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Oracle Broadens Legal Fight Against Third-party Solaris Support Providers

Posted by Soulskill on from the friendly-neighborhood-corporation-looking-out-for-you dept.

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.'"

38 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. What assholes by Billly+Gates · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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/
    1. Re:What assholes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Remember, kids, Winners Don't Do Oracle.

    2. Re:What assholes by noh8rz10 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Why is this such trash jobs and nut faces? Fair disclosure: I used to work at oracle as a yacht captain.

    3. Re:What assholes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Funny it is sooo bad for providing support for Solaris and wrong to steal code that was opened sourced.

      But taking it from RedHat ... sure it is perfectly legal! Hey what is so bad for taking from Redhat and providing support? After all they opened it right?!

      Hypocrites.

    4. Re:What assholes by Inf0phreak · · Score: 3, Informative

      I... eh... what? Oracle owns MySQL, not PostgreSQL

      --
      ________
      Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
    5. Re:What assholes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Source? From what I can tell, the limit is due to the architecture of PostgreSQL which they mention on their FAQ. http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/FAQ#How_does_PostgreSQL_use_CPU_resources.3F

      I googled a bit and couldn't find supporting info, but I did find:
      http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PgCon_2012_Developer_Meeting#Parallel_Query - no mention of patents.
      http://grokbase.com/t/postgresql/pgsql-hackers/073y7qnx3t/oracle-indemnifies-postgresql-on-its-patents - seems to indicate no problem.

      Just looking to see if I missed something. Not to defend Oracle, I'm still rustled over them forcing wesunsolve.net to shut down. They're all business, no heart.

    6. Re:What assholes by NoKaOi · · Score: 5, Informative

      Come on, at least read the summary if you're not going to read TFA. I wouldn't normally be defending Oracle, and Oracle may do a lot of evil things regarding IP (like trying to assert copyright on an API), but this isn't one of them. They're going after them for pirating their software and making money as a result. This isn't some kid or hobbyist pirating something, it's a for-profit company pirating software that's owned by Oracle, and not even just for use on their own computers but for clients that they're making money off of.

      Of course, their motivation for enforcing their IP is probably to get rid of the competition, but they're not trying to assert that competition is illegal. It's simple - if you're going to make money off of supporting software, don't pirate that software for your customers. If you think that software being non-FOSS is evil and you want to hold to that principle like a lot of the people who are going to whine about this, then don't try make money off of supporting that software.

    7. Re:What assholes by Tough+Love · · Score: 2

      [citation needed]

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    8. Re:What assholes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      I do follow the development of postgresql and never heard patents mentioned as a reason for not supporting more parallelism. What I always gathered from it was that a) there were a few technical obstacles and b) there where always more pressing matters. But Robert Haas is working on it.

    9. Re:What assholes by mwvdlee · · Score: 2

      Heck; even Losers know better than to Do Oracle.

      --
      Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
    10. Re:What assholes by kthreadd · · Score: 2

      Oracle Solaris is not open source anymore.

    11. Re:What assholes by raynet · · Score: 2

      Yup, Oracle is right on this case. The companies can provide support for Solaris, as in how to fix and configure things and also distribute OpenSolaris but distributing Solaris updates that have been downloaded from Oracle's password protected support site or providing login credentials to Oracle's support site is not ok.

      --
      - Raynet --> .
    12. Re:What assholes by kthreadd · · Score: 4, Interesting

      What is Oracle doing wrong here? From what I can tell by reading the article this firm distributed Oracle's binary updates, which Oracle charge a lot of money for. That's the way Oracle makes money on Solaris. The install media is a free download from Oracle's web site, but if you actually want patches you need a support contract.

    13. Re:What assholes by easyTree · · Score: 2

      Fast forwards to the future where a single remaining company makes software - the remainder simply squabble over patents. Within that single company, only a single employee produces any output, the remainder are organized as multi-layer management-oversight.

      --
      Requiem for the American Dream
    14. Re:What assholes by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      On the plus side, Oracle shows signs of being stupid evil, which is a self-correcting problem in the long run. It's pragmatic evil that you really have to worry about.

