back to article Oracle fires big red Solaris support sueball at HPE

A new outbreak of hostility between former partners Oracle and HPE has seen Big Red fling a flaming sueball at Hewlett Packard spin-out over who has the rights to support the Solaris operating system. The basis of the spat is that an HPE-backed a third company, TERiX Computer, has pitched itself as offering Solaris support but …

  1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

    Handbags at dawn?

    oblig

    Larry has to fund that new planet somehow.

    This is really getting silly. AFAIK, both are working (sic) in a shrinking market.

    The antics of Oracle seem to me thatthey really don't want to be inbusiness in say 5 years.

    As for HPE, any revenue is good revenue apparently.

    Rather sad really.

    1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

      Re: Handbags at dawn?

      Reap what you saw.

      HP did the same to people who were offering to support older Proliants several years ago.

      I have zero sympathy for them on this one.

      1. John Riddoch

        Re: Handbags at dawn?

        Yeah, you also can't get firmware updates for HP servers without a support contract/warranty. Each as bad as the other.

        1. oiseau
          Flame

          Re: Handbags at dawn?

          > ... can't get firmware updates for HP servers without a support contract/warranty.

          > Each as bad as the other.

          To say the least.

          Once Oracle got hold of Sun Microsystems it has been impossible to get BIOS updates for any and all Sun machines, not to mention basic support.

          Had to get a bootlegged *.iso file to fix a well known bug in my Ultra 24's BIOS.

          It was either that or big $$$$ ...

          They deserve to rot in hell.

          My $0.02

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Handbags at dawn?

        I have zero sympathy for them on this one.

        I have trouble eking out sympathy for either, to be honest. The whole support thing has always felt like the sort of income racket that Microsoft and Adobe are now trying to run with their subscription model.

        In addition, it gives me doubts about the product - if there is money to be made from support, there is a financial incentive to avoid quality like the plague. I wouldn't trust anything from either.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Fuck Oracle

    Expensive pricks

    1. iOS6 user

      Re: Fuck Oracle

      First try compare cost of RH Linux support on the same hardware with costs of Solaris support.

      1. mi1400

        Re: Fuck Oracle

        First why the fuck these oracle bastards are suing HP!?! cant they sue US government for allowing TERiX a fraudulent(as per them) biz operating under their noses/balls!?! why dont they effort in getting TERiX licence (if oracle is true at its face) killed to operate in market instead of bottom feeding through suing!?!

        These oracle bastards are not only into this but doing same in as sacred as dept of education. these fuckin bastards forbid any of ur approach to OCP if u have not taken atleast 1-part training from an oracle certified training partner. And in turn that oracle certified training partner is tied with its hands, feet and balls to conduct trainings of only of a retarded version hence oracle throttling region to produce labour which can compete i.e. people from that region do not get able to compete with current internationally recognised skillset. example a friend complained me that his country is forbidden by oracle to allow any certification higher than 11g, a tech approx decade old.

  3. PaulAb

    How boring

    Monoliths of yester-year sueing each other, how very 90's. Kissy, Kissy children.

    Side note: does this mean I have to stop offering support to my own virtual box install on the old proliant? (I love yester -year)

  4. TRT Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    Was that a Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards reference?

    Thumbs up if it was!

  5. x 7

    desperation moves of dying companies

    neither can see a future making money by selling stuff, so they have to extract whatever they can from what they have already sold.

  6. Mikel

    Genre violation

    Zombies don't attack each other.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I love watching Oracle dig themselves more and more deeper into holes. I used to run large Solaris systems and have run Sun systems since having Sun 3/50s and SunOS 3.5 (that dates me). I got out of that years ago, but friends stayed on and now they say the market is going for Solaris, Oracles antics are driving customers away. To be honest much the same as their database.

    Anybody who can survive without Oracle (and do you really, really, really need it?) should look at the alternatives. Some people do need Oracle but when your hand crafted, hand patched version of Oracle that only runs on this version of Solaris with this firmware on your hard drives falls over, perhaps think again.

  8. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

    How to futher shrink one's market

    Both Opacle and HP seem hell-bent on killing any small likelihood of ever growing their sales again. I'd like to say I shed a tear but it would only be one of joy.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: How to futher shrink one's market

      Agree. It seems like a lot of the legacy tech vendors are fighting over the same increasingly smaller pie.

  9. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    I wonder what would happen if a customer dug out an old-school tender document which specified as a requirement "must have multiple sources of support".

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    One moment

    One moment, something is very unclear here. Ok, we have Sun machines, hosted and maintained at HPE data center. For couple of customers like Comcast. Somebody wanted to save some money and bought solaris support from Terix instead of Oracle. Who was that, HPE or Comcast? If it was HPE then it was plain stupid move and somebody should be fired for that, it was sure thing Oracle won't leave it that way and will want to sue. But usually it's end customer who provides things like software licenses, support contracts etc, not hosting company. Hardware support contracts ok, they are usually managed by hoster, so if it would be about bioses then ok, case clear. But OS patches? It should be customer responsibility to have OS license and support contract, not hoster.

    I have similar example from company I worked in, we too hosted servers in HP and they provided OS support. And we did have some solaris x86 machines. HP at each installation request wanted us to provide OS license and support contract that we had to purchase by ourselves from Oracle and without that they didn't accept any new HW installation requests.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oracle sues over support contracts

    Is this the same Oracle that striped off Red Hat logos and trademarks and then sold this as support contracts as 'Unbreakable' Linux.

  12. x 7

    naive question maybe, but I'm out of touch........is there now an open source version of Solaris available? I mean one that can actually be used....

    1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

      Opensolaris AFAIK is abandonware

      Oracle took the development of future versions back onto the closed source path. The last official opensolaris was in 2010.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Opensolaris AFAIK is abandonware

        True, but there is the illumos fork of opensolaris, along with Joyents SmartOS.

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