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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.'"

14 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 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.

    2. 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.

    3. 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.

    4. 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.

    5. 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.

    6. 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.

    7. 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.

    8. 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.

    9. 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.

  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. 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
  4. 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.