      Seriously, will Oracle make some additional money by freezing out 3rd party support minions? Sure, at least in the short term. Does a proprietary big-iron UNIX need a reputation for help being hard to find and expensive(more than it already has)? Like an extra hole in the head... If you want to sell expensive software and hardware, you either need to offer unbelievable ROI or commodify the hell out of everything you don't sell that your customer will also need. MS did it with MCSEs, Apple did it with 'apps', IBM supports Linux more or less entirely for this reason.

      Unless you feel damn lucky about the value of your product, such that you think people are willing to pay through the nose for it, trying to squeeze the customer in areas that aren't your core expertise is a short term gain that cuts your own throat. If you are really that good at selling support, you probably don't need to squelch your competitors by other means. If you aren't, can you be assured that your customers will continue to put up with buying expensive hardware and software, only to deal with getting support only from you, for a pretty penny? Not a good long-term bet.

    15. Re:What assholes by kthreadd · · Score: 2

      According to the article this "support minion" basically just distributed Oracle's binary patches which you usually need a support contract in order to download from Oracle's web site. They didn't actually do anything of their own.

    16. Re:What assholes by kthreadd · · Score: 5, Informative

      What they're doing wrong is that they're suing somebody for doing EXACTLY what they do with their rebranded Red Hat distro.

      Except that Oracle downloads the publicly available source files from Red Hat and rebuilds them.
      This is not the case here. Oracle does not provide source code for their patches, only the binaries.

      Yes, Red Hat is FOSS so it's fair game whereas the proprietary Oracle stuff is not

      So it's not exactly the same then.

      but that doesn't make it any less hypocritical or Oracle any less vile.

      It sounds like all Oracle is doing is following the license.

    17. Re:What assholes by Ash+Vince · · Score: 2

      Everytime I see something like this it just makes me sad. I knew a couple of people who worked for Sun. It was always a pleasure to deal with them and they seemed, HAPPY. More and more it seems like everyone everywhere has something to grump about. Attack others, don't focus on your own products, win by any means, not by just being the best.. Kind of getting sick of it.

      The problem is those lovely people at Sun were too busy being all nice to make enough cash to cover their own wages.

      Nice companies go under, companies who do anything legal they can in order to make money survive and then buy up the companies that failed at a liquidation firesale. This is a feature of the capitalist system we live in where making money is the primary consideration over what you produce being of value to society as a whole.

      Since this is how the system works though I don't see any reason to blame one company over another for being better at this game of dog eat dog when it is the system that encourages it that is really at fault.

      --
      I dont read /. to RTFA, I read /. to offend people in ignorance.
    18. Re:What assholes by mysidia · · Score: 5, Insightful

      What is Oracle doing wrong here? From what I can tell by reading the article this firm distributed Oracle's binary updates, which Oracle charge a lot of money for.

      The problem is it represents a departure from what Sun was doing. Enterprises already paid a lot of money for the Sun hardware, so they could get Solaris included with it.

      Solaris was never free for production use. If you want Solaris for production, you always had to either pay a large fee for each copy, or buy the Sun hardware which came at a huge premium, but included Solaris..... much like Apple includes MacOS with their hardware.

      Acquiring a vendor, AND locking down all the patch download websites for server firmware updates and OS updates, while requiring customers start paying extortionate rates to even continue basic software update service ------ is not the path to becoming a well-liked company.

    19. Re:What assholes by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      Oracle is a services company, sure they sell a product you can just buy but what they really want is to be invited into your organization to sell you a lot of expensive projects that won't work at the end of the contract. Like SAP, for example. Sun was a stuff company, they sold you stuff. So for Sun it was a win-win to have other people out there supporting Solaris. For Oracle, it's a lose. They don't want you on Sun if you're not making them money. You're just someone who might be giving them money who isn't. Of course, they'll just kill SPARC in the process of overprotecting Solaris. And good riddance.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    20. Re:What assholes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Patches are part of the cost of doing business, and Oracle is simply making its customers financially responsible for Oracle's incompetence.

      I have seen first hand how bad it could be. At some point we were buying lots of hardware. Quality wasn't great though. It was so bad, that we wrote scripts to file RMA cases on hardware which was often DoA or failed within a couple of months. They couldn't keep up with their contractual obligations to provide replacement parts. Alas, we had not negotiated proper sanctions in that case. In practice it cost them nothing to fail on delivering replacements.

