn good, but the business side of things just make you want to run screaming...
They *really* need to stop getting trigger-happy every time they see their own feet...
Oracle Linux Support offers support for any existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux installations. Is this a case of pot calling the kettle black?
11 !
... ]
[Old Oracle joke --- probably before your time
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
That will accelerate the move away from Solaris. It is more of a problem than a solution anyways these days.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
makes for a cheap marketing campaign for linux ;-)
nobody knows or cares is the thinking we only need to look good in our new mirrors they say
exactly by this kind of practices, which make it a sort of oversized patent troll. In the lifecycle of each corporation there are various phases: start-up, growing/innovator, mainstream, dinosaur/conserver, dying. A company like IBM managed to go back from stage 4 to stage 2 by taking some radical decisions. Oracle didn't. Now the only way forward for Oracle is toward stage 5. All dinosaurs eventually die. Remember Blackberry !!!!
Mark my words: By 2030, Oracle will not exist anymore in its current form. In fact, it may have dwindled into nothingness well before that date.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Oracle was a product of the CIA; nsa1.0, so to speak.
I hadn't heard thtat before, good one
And we have a room full of lawyers fighting over it!
The good old days are still here and we are relevant!
There is a piece of us someone wants and we are barking as loud as we can to get attention!
(That, I perceive, is the idea.)
Please stop fucking up Solaris.
Thanks,
All of us.
...rather than suing companies which pick up its slack. I've tried on-and-off for several years to get support from Oracle on my Solaris machines. I'm even offering to pay for the support contracts which abruptly ended when Sun was bought out. It wouldn't have been such a problem if Oracle hadn't pay-walled the Recommended updates for Solaris. I'm having to move away from the venerable old operating system because of Oracle's neglect.
That stench in the air is the SCO disease.
the two of us would really like to know.
Who care? Solaris is irrelevant. This is a dying OS that is miliking its remaining customers.
In a few years Oracle will slash SPARC servers, and Solaris will dissapear. It can't be profitable to build a cpu with so few servers selled
One law suit at a time.
It looks as if oracle is doing its best to make developers hate them. The problem is that developers of today often become decision makers of tomorrow. Oracle misbehaved about mysql, about java (very bad handling of security issues), about opensource software (open office, open solaris and java) and now even about solaris. I do not know if there are really short term benefits, but I think it is a long term suicide.
They compensate by charging a lot for them. A Sparc server usually goes for about 10x the price for the equivalent x86 server. I guess some people really want it.
Okay, so maybe Larry Ellison went on a booze cruise to Mexico with a bunch of hookers, got drunk, and named Darl McBride chief counsel of Oracle.
Solaris isn't open source anymore. I doubt they download Solaris sources from RedHat?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I've owned my own company for 20 years, most of providing services to business. In that time, I've seen a lot of competitors and customers come and go. My experience is that people like to do business with people who treat them right, so the good guys last. Assholes lose customers and partners pretty quickly.
Mostly , it's clear during hard times in an industry. I've had customers ask me more than once prepay a few thousand files to get my company through a rough spot. Once or twice, the employees have purposely waited a week or so to come pick up their paychecks because they knew cash was tight. People don't do that for assholes.
If you're already running Solaris 11, and you're sick of Oracle's shenanigans, you might find a transition to OmniOS to be surprisingly painless. OmniTI doesn't grind up small children with their coffee beans like Larry Ellison does, either. Their work is completely Open Sourced so you can participate in improving the free operating system, and pay for support, hosting, etc.
OmniOS is based on illumos (kind of like RHEL is based on Linux & GNU). There are a number of other illumos distributions besides OmniOS that are worth a good serious look. Get out of bed with Oracle, already.
Even if you pay x10 the difference is very big against Oracle
SPARC is reaching the level of sales of Itanium, and Itanium will disappear.
HP-UX/Itanium has a loyal base, but Oracle has many angry customers waiting to migrate to other operative systems. The decline will be faster.
The behaibour of Oracle working as a mafia with extortion with their customers can work with Oracle DB, but not with servers, it is more easy to migrate.
I butchered one sentence in my post. That should be:
More than once, I've had customers offer to pre-pay for services in order to get my company through a rough spot.
