[Info-vax] Oracle loses appeal in HP/Oracle Lawsuit

[Paul Sture]

In article <ao45htFfa5qU1 at mid.individual.net>,
 billg999 at cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) wrote:

> In article <1d4407f1-12af-4f43-9d3d-737d262da538 at googlegroups.com>,
> 	Neil Rieck <n.rieck at sympatico.ca> writes:
> >> 
> >> As we become more and more like the EU.  Where else can a company be
> >> ordered to lose money in a time of very hard economics.
> >> 
> > With all due respect, this has nothing to do with the US becoming like the 
> > EU. Almost every western country allows monopolistic behavior but this 
> > comes with a huge amount of government oversight. When companies get too 
> > big, they can either live with the oversight (like the telcos did for over 
> > 100 years) or break up their companies so they are no longer considered a 
> > monopoly.
> 
> There is no comparison between the business model of a company like
> Oracle and the early Bell telephone.  Bell relied on a very limited
> resource (just how many cables do you think can be strung down a
> single city street?)  And there are many who thnk granting special
> priveledges to supposed "Public Utilities" is just plain wrong.

But Oracle (and other database vendors) do have customer lock in.  All 
they have to do is keep price below the cost of migration to other 
products.

"Oracle don't have customers, they have hostages" - Anon.

> > No one can deny the fact that Oracle is king of the relational database 
> > world because they've got the best software in that marketplace (IMHO). 
> 
> And that somehow makes them a monopoly?  Microsoft has a even stronger
> stranglehold on their niche and I don't see anyone calling them a
> monopoly.

Have you forgotten the long running legal battle about Internet Explorer?

Or more recently, the "browser poll" they agreed to introduce in the EU?

Which incidentally, they managed to "forget about".  I know that the 
couple of Windows 7 installations I got a couple of years ago didn't 
include that.  Strictly speaking I am not in the EU, but one of those 
Windows 7 packs was manufactured in Germany.

> > But they raised more than a few government eyebrows when the acquired MySQL 
> > (probably with the intention of slowing its development). But in the end, 
> > no one really cared because there were other open alternatives available, 
> > like MariaDB, which most Linux distros are moving to now. 
> 
> Or maybe they didn't care because MySQL was a piece of crap.  It is the
> database of choice for people who know nothing about databases.

Betamax and VHS?

-- 
Paul Sture