      So what could we do, once we were short on functional hardware? It had to be compatible with the systems we were running, which meant there was only one place we could buy more hardware from. Turns out, hardware can be delivered on schedule, when you place a new order, but they could not do it, when the hardware failed a couple of months later. Failure to deliver replacement parts on time turned into additional sales for them.

      Until then vendor-lock-in had been a theoretical concept to me. It was only once I found myself in that situation, I realized what it was like in practice. In retrospect every step on the way to this vendor-lock-in was a rational decision. There was no single step on the way, which I could pinpoint as being a bad decision, but the outcome was a vendor-lock-in.

      Lesson learned, you have to worry about a potential vendor-lock-in frequently. At least before every major decision consider if that is leading towards a vendor-lock-in, and how you can get out of it again. At that point it became clear that the next rational decision was an investment in getting out of that vendor-lock-in.

    21. Re:What assholes by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      will SPARC take Solaris with it, or will they just stop treating the x86-64 port like a bastard child and keep right on selling it on Xeon/Opteron boxes instead?

      If Solaris survives it will survive in Oracle turnkey systems. They'll become the netware of our day and get left behind at that point.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    22. Re:What assholes by hackus · · Score: 2

      Like a lot of companies that refuse to change with the times, Oracle is getting its lunch eaten by Open Source.

      I won't miss them when they are gone.

      -Hack

      --
      Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
  2. We all know the acronym... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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...

  3. HA HA HA, Oh Wow... by Ignacio · · Score: 2

    They *really* need to stop getting trigger-happy every time they see their own feet...

  4. Pot calling the kettle black? by liwee · · Score: 5, Informative

    Oracle Linux Support offers support for any existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux installations. Is this a case of pot calling the kettle black?

    1. Re:Pot calling the kettle black? by FireFury03 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Absolutely... but Oracle have a case with other people redistributing their Solaris patches. I'd say that they've got a legitimate right to the proprietary code that they own.... and Linux is GPL, so that's not a conflict of interest for Oracle. Their goal is "profit at all costs" anyway. That's the only ideology Oracle understands.

      I'm curious about the legal situation with respect to bugfixes in the EU: EU warranty law requires the vendor to warrant that a product is free of manufacturing defects, and there is no time limit to this warranty. It could be argued that any bug in software is a "manufacturing defect", and therefore the vendor needs to provide bugfixes forever more. Courts would probably say that it is unreasonable to require the vendor to engineer patches for very old software. *However*, if the patches are already being produced anyway, is it reasonable for the vendor to only allow their current support customers to access the patches, rather than making them freely available to anyone who has bought the defective product in the past?

      So whilst I'll agree that the code is proprietary and other people shouldn't be redistributing them without Oracle's permission, I do question whether Oracle shouldn't be legally obliged to provide those patches to everyone who bought Solaris anyway.

      --
      http://blog.nexusuk.org
    2. Re:Pot calling the kettle black? by FireFury03 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      A vendor having an incentive to make their product defective so they can charge for fixes doesn't exactly sound like it's in the customer's interest...

      --
      http://blog.nexusuk.org
  5. Eleven! by TrollstonButterbeans · · Score: 2

    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
  6. Good by gweihir · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Good by russbutton · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There ya go. There's no better way to kill off Solaris, not that they really needed to try...

      Sun made good hardware back in the day. I had a Sun Sparc 2 I ran Solaris 2.7 on until it was about 14 years old. Imagine trying to run anything on a PC or a Mac that was 14 years old and expect it to hold up. The only reason I retired the Sun box was that I just wearied of running my mail/DNS server at the house off my DSL line.

  7. Maybe Oracle should focus on providing support... by LoadWB · · Score: 2

    ...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.

  8. Re:does this affect illumos? by kthreadd · · Score: 3, Informative

    It does not affect Illumos since it is based on the open source release of Solaris. The article is about a company redistributing the binary patches to Solaris provided by Oracle.

  9. Suicide by e70838 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Suicide by kthreadd · · Score: 2

      How is it misbehaving to stop another company from redistributing your proprietary binary blobs that you have copyright to?

  10. Not for Solaris by dutchwhizzman · · Score: 2

    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?
  11. decades running companies tells me no by raymorris · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  12. What consultant doesn't do this? by swb · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.