Judge Rules Oracle Must Continue Porting Software To Itanium 109
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:Sure it's the Itanic (Score:5, Interesting)
They actually made the agreement when Itanium was already dying (2010). It was (a vague) part of the settlement when HP sued them for hiring their former CEO
At least, that is what I got when I RTFA
Silly Oracle (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you *really* want to depend on a forced port?
One that the developers' heart isn't in?
One that their company puts all their least competent people on?
One were a few deliberate bugs would be just as bad for you business as not having a port at all - if not worse?
(And how are you going to prove in court that a bug is deliberate, unless some manager is stupid enough to send the order to the developers by e-mail.)
Re:Silly Oracle (Score:3, Interesting)
OTHO, the software will still represent Oracle to customers. Deliberate bugs and deliberately substandard support will just be their own foot they're shooting. Their sales managers will *not* like dealing with that, so it's unlikely.
Re:Then shouldn't HP have to support TouchPad? Pre (Score:4, Interesting)
Being a trustworthy hardware entity isn't really the HP Way since at least the late 90's. Now it's just the same shit Dell and Acer and the rest sell, but with a roll of the dice CEO and enough money from printers to pretend that they still have anything to bring to the table. Innovation is a four letter as they have selected the role of yet another OEM. HP used to be awesome, now... not so much. Still Oracle laid their bed on this one, and HP is just treating them the way they would have treated HP if the roles were flipped.
They still support old mainframe boxen from a different era running VMS, HP-UX, Non-stop and I think Tandom? These things run nuclear power plants, air traffic control systems, financial markets, and things that IBM still makes money today. These are not your typical XP to Windows 7 migration issues upgrading boxes but are part of decades old infrastructure. HP acquired some hardcore players like Digital back in its day.
True I have not even seen opensource software work on VMS ports of perl and apache since the beginning of the century. No new customers and my guess is they are supporting old.
But still you are right with new purchases and this pulling of Itanium has scared the crap out of customers who are already investing in crappy wintel or lintel replacements in clusters for many things that are not industrial scale.
Re:Silly Oracle (Score:2, Interesting)
Having dealt with with Oracle support, I'm almost sure that any problems that arise with Oracle's newly-ported software will be hardware/hp related and they won't to shit.
Short of actually showing the part of code that is faulty, I've never had oracle step-up and patch anything. The upside is I've learned a lot in quite a short period of time.
Re:Not an Oracle Fan (Score:5, Interesting)