back to article Comcast dragged into muck in Oracle's Solaris fix-it lawsuit

Comcast is caught in the crossfire in Oracle's ongoing lawsuit against Solaris fix-it companies Maintech and Terix, but the broadband giant is trying to stay out of it – illegally, Oracle claims. A filing [PDF] with the US District Court of the Southern District of New York last week reveals that Oracle subpoenaed Comcast last …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Chad H.

    So its Comcast's problem that Oracle's filing system is shit... Brilliant

    1. Crazy Operations Guy
      FAIL

      Indeed

      In any sales contract, electronic and paper copies of everything sent to the customer should be stored in a safe place indefinitely. The amount that Comcast would have paid for these contracts makes the cost of secure storage trivial. Must be very embarrassing for a company that is trying to get everyone to buy their storage and data warehousing products...

  2. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

    Woah

    Pissing off customers, telling them that they better buy support in perpetuam or else they get the gloved hand treatment or need to go somewhere else.

    Looks like Oracle is now eating the seeds.

    1. asdf

      Re: Woah

      What are customers going to do? Port to another POSIXish system like Linux? Oh wait they have been doing that for years in droves.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Since when have they cared about customers?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Comcast or Oracle; IMO neither cares about the customer.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        It is hard to choose which one should win.... My vote is that they make each other go bankrupt.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Maintech, Terix, and Comcast have each argued that the licenses customers receive when they purchase Solaris servers grant them the right to "perpetual" support of both the hardware and the OS – including the right to seek support from third parties once their original support contracts with Oracle run out."

    And the NBC Universal (which Comcast now owns) content that I purchase or that they frely distribute over the airwaves (broadcast TV) can be used in any way I see fit. Ohh, they don't think so?

    HP doesn't give free updates, nor Cisco, Juniper, etc. Comcast can seek support from third parties for hardware, but when it comes to software, different story unless Maintech or Terix is going write their own OS or patches.

    I wonder if Comcast is telling Microsoft that they must provide XP patches perpetually.

    1. tfewster
      Pint

      Consider yourself both upvoted and downvoted ;-)

      Yes, Oracle should fix bugs in faulty programming until the final EOS date. But not give away new hardware drivers or feature improvements. Or phone support - but feel free to engage a 3rd party provider to work out what caused your system crash and what Sun/Oracle patches (that you are entitled to) to apply.

      As to Microsoft & XP - If MS are fixing bugs for selected customers, I think there's a case to say those fixes should be available to anyone affected by an XP bug

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    One wonders...

    ... I'm currently pondering the legal position of something very similiar to this, and I wonder if Oracle (in this case) isn't potentially going to destroy it's own business?

    In the EU we have these laws which require all contracts to be put out to public tender, I don't know if they have similar laws in the states?

    It seems to me (and I'm not a lawyer, so I could be wrong, but) if you make your product one which only you can support, you fuck yourself as far as being able to sell your product into any public authority, because buying your product would prevent them being able to publicly tender the maintenance/service contracts, which they're required to do by law... can it really be that they've all missed that?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: One wonders...

      Hmmm a downvote already... Oracle employee? HP employee? IBM employee? So many possibles...

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: One wonders...

      Just trying to understand your suggestion here - so you're suggesting that any third party must have the right to support - surely this would mean that they would need to access (and update) any proprietary source code so that they can write their own patches and provide them to the use ?

      So when I buy, say, Microsoft office, I should be able to go to, say, HP and buy support from HP and then they can write and supply patches to me against the original source code.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: One wonders...

        Just trying to understand your suggestion here - so you're suggesting that any third party must have the right to support - surely this would mean that they would need to access (and update) any proprietary source code so that they can write their own patches and provide them to the use ?

        So when I buy, say, Microsoft office, I should be able to go to, say, HP and buy support from HP and then they can write and supply patches to me against the original source code.

        I'm not suggesting anything, I'm stating that EU law requires all contracts to be put out to public tender. I guess I'm wondering, if you deliberately design your product (including the fix cycle for any flaws it has) to attempt to circumvent that law, you must surely exempt your product from being eligible. As inclusion of your product into any bid would mean the buyer might find themselves being forced to break the law when the warranty period expires.

    3. BearishTendencies

      Re: One wonders...

      Doesn't work like that. There's a get out clause for buyers that says they can perform a single tender action in those circumstances.

      Circumstance shouldn't arise that often though because the buyer should be buying a contract to buy and support the product through its used life. But what the practice is usually is that the buyer will buy the product and a relatively short period of support then wonder how to carry on supporting it.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: One wonders...

        Circumstance shouldn't arise that often though because the buyer should be buying a contract to buy and support the product through its used life

        Hmmm I can't see that working in IT, where lifespans of equipment/systems can vary wildly from any initial plan.

