HPE says $30m Solaris verdict against it didn't provide 'evidence' of copyright Hewlett Packard Enterprise has come out swinging two months after a $30 million verdict against it in a long-running case, saying claims by Oracle it directly infringed copyrights in the Solaris OS are not backed by enough evidence. In a motion filed on July 29 [PDF], HPE alleged the evidence provided by Oracle to prove it …
The US remains an outlier in this respect with the result that you may have an automatic copyright but be unable to effectively enforce it unless you have also registered the work with the copyright office.
HPE are playing dumb and dangerous here - If they "win" this case, then they have a lot to lose with third-party providers distributing HPE software patches.
- It would be nice if a purchased product came with a "lifetime" warranty against flaws.
- On the other hand, if your business model involves using others work without remunerating them, don't try to claim the moral or legal high ground.
A pox on both their houses.
-> - It would be nice if a purchased product came with a "lifetime" warranty against flaws.
Define "lifetime" because it means different things to different people. I would rather companies would say "n years of support" rather than "lifetime". Who reasonably expects support for a tens of years? Apparently some people do.
Who reasonably expects support for a tens of years? Apparently some people do
Well, if the equipment survives tens of years, then yeah. For example, I expect parts to be available for my car for at least 15-20 years, because I expect my car to last at least 15 years.
I should expect to be able to buy laser printer toner refills for 10 years too.
We're discussing computer software here. The chances are some of the software you have from 20 years ago will not even run on an up to date OS. It may not even install. An old OS may not install.
While everyone likes a car analogy, here it doesn't work. I have a drawer with old mobile phones. They may or may not work physically, but I bet £1 right now that some of them will not be able to connect to secure web sites.
"The chances are some of the software you have from 20 years ago will not even run on an up to date OS. It may not even install. An old OS may not install."
Look, "PC" Chicken Little, millions of smart people run (even with ability "to connect to secure Web sites") older HW, SW, and OSes.
Just because you neurotically throw out your overpriced fondle-phone every six months does not mean that others are spendthrifts...or waste time browsing on tiny screens.
At some point pre-HPE, HP started denying access to previously-published-by-HP BIOS and software updates by anyone who didn't have a current support contract with HP for that specific piece of equipment.
This tanked the resale value of used HP equipment, and put HP on my "dis-recommend" list.
A pox on both their houses, indeed.
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In theory you can get Solaris 11.4 support until 2032 with enough money. There were patches to Solaris 9 hidden in the Solaris 11.3 patches less than two years ago so it could be considered "supported" with the right expensive vintage support contracts. Solaris 9 will run on 28 year old hardware.
There are still lots of systems running Solaris 8 and 9 out there. The smallest Solaris 9 install is smaller than the grub boot loader so some people used that for seriously locked down systems.
Solaris switched to an SVR4 base with Solaris 2, aka SunOS 5, in 1992.
SVR4 itself combined AT&T SysV with a bunch of BSD 4. There's a lot of cross-pollination. Could you find matching source lines in OpenSolaris and, say, the listings in John Lions' Commentary? Seems not implausible.
'Switched' is a bit of a understatement of Sun's involvement.
Sun, along with AT&T themselves, Amdahl, ICL, SCO and several of the minor UNIX companies (and I think this included Dell), were involved in creating SVR4, which was, as you say, a merged UNIX. Eventually, these companies invested in an AT&T offshoot called UNIX System Laboritories (USL), which was given the UNIX ownership and copyrights. USL was bought (rescued?) by Novell, and the rest is quite well documented.
Of course, this single UNIX did not suit all, and IBM, DEC, HP and a number of others went on to set up the Open Software Foundation (OSF) to push their own Unified UNIX, just to poison the waterhole.
I was working for a part of AT&T up until late 1989, and I attended the SVR4 developer conference sometime that year. I also installed AT&T R&D Unix on Sun 3 kit, which was nominally titled SunOS 4.2, but was sitting on the early SVR4 codebase (this may have been just for R&D UNIX, though). AT&T used this version to emulate their large 5EE telephone exchanges during development, in what were called Execution Environments, replacing 3B20Ds and Amdahl mainframes.
SVR4 had a lot of code inherited from SVR3.2, SunOS, BSD and Xenix, and could be used like many of the source OS's by manipulating path and libpath to acquire their personalities, and included a lot of nifty technology including a unified software installer and an ABI that allowed software to be written for an architecture like Intel 386 or Sparc and run on any other variant of that platform, as long as it was running an SVR4 complaint OS.
As with all things, it would have been interesting to see where we would have been if OSF had not been set up, and SVR4 had become the single UNIX variant in the early '90s, for platforms including Intel (there were several i386 implementations of SVR4, including one from Sun themselves), especially if it were available at reasonable cost. I don't know how much it would have deflected the rise of Windows as a server platform, but it would have changed where we are now a lot IMHO.
...the writhings of a beast slowly dying of a thousand cutbacks by customers.
Sorry Larry old son, your cloud is shite, your DB is shite, your dev tools are shite, in fact things are not so great. You'll survive, just like IBM still survives but the glory days are long my old mate. ( for the record, I'm 25 years as an Oracle DBA and Solaris sysadmin )
You have copyright without registration, but you can't do anything with that copyright - ie. if you want to sue someone for breaching it, that is unless you registered it, which is voluntary.
So effectively, copyright still requires formal registration, and the USA doesn't appear to be compliant with its obligations under the Berne Convention.
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