Judge Rules Oracle Must Continue Porting Software To Itanium

angry tapir writes "A California court has ordered Oracle to continue porting its software to the Intel Itanium chips used by Hewlett-Packard in a number of its servers. Last year, Oracle, which competes with HP in the hardware market but shares many customers with the vendor, announced it would cease supporting Itanium. HP filed suit in June 2011, maintaining that Oracle was contractually bound to continue supporting Itanium."

Re:Free enterprise!

[CMiYC]

There was a contract. When the contract is violated, [American] businesses sue.

Re:Not an Oracle Fan

[slashmydots]

But...cue the horribly glitchy, barely working, piece of crap Itanium port edition rofl.

Re:Silly Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you are vastly overestimating the amount of effort to support Itanium.

Because Oracle already supports several platforms, most of the code will already be platform-neutral. That means the specific changes they'll have to make will be minimal, and may even consist of just re-enabling (and updating) previously working code. The major cost will be in testing and certification the newly supported configurations.

Re:Silly Oracle

[steelfood]

Agreed. The difference between "supported" and "not supported" more or less amounts to whether a support drone logs a ticket or not when you call in. Especially where Ellison (who is only slightly less evil than the RIAA and MPAA) is involved, there's no "spirit," only "word" of the law.

Obviously, Oracle will honor their contract with HP. If the contract can be honored by poor-performing 60-year old guys trained in supporting S/370s somehow managed to squeak by and not be forcibly retired (not that all 60-year old guys supporting IBM mainframes are poor performers), then so be it. And if those guys throw their hands up in the air after a few hours on site, because in reality they have no idea what they're doing, as long as the contract does not stipulate a time limit before fixing each problem, then that's fine too.

Good luck, HP. Dealing with Oracle is a step down from dealing with the devil. At least the devil actually gives you what you asked for (while all the numerous ancillary things somehow end up going horribly wrong).

Re:Not an Oracle Fan

[CheshireDragon]

yup, I kind of see patches and other developments coming very slowly to glitchy software. No where does it say how fast they have to code and release patches. i see problems ahead. Usually the bully picks on the kid too hard and the kid comes back and shoots up the whole school....eh, bad analogy

locked-in customers

[Chirs]

They likely have big enterprise customers that have spent oodles of money customizing the software. It's not just a matter of recompiling at that point.

Re:Sure it's the Itanic

[walshy007]

It's about the large enterprise customers, they bought into itanium and want continued support for it. Asking a gigantic company (the clients who bought itanium) to change architectures or use a mix of them in a short period is a quick way to lose the customer.

Re:Then shouldn't HP have to support TouchPad? Pre

[Anonymous Coward]

They still support old mainframe boxen from a different era running VMS, HP-UX, Non-stop and I think Tandom?

As a mainframe sysprog, recently escaped from HP, I can assure you that at least the boxen I was working on wasn't 'old'. It was a state-of-the-art Z196, capable of running thousands of linux images under VMS with essentially cross-memory comms between the images and the the z/OS LPARs, and virtually 100% uptime.

Give me a mainframe running linux images to front end the mainframe over a swarm of crappy, consumer grade X-Boxes any day.