The wheels of justice grind slowly
Holy crap, this lawsuit started back when I worked at HP, years before the HPE split. I've had another entire career since then.
There was a whole lotta bad blood between HP and Oracle over hiring Mark Hurd. HP had just fired him for "inaccurate expense reports," which was clearly a palace plot by other board members because the supposed discrepancies were a microscopic fraction of his total compensation. Seen from the trenches, it appeared that his immediate hiring by Oracle threw the HP C-suite into full "Crazy Spurned Ex" mode.
The disagreement that led to this lawsuit was driven by posturing and dick-swinging. Oracle announced they were dumping Itanium; maybe it was Hurd's revenge, maybe not. They certainly seemed to take pleasure in their decision. I can't speak to Oracle's motives, but many at HP saw it as payback from Hurd for the ginned-up scandal that forced him to resign. The HP internal narrative was that the whole Integrity product line was now in jeopardy because of the Oracle announcement.
I'll admit, many of us thought the lawsuit was kind of a pathetic move by HP. Itanium was obviously not the future of computing. It was a constant battle to keep Windows DC, RHEL, and any other operating systems that were not called HP-UX aboard the Itanic. But what-evs. You do you, HP board.
So now HPE (which did not exist in 2011) has "won." Yay. The $3B that they sued for in 2011 is now worth $2.3B in constant dollars. The rusted hulk of the Itanic rests on the bottom of an ocean somewhere, unmissed. Oracle is still Oracle; they'll pull $3B out of the couch cushions and move on. The lawyers for both sides got new yachts and private planes. Plus ça change, plus ça change rien.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
