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."
Not an Oracle Fan (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not an Oracle Fan (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not an Oracle Fan (Score:4, Insightful)
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It doesn't even need to be bad. The fact that it's a dead platform that is only supported as the result of a lawsuit ought to set off warning bells for anyone considering buying it. As soon as the agreement expires, it's going to be dropped. It's also likely to be a wake-up call for anyone still using Itanium: if even Oracle (a company well known for being motivated solely by money and willing to support anything if they think there's a dollar in it) won't support it without legal pressure, then no one e
Re:Not an Oracle Fan (Score:5, Interesting)
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willing to support anything if they think there's a dollar in it
I think Oracle would request a great deal more cash than 1 dollar.
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At this point, the only possible reason for using Itanium is that you have a large OpenVMS deployment.
Some people are forced by a software vendor to upgrade from their perfectly-working Alpha AXP systems to an Itanic with vastly more power than they need because of OS upgrades.
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This looks like the perfect opportunity to switch platforms - maybe something like SparcServers
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This looks like the perfect opportunity to switch platforms - maybe something like SparcServers
Nice irony. But the upgrade path from Digital Unix on Alpha doesn't lead to a SPARC anyway, it leads to HP-SUX on Itanic, or at least it did. I know of at least one case where this was the only option presented (other than "good luck getting your data out of our databases and into another system") that resulted in an otherwise unnecessary move from a quad Alpha to an eight-way Itanic.
Re:Not an Oracle Fan (Score:4, Informative)
The Tandems / NonStop servers also use Itaniums.
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Re:Free enterprise! (Score:4, Informative)
It is. Unless you haven't freely entered into a contract guaranteeing you won't do it.
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Urgh. Double negative. Teach me to rewrite a comment without re-reading it.
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Yes. It was shorthand for "unintended double negative". I figured the context of me not reviewing my comment would be sufficient to imply that.
Re:Free enterprise! (Score:5, Funny)
evacuate City 17 at once, if not sooner! I cannot state this without enough undue emphasis.
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If you do not want to not have your hard drive formatted, do not click "no".
Starting format in 10... 9... 8... 7...
[yes] [no]
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Re:Free enterprise! (Score:5, Informative)
This is free enterprise. Oracle and HP entered a contract. Oracle disputed, and the judge said they can't back out of their contract. So there you have it.
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Ya, hardly a surprise.
20 years ago or more I worked on an ancient project on Prime computers (with language RPG II -- sweet!) and it had Oracle on it. However, Prime had paid Oracle for the port since there weren't enough Primes around to justify it to Oracle based purely on Oracle sales.
But, also take from this that many enterprises deem Oracle a necessity.
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There was a contract. When the contract is violated, [American] businesses sue.
Sure it's the Itanic (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Sure it's the Itanic (Score:5, Funny)
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"sleep 100" won't do you much good. You need to do "for i=1 to 100 do null" ;=)
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Funny thing, I worked a little bit on an IBM 5100 desktop computer back in the day. This was a rather cool little machine, which ran BASIC, APL and one other language I forget. IBM had an accounting package written in BASIC for the 5100, but it was rather slow. So I looked at the code, trying to find why. I found multiple instances of empty loops to 1000, just like yours. (I forget how to write BASIC so I won't try.)
That machine was also the one where I played with APL, which I still think was a cool l
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
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What I want to know is what advantage HP gets by sticking with the good ship Itanic instead of just switching their kit over to say Ivy Bridge Xeon chips...
locked-in customers (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Backwards compatibility with Pa-Risc, AFAIK. Those HP/UX - and whatever their mainframe-ish OS is called - machines aren't going to start running on x86 overnight.
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They've got the HP 3000s which run MPE/iX but that was EOL'd so I'm not sure if that's what you were referring to, though they do run on PA-RISC.
They've also got Tandems which are considered mainframes by some.
Honestly, I think HP can move the Tandems and OpenVMS to Xeons, though OVMS may be a bit of work.
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What I want to know is what advantage HP gets by sticking with the good ship Itanic instead of just switching their kit over to say Ivy Bridge Xeon chips...
They will use a proportion of their HP-UX and OpenVMS customers during the port, just as they did when they abandoned Alpha and PA-RISC. It's a profitable business for them to take the support money, and do the occasional hardware refresh.
Even if HP did do the ports, third party suppliers aren't going to be rushing to port to HP-UX/OpenVMS on x64. What would Larry say about a port of Oracle do you think?
Re:Sure it's the Itanic (Score:5, Funny)
GNU/Hurd, please. Don't set Stallman off again.
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Even if that platform does perform adequately, if you're truly going to support something, you should test your software on it, and it takes extra resources
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.)
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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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
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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.
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Not necessarily. Oracle has to weigh up the cost of being further sued by HP for not putting in any effort against the cost of actually making some effort. I imagine they least they will do is the least they have to in order to avoid being sued.
Courts generally seem to be quite harsh when dealing with people who try to flout previous rulings.
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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.
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Well if it is under contract then yes they better damn support it and pay up to HP.
Do you really x is irrelevent if Oracle signed a contract with Digital/HP back in the day. The US constitution itself guarantees protection of contracts as evil as Oracle or else dimwitted and inept HP is. There is real damaged too as HP lost money relying on a contract from Oracle. Larry probably just assumed the increase of revenue from former OpenVMS, HP-UX, and other other platforms will pay for the lawsuit itself.
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A lot of us still put our best effort into whatever our job is, even if the corporation didn't want to do it.
So don't assume that the quality of the development work will decrease due to the corporation being uninterested in the product.
Then shouldn't HP have to support TouchPad? Pre? (Score:2)
Rehire fired workers? Or doesn't HP feel its own statements should be binding? :-)
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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.
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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.
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Ummm, what?
