Oracle Broadens Legal Fight Against Third-party Solaris Support Providers 142
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.'"
Re:What assholes (Score:4, Informative)
Pot calling the kettle black? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What assholes (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.
Re:What assholes (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.
Re:What assholes (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 [blogspot.nl] is working on it.
Re:does this affect illumos? (Score:4, 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.
Re:What assholes (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.