They don't do that because we treat them poorly.
j/k... please don't sue.
Some other products from Oracle may still be relevant for you, and the problem there is not Solaris, is Oracle. If you think the saga is over, just wait for the next attack. So if you care you should be running from any of the technologies they fully control, like being sure that your java apps runs with other jvms, switching to i.e. mariadb if you use mysql, and so on.
I think this happens all the time with complex infrastructure.
Many of the customers who buy it can use it but they lack installation expertise and patch/upgrade expertise, so they outsource it. Chances are when they bought it it came with installation from the vendor which, if the customer is too small to have in-house install talent, means that the OEM farmed that out to a support provider.
Time passes, IT turnover happens and they need to upgrade. They're still paying licensing and support costs.
In comes the next consultant. Nobody can tell this person what the fuck they really own, the support accounts are hosed, in somebody else's name, no login access. The consultant has been flown in for a two day gig, the downtime has been scheduled for a month or more, and there's a lot of sad faces all around if this doesn't get done.
A verbal discussion is had about licenses, support agreements, everybody thinks the bases are covered and then the expedient thing gets done. Consultant installs stuff, maybe even temporary licenses, until the customer can unfuck their accounts on the vendors hopelessly overcomplicated web site.
I see this happen all the time and mostly blame it on vendor support systems being a few orders of magnitude too complicated. It can take days of wrangling and exchanging emails to unlock support accounts that vendors mainly use to protect their software licenses. It's gotten to the point where managing the system is easier than managing the support agreement and navigating the support site.
Are customers to blame? Sure, but its a little fuzzier once you factor in turnover, the fact that they don't actively use the support account because nobody on site has that kind of knowledge, not to mention the never-ending "upgrades" to support sites.
handheld "computers" (smart phones) and "you have no privacy, get over it!"?
I think of old Scott often these days.
What we need are some judges that realize that just because you didn't find the critical security hole when you tested said product, doesn't mean that the company isn't liable for assuring that the product you purchased remains useful for its intended purpose.
Instead what we have are companies giving you shit, and then trying to charge you to fix their mistakes. Most other industries worked this out years ago, someone discovers your refrigerator's defrost unit catches fire and burns peoples houses down after its been in the market for a few years, the original company is generally on the hook to repair it.
A few years ago, GE sent me a nice notice telling me that I should immediately contact a repair organization to replace the door on my 10 year old dish washer, or alternatively they would give me a $200 discount off the purchase of a new unit... All because it turns out they were catching fire.
Oracle customers always get what they deserve. Solaris and SPARC have been dead for a long time. Oracle bought Sun for the same reason Compaq bought DEC back in the day: to bleed dry the customers who were stuck on a legacy platform with nowhere else to go. Oracle clearly recognized this when they bought Sun, but this is not something that they can say out loud and have the business model succeed.
Using Solaris is the IT equivalent of a crack addiction. It's just as irrational. And users always find a way to justify the addiction. (Rehab costs too much and takes too much time. It's not that bad. It's not affecting my bottom line. I can quit any time.)
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
One
Raging
Asshole
Called
Larry
Ellison
As the legal representative of the organisation that has purchased the right to download those updates, they are legally allowed to download those updates.
This is why those various honeypots for the *AA (e.g. Media Sentry) are not committing copyright infringement, despite copying works they do not own.
Well played. There's no way to argue against the conclusion that any argument would be akin to a crack addiction. Might as well have said Solaris users are the new racists or just gone ahead and invoked Godwin.
Denial. Recognize it and you have reached the first stage of overcoming addiction.
Otherwise put up a well-reasoned rebuttal.
I've seen the effects of Solaris addiction on a company first hand. The result is little different than a drug addiction. It doesn't cost much at first, then you start having to devote more and more of the budget to support. Some companies resort to breaking the law to feed their addiction (which is what this article is about). The best engineers leave for greener pastures. The company is relegated to only hiring the second-tier developers and admins that are still willing to work on Solaris, knowing full well that the cream of the crop have moved on. The competitive edge is lost and the company is in an inexorable death spiral, with no one on board with the skill to turn it around.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause