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Judge Rules in Favour of HP in Litigation with Oracle Concerning Support of Itanium SoftwareA California state judge ruled on Wednesday that Oracle will have to continue supporting and releasing new versions of its software designed for Intel Itanium-based servers sold by Hewlett-Packard. The judge said that an agreement between HP and Oracle regarding release of software compatible with Itanium did exist and that Oracle is obliged to follow it. The latter will appeal the decision. "Today’s proposed ruling is a tremendous win for HP and its customers. The superior court of the state of California, Santa Clara County, has...

Column Oracle won't win this case against Google IT SEEMS that Oracle's lawsuit against Google over its use of Java in Android has fallen apart. Although the trial is still ongoing, and the judge has yet to hand down an important copyright ruling while the jury has yet to return its verdicts on patents and damages, if any - it's already apparent that Oracle is unlikely to win billions or even millions of dollars from Google, and it's possible that Oracle might lose entirely. This lawsuit is rather important, however, if only because it has raised the spectre that software...

One month into the Oracle v Google trial, Judge William Alsup has revealed that he has, and still does, write code. Will this affect the outcome? So far all that Oracle has managed to prove is that Google copied nine lines of Java code, that are incorporated into Android operating system and eight test files that are not part of the production code. And yesterday, in a hearing about "infringer profits" Judge Alsup challenged Oracle's lawyer David Boies for trying to pin so much on the rangeCheck infringement. U.S. District Judge William Alsup, Northern District of California (Image: Hillary Jones-Mixon/The...

Summary: There were no winners in Oracle vs. Google. Only losers, including all programmers, and perhaps everyone else as well.Not counting the APIs, here's how much code Google was found to have copied from Java.On the surface, it may look like Oracle won the first round of its intellectual property (IP) lawsuit with Google. Look again. No one’s won anything and that includes Oracle.While we wait to see what the jury has to say about the two remaining patents, let’s take a closer look at what the jury decided. They said that Google’s Android mobile platform infringed on part of...

Open-source Java: Part One Open source Java has a long and torrid history, rife with corporate rivalry, very public fallings-out, and ideological misgivings. But has all the effort and rumpus that went into creating an officially sanctioned open JDK been worth it? Java co-creator James Gosling certainly thinks so - although he didn't seem entirely open to the idea in the early days. Gosling told The Reg that putting Java under the GPL has helped unify what was a fractured community while making the code freely available has helped uptake from a grassroots up. "In general, I'd say that it's...

MEN OF HONOR Apparently, if you want to cheat on your wife or spurn the mother of your unborn child, cover up and easily settle your institution's criminal efforts to help Americans avoid paying their federal income taxes, or just avoid paying your own fair share, the place to be is on President Barack Obama's economic-recovery advisory board. Because that's where Robert Wolf, chief executive of UBS Group Americas, the U.S. arm of one of Switzerland's largest banks, UBS AG, sits, as do Charles E. Phillips, President of Oracle Corporation, Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management of...

This is the second of three consecutive posts on information gleaned from last night's filings in Oracle v. Google. I previously blogged about Sun's proposal to create a Red Hat-style Android distribution with open source Java.While patents are the most important part of Oracle's lawsuit against Google, the copyright infringement part shouldn't be underestimated. Google is currently trying to get rid of it on summary judgment, but Oracle defends its related claims.Judge Alsup denied the filing of various interesting documents under seal, so they entered the public record last night. Also, documents that were heavily-redacted are now much less redacted...

It's been a tough week for Oracle Corp. and its lawyers. Oracle sued SAP alleging copyright infringement. A judge said the evidence didnt' support the penalty. On Thursday, the judge in a high-profile copyright case Oracle brought against rival SAP AG threw out a $1.3 billion jury verdict against the German software company. The ruling is expected to result in a new trial to set damages, unless Oracle accepts the judge's suggested figure of $272 million. The court ruling is the second bit of unwelcome news for Oracle this week. On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. authorities...

In what would be Larry Ellison‘s crowning achievement if he could pull it off, the market is buzzing over the idea that Oracle could make a run at Hewlett-Packard. This idea stems from a New York Post story Sunday, which asserts that the sell-off in the stock last week has “put the world’s largest tech company in a vulnerable position and may make it an Oracle takeover target.” The piece says that “one source close to the situation” thinks Ellison is ready to pounce, and that a deal is “inevitable” if HP’s share price keeps dropping. The source told the...

Warren Buffett was in the New York Times today bragging about his low effective tax rate and saying how he would like to be paying more. Fellow Forbes contributor Tim Worstall weighed in quibbling about Mr. Buffet not factoring in the corporate taxes on Berkshire Hathaway's earnings. I'm just a simple CPA, whose firm won't even let him sign audit reports anymore. (That's true of all tax partners here by the way. I don't take it personally). I don't want to quibble with a quibble but apparently economists have a hard time figuring out the incidence of the corporate income...

Google Chief Executive Larry Page has been ordered to testify before the court as part of an ongoing lawsuit in which Oracle has accused the search giant of infringing on its patents for Java. Google CEO Larry Page(Credit: Google) The order yesterday by Judge Donna Ryu of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California states that "Oracle may depose Mr. Page for a maximum of two hours, excluding breaks, solely on topics relevant to the willfulness of Defendant's alleged patent infringement, and the value of Android to Defendant," according to a blog published today by FOSS Patents'...

The earnings rainy season has come and gone. For the next several weeks, it’s a virtual desert for corporate results. But on Thursday, thirsty investors can find an oasis of tech earnings. Best Buy (BBY) reports before the opening bell, and Oracle (ORCL), Research In Motion (RIMM) and Accenture (ACN) release results after the market close. These giants, some of them lumbering, will provide insight into current and future consumer and business tech spending via their various industries. Many may offer some sense of how Japan’s earthquake and tsunami will affect operations or sales.

The White House has released the list of tech leaders meeting with President Obama this evening in San Francisco: • John Doerr, Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers • Carol Bartz, President and CEO, Yahoo! • John Chambers, CEO and Chairman, Cisco Systems • Dick Costolo, CEO, Twitter • Larry Ellison, Co-Founder and CEO, Oracle • Reed Hastings, CEO, NetFlix • John Hennessy, President, Stanford University • Steve Jobs, Chairman and CEO, Apple • Art Levinson, Chairman and former CEO, Genentech • Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO, Google • Steve Westly, Managing Partner and Founder, The Westly Group • Mark...

Florian Mueller has been killing it these past few months with his analysis of various tech patent suits on his FOSSpatents blog, and today he's unearthed a pretty major bombshell: at least 43 Android source files that appear to have been directly copied from Java. That's a big deal, seeing as Oracle is currently suing Google for patent and copyright infringement in Android -- which isn't a hard case to prove when you've got 37 Android source files marked "PROPRIETARY / CONFIDENTIAL" and "DO NOT DISTRIBUTE" by Oracle / Sun and at least six more files in Froyo and Gingerbread...

Proprietary deal falls through A cunning plan by the big names in proprietary software to snap up Novell's patents has fallen through leaving the future of the patents in doubt. Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and EMC had planned to create a consortium to acquire hundreds of Novell patents but now they have decided not to press ahead with it as it could get them into all sorts of anti-trust hotwater. CPTN Holdings was to jointly acquire 882 Novell patents for $442 million. The rest of Novell was to be sold to Attachmate for $2.2 billion, with that sale being conditioned upon...

CPTN Holdings LLC (acquirer of 882 Novell patents): Microsoft, Apple, EMC and Oracle are the partners according to German antitrust notification Breaking news: Twitter user @VM_gville (whose account has meanwhile disappeared) pointed me to the website of the German federal antitrust authority ("Bundeskartellamt"), which discloses a merger (or more precisely, joint venture) notification filed a week ago (on 09 December 2010), according to which the four companies behind CPTN Holdings LLC -- the acquirer of 882 Novell patents -- are Microsoft, Apple, EMC, and Oracle. The product market in which the newly formed company plans to operate is defined as...

InformationWeek Analytics, the leading service for peer-based IT research and analysis, today announced the release of its "Research: 2010 State of Database Technology" report. More than 750 business technology professionals weigh in on their database strategies. Report author Richard Winter is founder and president of WinterCorp, an independent consulting firm that specializes in the performance and scalability of data management systems. Research Summary: Our first InformationWeek Analytics State of Database Technology Survey reveals serious fault lines beneath the critically important enterprise database and data warehousing markets. The 755 business technology professionals taking part in our poll express discontent with rising...

Oracle, now the keeper of the Java flame through its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, has decided that Google has sullied Java through its modifications for the Android platform. For that, Google must pay, and it must pay Oracle. At least that's the way Oracle sees things. Microsoft must be laughing at this turn of events. Recall that Sun went after Microsoft in the 1990s for similar transgressions against the purity of Java. Sun's catch phrase of the hour was "Write Once, Run Anywhere". The changes Microsoft made in the Java VM allowed Java apps to access Windows-specific functionality if they...

Oracle has responded to HP's lawsuit against new hire Mark Hurd. In short, Larry Ellison is ready to fight! Here's the statement: “Oracle has long viewed HP as an important partner,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “By filing this vindictive lawsuit against Oracle and Mark Hurd, the HP board is acting with utter disregard for that partnership, our joint customers, and their own shareholders and employees. The HP Board is making it virtually impossible for Oracle and HP to continue to cooperate and work together in the IT marketplace."

It took Hewlett-Packard less than a day to file a lawsuit against its former chief executive, Mark V. Hurd, over his decision to join its rival and partner Oracle as a co-president. H.P. filed its lawsuit on Tuesday in the Superior Court of California in Santa Clara, claiming that Mr. Hurd had breached his contract with the company. The lawsuit said that Mr. Hurd could use his intimate knowledge of H.P. and its trade secrets to aid Oracle and harm H.P. The two companies compete in the market for computer servers, storage systems and business software. Mr. Hurd resigned from...