Daft
Is Oracle wanting to extinguish Solaris with their fixation on only making money from support?
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Oracle are heading back to court – this time over an alleged violation of IP rights on Solaris. A US judge has thrown out a motion by HPE to have Oracle's Solaris violation claim against it dismissed. Oracle had accused HPE, case 3:16-cv-01393-JST, of improperly partnering with Terix Computer to …
I think the MAD will only go as far as SPARC and Itanium for the moment.
Expect a LOT of crowing when Larry or HPE finally win the battle of who will be first to stop producing new processors. Particulaly if Larry's "why support Oracle beyond X when Itanium is dead" turns out to be true.
Was it worth the $3 billion?
And will HPE actually come back with software that runs on their Xeons and win the next battle?
Just a shame that the battle is so slow and the bags of popcorn are so small...
Everyone who has been following the news around Solaris knows in what dire situation whOracle has maneuvered it. On a personal level I think it's an outrage to see how disrespectful Solaris is being managed here, a true Unix environment which has such a rich history behind it...
But enough semantics. I don't get it why HPE would even try to get into this hornets nest in the first place? I can understand that they smell revenue (support costs for Solaris became ridiculous after Sun was taken over) but surely there are much more profitable and reliable ways here?
For example by persuading companies to move away from Solaris. There are liable alternatives, even if you take ZFS and Zones and everything else into consideration. First I'm looking at a personal favorite of mine called FreeBSD, but the other BSD's should provide decent candidates as well. And what about HP's own Unix brand HP-UX?
But with the way Oracle has been manifesting itself as of late what else would you have expected to happen here?
It's done all the time. Oracle sells support for SAP, SAP sells support for JD Edwards (now owned by Oracle) etc, etc, etc. There is no money in actually selling the software. All the profits are in consulting and support. It's why IBM jetisoned everything except it's consulting firm. IBM "Management" had the wrong headed opinion that they don't need a loss-leader hardware business to sell consulting services (and they are finding out how wrong they were).
I recommend someone (HPE, Dell, IBM, anyone...)go after Solaris customers by offering them another flavor of UNIX (or Linux) with bonus extras that will lure them away and crush Oracle's Solaris business. Add a better database to sweeten the pot. Oracle deserves it ( not just for this).
The problem with that is, these companies don't want to innovate anymore. they just lay in wait for the next startup that does something interesting, buy it up, re badge it as their own and rake in the profits. The lawyers, who have all the reasoning of a group of guard dogs on meth, then attack anyone that even remotely attacks their profits/turf.