Oracle deploys lawyers against Solaris fix-it duo Oracle have unleashed its lawyers onto two Solaris fix-it companies, accusing them of stealing copyrighted code through their work with customers. The database giant has filed action against Terix and Maintech saying they took or facilitated the removal of “large quantities” of copyrighted Solaris patches, updates and bug …
Unbreakable..
Have any of you noticed that only in the beginning, their (Oracles) Redhat Linux clone was named "Unbreakable Linux"?
Then the world realized that it was anything but unbreakable.
So they called it "Enterprise Linux"
Then the world realized that it was anything but..
Therefore today it's simply called Oracle Linux.
Oracle attacking outfits that support their customers isn't going to encourage folks to buy their hardware, certainly adds a new dimension to support woes. :)
This looks like further evidence that Oracle has now prioritised screwing it's customers over growing it's business.
I wonder if this is the vision Mark Hurd brought to the company, it seems to fit the pattern he has established elsewhere. ie: Join large well established IT business, destroy existing revenue streams, eliminate new product development, alienate customers, bad mouth the opposition, bail with enormous pay check before anyone calls him on the fact that he has just wrecked all efforts directed towards growing the business.
Definitely not a strategy of a first choice vendor...
Of course, the other way to look at it is "why am I paying this third-party aaaaalllllllllllllll this money, perhaps almost as much as I'd pay Oracle direct, when it's clear they're not paying Oracle their dues or leeching Oracle's resources illegally, do I really want a shady company supporting me?"
>do I really want a shady company supporting me?"
As opposed to Oracle themselves? Shady are your only options if you want Solaris support these days which is also largely true with the other UNIX vendors as well which is why the proprietary Unix market is quickly dying.
Soon as Oracle bought Sun, the hobbyist market for SPARC died instantly. You used to be able to pick up cheap SPARC hardware on eBay, then go to Sun's website and download drivers, manuals, patches, firmware, whatever you needed. Once Oracle took over, everything including necessary device firmware updates is behind My Oracle Support, and you need a support contract to access it. The funny thing is that not just any support contract will do -- you need a Firmware authorization for your hardware, a Patch authorization for OS and software, and authorization to look at the support articles for your products.
The same goes for Solaris -- no patches means no production or pseudo production use. And with Linux a viable alternative for most, they're basically killing the potential new talent market. Add to that the fact that a lot of their traditional educational customers (to whom Sun would basically give hardware and software) abandoning them, and they're going to be making money off legacy support and not much else in the future.
Now Microsoft is starting down this road -- they killed off the TechNet Subscription, which is the ultimate gateway drug for Microsoft software. Rumor has it that MSDN is next, or it will be severely restricted.
What are these companies thinking? Are they actively trying to discourage new development?
taking the security patches into the "contract only" areas of Sunsolve pre-dates the Oracle takeover.
I think it was pretty short-sighted, too. Oracle merely accelerated the attempt to kill off Solaris, by removing the freely available Solaris update images and Solaris Express.
>What are these companies thinking? Are they actively trying to discourage new development?
No they see the writing on the wall and are starting to get paranoid. The longer you can hold off the disastrous quarter headlines by turning the screws on current customers the longer you can keep getting your bonuses. Who cares about the long term health of the company?
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