Z196 isn't HP, it's IBM.
VMS doesn't run on z/OS LPARS; VMS is HP and z/OS is IBM.
What the hell are you talking about?
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You mean MVS (as in now called zOS) not VMS which is the ex Digital / Compaq OpenVMS.
zOS / MVS is IBM not HP....
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MVS (now z/OS) does not "run thousands of linux images." In fact, it doesn't run even a single image of any type - it is not a VM hypervisor. The product that runs linux guests is z/VM.
I think that the AC just picked up a bunch of jargon (sysprog, LPAR, z196, VMS, etc) from an article on mainframes, threw them together, and got the clueless slashdot mods to mark him "insightful". Pretty pathetic.
Open source impact? (Score:1)
From the article:
"For approximately three decades, these corporate giants dealt on an informal basis," Kleinberg wrote in his decision. "Even when the financial consequences were in the billions, they shared resources, worked together, supported mutual customers, and with only a handful of exceptions did so without a written contract."
HP had "every reason to believe" the settlement agreement "was consistent with 'business as usual,'" Kleinberg added.
Overall, Oracle's statements amounted to a valid contract
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You miss-read that. The judge pointed out that even when they *didn't* have a contract, they had (for decades) worked together in good faith on huge, and expensive projects. In the face of that past behavior, HP's belief that Oracle would *honor* the terms of a settlement agreement (which is a contract), was beyond reasonable, and Oracle doesn't have a leg to stand on with regard to reneging on that agreement.
Too late (Score:2)
No one in their right mind would invest money in this now and have already started porting their apps to Windows or Linux.
This reminds me of when Sun cancelled x86 solaris only to reintroduce it. Corporate customers shunned it and software vendors stopped supporting it which caused customers to shun it more in a perpetual loop.
The only people running VMS, HP-UX, and Windows on Itanium are not upgrading or buying new. Just keeping their existing infrastructure or moving or are in the process of moving to a m
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It is a very expensive CPU that never even started to live up to it's considerable hype. Because of that, it never really caught on, so there's not a lot of ROI for a software vendor supporting it.
Even a verbal contract can be a contract.... (Score:3)
While I found it somewhat surprising, it isn't totally amazing. The Judge reviewed the totality of the joint corporate history and ruled. While it's inevitable that Oracle will appeal, IANAL but successful appeals usually require there to be an error in Law, not in "Fact". It seems to be a finding of "Fact" (there's little doubt that if there was a valid contract, it's a contract ;>).
As for Oracle then producing intentionally buggy software that would be unprofessional and begging for suits from the customers (who tend to be Fortune 100 companies, with their own nasty Legal departments).
It is not clear to me from the media coverage if Oracle is required to do the work for free (or, if like Intel, HP can/must pay for the work done on their behalf). Or if Oracle still has to do the work, how many boxes will HP have to ship Oracle for Development and Testing (that's another way to potentially extract pounds of flesh from HP).
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Fortune 100 companies would move away from a DEAD platform, and that is what Itanium is at this point, a dead platform that never got enough traction for ANYONE to really want to support it. HP is foolish to continue selling a dead platform, and there was more of a case to continue supporting webOS than Itanium.
Is this a California thing? (Score:1)
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No, the remedy is to restore to a position they would have been in had the contract been properly performed.
Injunction or specific performance (i.e., directing a party to do something "against their will") are very common remedies when monetary damages are not adequate.
Oracle is not doing so well in court (Score:1)
Google case, now this one... wow. Oracle is not my favorite company, extremely dislike their support services etc...
Brilliant. (Score:2)
I can see it now: Oracle does a quick and dirty (read: half-assed) job of porting their RDBMS to Itanium, and assigns an intern for bug fixing.
What could possibly go wrong (for HP).
The real motivation (Score:1)
Let's face it: this has little to do with the relative quality or potential lifeline of the Itanium family. Oracle simply wants to force folks to use Oracle hardware. Not supporting Itanium is just another way to eliminate competition for their Sun/Oracle servers.
Why can't they just half-ass it? (Score:1)
What's to stop Oracle from taking the Homer Simpson solution? ("When you don't like your job, you don't strike. You just go in everyday and do a half-ass job.") In other words, the judge can order them to port their software to Itanic, but can the judge really order them to do a good job of it? How would this even be measured? Is the judge really going to be acting as a de facto project manager, holding Oracle in contempt of court if there are too many bugs? (Imagine how much they'd have to pay people to wo
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The companies using Oracle on Itanium are not just HP's customers, they are also Oracle's customers. Oracle has competitors (IBM, Microsoft) who will happily come in and say 'remember how Oracle tried to force you to move to a new hardware architecture, and how crappy their product and support was when they got told they couldn't do that? We won't do that to you.'
Just don't BUY Oracle for Itanium: It'll suck (Score:2)
Not to say that Oracle database doesn't already suck, but now Oracle is being forced to maintain their database for a platform they see as unprofitable. Oracle cares only about profit, remember, and Itanium is, objectively, not a profitable platform. And not to say that they already have much incentive to do a good job, but now for Itanium, they have even LESS incentive to do a good job. So if you thought Oracle was a nightmare already, just wait until you see what a horror show it'll evolve into over th
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The companies using Oracle on Itanium are mostly large companies, and they are customers of Oracle (obviously). A number of those customers are probably already looking to move to a vendor that won't abandon them like Oracle tried to. The ones that aren't looking to change vendors now surely will be driven to change vendors if Oracle exhibits behavior like you suggest.
Oracle may have tried to quietly drop support for Itanium, and hoped that only the few Itanium customers would notice. HP did not let th
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Absolutely. If you're a crook, then you'll take the money and run. From the sociopath's perspective, there's little or nothing to be gained by doing the actual work. Oracle, like any other big company, is sociopathic.
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