Judge Nixes, Lowers Oracle's $1.3B Award Against SAP 48
itwbennett writes "Federal judge Phyllis Hamilton has overturned the $1.3 billion judgment Oracle won against SAP and has approved SAP's request that Oracle accept a lower award, which would negate the need for a new trial." Oracle is in the habit of asking for awards in the billions; with that model, they really can make it up on volume.
Well now we know where Oracle makes their money (Score:2)
After all, it certainly isn't on selling products!
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Forget it man, I go there first.
Hmm, in fact...
FIRST POST!!!
Dammit, I guess I've been around here long enough to see that become possible again.
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Re:I am not sure I understand the point here? (Score:2)
You got Whooshed.
Selling products is old and busted. Making money off IP Lawsuits over square pieces of plastic is where it's at.
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"asking for .. billions" (Score:5, Funny)
...and they've clearly carried the practice over to lawsuits...
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"We want 100 billion dollars from them"
Judge: No
OK 50 billion
No
5 billion then
No
2 billion
That dosn't sound like much, OK.
Defendent: But they haven't even proven we have done anything wrong
Judge: Well they aren't asking much lets just give it to them so they stop bugging us.
$272 million is still huge! (Score:3)
I should think Oracle would be happy to take that and have case closed. Somehow I doubt actual damages were that high...
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I should think Oracle would be happy to take that and have case closed. Somehow I doubt actual damages were that high...
I doubt they were even close. But ellison comes across as the kind of guy determined to have the biggest swinging dick at the country club, so it probably isn't about what's fair but instead how hard he can beat on the competition.
ORACLE - One Real Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
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Ellison's philosophy is that for Oracle to win everyone else must lose. There is no win-win to him. If he sees any opportunity to kill, he will.
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it's off topic but yea there is currently a lot of loss
http://www.internetpulse.net/ [internetpulse.net]
Corporapocalypse (Score:2)
When companies throw around billions of dollars on mere whims, that to me is proof that our financial model is obsolete. These corporations wield far too much power and influence and should be broken up.
Does the fact that Oracle is a 40 billion dollar company result in better products ? No. Ask any Oracle admin.
All it does it give them the power to bully everyone else around until there is nothing left. They gobbled up Sun. They chugged MySQL. They bought John Ashcroft (not that this was any challenge
Re:Corporapocalypse (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean shops like SUN, BEA, PeopleSoft, Hyperion and Siebel, to name a few of the bigger ones they gobbled up? GP isn't talking about mini-shops. Gobbling them up (or not) has no impact. We're talking about multibillion dollar mergers that leave little competition and huge barriers to entry for new companies.
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They do have a competion now.
That is the cloud. Personally I prefer Oracle as it would at least leave us jobs left to manage the servers.
With Oracle charging outragous and downright barron rates to existing customers the Cloud is promising savings. Eventually Oracle will push customers to this in order to save money and throw out our jobs in the process. But maybe that is not a bad thing.
Larry appears asleep at the wheel on this one. You can hold companies hostage because their data is on your product for s
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I would tax dividends paid from corporation to corporation, but not dividends paid from corporations to humans. That would make it less attractive for one corporation to own another.
The problem today is that corporation management answer only to themselves when one corporation owns another. If all corporations were owned by people there would exist someone whose best interest would be in how effective the company was, not in how much they could milk the cash box without going to jail.
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That's great, the next time someone asks me what MySQL is I'm going to tell them it's an enterprise server infrastructure brick. That sounds like a term the buzzword generator [outofservice.com] would throw out.
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Being an SQL server that sometimes didn't even corrupt data isn't enough. How's MySQL scalability compared to Oracle, DB2, or Sybase?
A hell of a lot cheaper?
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Shame on you, sir, for that vile calumny!
They've given a lot of money to yacht builders, and a yacht to Larry.
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Shame on you, sir, for that vile calumny!
They've given a lot of money to yacht builders, and a yacht to Larry.
A yacht? Larry has a bigger fleet than some navies. Not to mention a fighter jet.
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As much as I hate lobbying and monopolies Oracle is right on with 40 billion.
Customers who own massive data warehouses use them. They are the only game in town. DB2 is the only thing that comes close and IBM consultants are not cheap either. SQL Server is not in the same league. No mysql is not a real database. Sure it now has foreign keys, transactions, nested statements, as a brand new cool thing, but Oracle has had all of that for 25 years. Oracle can do data mining and anaylsis of data using dimensions
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True some stupid corporations love using Oracle Enterprise for a silly small 100 meg database over MySQL but that is up to them.
Uses of Oracle of this form account for easily 95% of the Oracle licenses I've seen in my career.
Say this for Oracle: They have amazing salesmen who can do the equivalent of sell an Formula One car and full pit crew to soccer moms who just want a car to get groceries with.
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Well if you already use Oracle for your data wharehouse and your I.T. department is trained and has licences already then why not use it?
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Because most companies, even ones that probably should have a robust data warehouse, don't.
Oh, the stories I could tell you of Fortune 500 companies whose entire record of swaths of financial and historical information reside in Access 97 databases even though the company is using Oracle for other things. Well, the stories I could tell you, NDAs notwithstanding.
Imaginary Customers (Score:4, Interesting)
"Rather than providing evidence of SAP's actual use of the copyrighted works, and objectively verifiable number of customers lost as a result, Oracle presented evidence of the purported value of the intellectual property as a whole, elicited self-serving testimony from its executives regarding the price they claim they would have demanded in an admittedly fictional negotiation, and proffered the speculative opinion of its damages expert, which was based on little more than guesses about the parties' expectations."
This comment from the judge is fascinating considering every software company out there pegs their piracy losses at face value rather than pointing to evidence of lost sales.
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Be easy on them. After all, you can trust them to come up with the right amount of money that they potentially lost (they can see into alternate realities).
It's all about the share prices (Score:3)
Note to SAP (Score:2)
SAP. It's much cheaper to hire an assassin than to pay 1.3 billion to an extortionist (and it's never the right policy to pay the Dane-Geld). I think extortion is never right and above certain level any response becomes justified. People dealt with extortionists very harshly when they could over the history of human race. I don't see many people crying over Oracle's CEO should something nasty happen to him.
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"I am really surprised more lawyers haven't ended up dead. seriously surprised...
"
Larry has a billion dollars and could hire an even bigger crime family to go after you.
Remember, use the mob and you owe them a favor. It will be impossible to become clean again.
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It's been a long time since either company has been anything like clean.
Of course, SAP could hire a non-union contract killer and avoid the problem.
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FTFA: "SAP had admitted liability for illegal downloads of Oracle software and support materials..."
You might also want note to SAP not to do that again...
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What people forget too is that Oracle purchased PeopleSoft who is Sap's biggest competitor. I think this has less to do with Java more than it does hurting your competitors and making them bleed.
Larry has been known to get pretty obsessive in its war over Microsoft a decade ago. Remember the story of Oracle hiring detectives to sort through garbage at Microsoft anti trust trail in order to file a friend of the court with the bundling of IE? Larry lobbied large amounts of money to make sure Microsoft was spl
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That's be pretty easy considering how close they are:
http://maps.google.com/?ll=42.483666,-71.199292&spn=0.005855,0.009581&t=h&z=17&vpsrc=6&layer=c&cbll=42.48347,-71.19968&panoid=-gZgbFangE_igV6WQLrVuQ&cbp=12,183.42,,0,-5.14 [google.com]
SAP on the left, Oracle on the right.
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