HPE ordered to pay Oracle $30m for Solaris IP infringement Hewlett Packard Enterprise must pay Oracle $30 million for copyright infringement after a jury found it guilty of providing customers with Solaris software updates without Big Red's permission. The decision, which HPE may contest, is the culmination of a three-week trial in Oakland, California. However, the case was first …
If you dug under the surface of third party maintenance contracts I wonder what percentage of them would show cases of this.
HP/HPE limited access to some of their FW updates a few years back for precisely this reason. So at least one of their tentacles was well aware of the issue.
They seem to have relented and got back to making them generally available again now, but perhaps buried somewhere in the TLDR agreement there is some clause saying end customers can have free access but not maintenance companies. Who knows, who ever reads the T&C on these sites.
For some reason I was thinking HP ultimately owned Solaris, so I couldn't figure out why Oracle would have a leg to stand on. I was thinking of Digital Unix/Tru64. Hard to keep all these M&As separate with who owns what now.
Either way... I'm simultaneously happy that HPE lost and upset that Oracle won. If only there were some situation where both companies could lose. And not just having the case tossed out, both companies being issued large financial judgments against them.
> both companies being issued large financial judgments against them.
That's what lawyers fees are for.
The judge said Oracle had to pay their own costs.
HP lost because they had to pay a penalty
Oracle lost because they didn't get a lot of what they wanted
Both parties lost because the legal bills will likely top everything else
Just a pity there is no way to make the lawyers lose too, but they never lose.
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