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.'"
What assholes (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.
Re:What assholes (Score:2, Insightful)
Remember, kids, Winners Don't Do Oracle.
Re:What assholes (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.
Good (Score:3, Insightful)
That will accelerate the move away from Solaris. It is more of a problem than a solution anyways these days.
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Pot calling the kettle black? (Score:4, 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...
Re:What assholes (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.
decades running companies tells me no (Score:5, 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.
What consultant doesn't do this? (Score:4, 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.