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

[David Froble]

Bill Gunshannon wrote:

> This attitude still assumes Oracle was making money on products to
> support the Itanium.  Some of us still don;t believe that.

A real interesting statement.

First, I'll assume that Oracle is written in C, and I'll also assume 
that the application logic and code is the same on all platforms.  I 
feel that these are potentially safe assumptions, especially the latter 
assumption.  It is quite likely that any architechure specific 
capabilities were long ago dropped and replaced by generic code.

Now, if the above is anywhere close to reality, then most or all of the 
work to run Oracle on the itanic would be a compile and link.  Even an 
testing should be minimal since for the most part support routines would 
not change and would have been tested long ago.  What's so costly with this?

Consider RDB.  Oracle continues to develop and sell this database 
product.  If there would be any product easy to kill off, it would be 
something that runs on VMS, as HP for sure, and DEC I think, and maybe 
even Compaq have made noises about VMS users being expected to migrate 
to Unix.  It's also quite likely that there are some languages other 
than C used in RDB, and Oracle would have to retain some expertise there 
that isn't required on any other platform.

So my question is, if Oracle sees value (profits) in continuing to sell 
RDB, with it's unique (VMS only) requirements in doing so, then just 
what the hell would be so expensive in continuing to sell Oracle Classic 
on HP-UX, and VMS?

Note that many times "beliefs" have little bearing on reality, but go 
ahead and retain your pet beliefs.

Larry's move had nothing to do with profits, and everything to do with 
Larry and his buddy Hurd wanting to poke a sharp stick in HP's eyes. 
Regardless of the lawsuit, they have probably been successful.