        But what the practice is usually is that the buyer will buy the product and a relatively short period of support then wonder how to carry on supporting it.

        That's exactly the point, if the manufacturer designs the product so only they can support it, then it any contract to support it can't be put out to public tender. The manufacturer has designed a system which is ineligible for consideration for use in a public authority.

        1. Fred Bauer

          Public Tender

          "That's exactly the point, if the manufacturer designs the product so only they can support it, then it any contract to support it can't be put out to public tender."

          There's nothing to say the support contract can't be put out to public tender... anyone can bid on it, but most likely only the manufacturer will be compliant with the requirements. Happens all the time.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Public Tender

            There's nothing to say the support contract can't be put out to public tender... anyone can bid on it, but most likely only the manufacturer will be compliant with the requirements. Happens all the time.

            If the public authority knows in advance that they will only be signing the contract with the supplier, because only they can meet the requirements. Then the whole public tendering process is being circumvented, and doing that must constitute a breach of the law. Making a mockery of the laws is frowned upon by those who enforce them.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Public Tender

              There are generally exceptions to this for sole-source vendors.

              Also there tends to be a difference in the types of support. For example, supporting an end user through training or generally inquiries can generally be handled by third parties. Modifying or patching code goes back to the sole source provider.

              I provide a certain software package we built to public entities, and probably 10% of them have requested the sole source letter from us. The contract has a specific time period and they are free to switch products (to a competitor) when the contract ends but don't have the right to continue using ours... unless they sign again.

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Public Tender

                OK lets deal with specifics.

                HP sell servers with iLO cards in them.

                Those cards have embedded firmware on them.

                Firmware which is owned by HP, so naturally only HP can patch that firmware.

                The new policy says that customers without service contracts (or warranty cover) can't get firmware updates.

                So the next time a 'heartbleed' type bug comes along the only HP iLO cards which will be patched are those in servers which are on maintenance (or warranty) with HP.

                No public authority can risk running a server with exploitable code like that on it.

                Ergo very public authority HAS to have a maintenance contract with HP, for every HP server they have. For every server they plan on buying, if it's HP they HAVE to sign that server up for maintenance cover with HP, once the warranty ends obviously.

                There is no competitive marketplace, there can't possibly be a competitive marketplace.

                Even if there are companies willing to bid, no public authority (or private company) can risk not having their HP servers maintained by HP. Lest they find themselves with a critical system which has a critical firmware fault on it.

                Now as they're required by law to put every contract out to public tender, buying HP will mean they know this in advance. If they choose to buy HP, despite knowing this in advance, they have already decided that the public competitive tendering process is going to be done just for show, because they HAVE to sign with HP.

                They will be putting themselves and their authority/department in a position of deliberately and knowingly breaking the law, and they'll have done it with premeditation on any server they brought after the HP policy change, because they knew then that they would have to put that server under maintenance with HP, irrelevant of any bids tendered by anyone else.

  6. Tsunamijuan

    Smell of SCO allover again

    Is Darl Mcbride working for oracle now?

    I know that oracle seems to be big into the old ways of closed support loop. But this is just reeking of early 2000's and the FUD of SCO vs Linux, allover again. The same horribly organized legal defenses. The destruction and complete abuse of customer bases.

  7. Lars Silver badge

    Skip Solaris

    Go for Linux, because of Oracle.

  8. Edward Groenendaal

    Who keeps licenses?

    I've bought a number of Solaris servers within a large telco, we never kept the Solaris licenses. They go straight in the bin. Who does keep them? Where would they be stored. With Sun you never had to worry about that sort of thing.

    Of course Oracle comes from the world of individual licenses, if I had bought an license for oracle I'd probably have filed it, on a random shelf somewhere.

  9. Stevie

    Bah!

    The only reason Oracle would bend over backwards for anyone is if they felt they had hidden the petty cash in the drop ceiling.

  10. chris lively

    The problem here is that Oracle is saying the license says one thing and Comcast, et al, is saying it says something completely different.

    If I was a judge then I'd want Oracle to produce the license that was granted to comcast. Simply because they are the ones filing suit. Once done, then it would be up to comcast to produce the license that THEY received. If it was different then I'd throw the lawsuit out the window and probably have a DA go after Oracle for fraudulent court filings.

  11. Rick Giles
    Pirate

    As much as I hate Oracle

    I would love to see Comcast raked over the coals. Repeatedly.

  12. Frank N. Stein

    There is sure to be a good reason for Comcast or any other company to not buy Solaris/Sparc support from Oracle. Considering the hefty deep pockets of Comcast, it's likely that they can stall Oracle for another year, if not more. Oracle must've been salivating at the prospect of forcing Comcast to buy some sort of support agreement for "thousands" of Solaris servers. Good luck with that, Oracle.

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like