Rimini Street promises 'business as usual' after Oracle IP judgment Software support specialist Rimini Street has promised it's "business as usual" despite suffering a setback in its ongoing intellectual property dispute with Larry Ellison's Oracle. "Oracle has established a prima facie case of copyright infringement as it relates to the identified copies of Oracle Database," said District …
"The Court's ruling today, like the Court's ruling in February, is an important vindication of Oracle's intellectual property rights" ref Oracle Geoff Howard attorney at law
Oracle Linux is a Linux distribution totally copied from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), repackaged and distributed to Red Hat customers, as an attempt by Oracle to steal Red Hat support customers. Paraphrased from Wikipedia
If Oracle want to go after Red Hat's install base that's entirely up to them. That's business. As for the distro, Oracle Linux is based on RHEL with their own kernel available and a load of stuff developed by Oracle and made available to the community. So no fate and no irony I'm afraid.
Totally different. Oracle Linux and Red Hat Linux are both legitimate and lawful and offer features and support. Oracle are not stealing anything from Red Hat. They can both compete with each other for respective business on their own terms. Whereas Rimini had been offering illegitimate support with unlicensed software, according to the judge. Rimini may compete with Oracle for support contracts but if those contracts are underpinned by Oracle's original licensing and support terms, they have to play by Oracle's rules.
Do I understand this correctly? Rimini provide some kind of oracle managed service but think that they can use other peoples licenses? What a dumb idea to hang a business on, especially when the company involved is well known as a vicious litigant with oodles of political clout
> What a dumb idea to hang a business on
Not really - if a company buys a software license and asks a third-party to manage the operation of that software on third-party's hardware, that seems reasonable to me.
This kind of behaviour is why every business wants to own its own stack - Oracle trying to squeeze extra cash out of Rimini could impacting the Rimini's client's business.
It's why Apple insists on its own OS, Samsung loves ARM and almost no hardware vendor wants Windows on their phone. It's why MS trying to suck businesses into their cloud is meeting a rather lukewarm response from their own partners and customers and why almost no-one builds extensions to Windows. Any cool money-saving ideas will be scotched by a flick of a pen.
Not really. Nowadays Rimini business model is the same as big ones like HP use successfully since 20+ years providing oracle support for anyone who wants to pay - end customer buys and owns licenses and related oracle support contracts, companies like HP act like customer agents doing database operations and support, communicating and cooperating with oracle only if needed. The main thing needed from oracle in this model is access to patches and this comes with default support contract that you have to buy with license. The rest is only knowledge and this can be provided by anyone who wants to hire proper people. This is fully legitimate business model and works fine since years. Of course oracle would be more than happy to cut the middle man and get this part too but they cannot do much to avoid that. If Rimini would always use this model and nothing else they will never got into court, but in the beginnings they did some weird and I think really illegal things and because of them Oracle got valid reasons to sue them.
Whole problem is about having or not support contract with Oracle. Rimini tried to set their business model on assumption that end customer doesn't need support contract with oracle, it's enough that they have contract with Rimini. Which is not doable with Oracle licensing terms. Besides I think nowadays it's not even possible as you cannot buy database license without support contract (though I don't know if the same applies to apps licensing). So Rimini initial business model was plain wrong and now they will pay for that. With other oracle support providers (Accenture, HP, IBM, Atos etc) it's different story as you always had to buy their services in addition to obligatory oracle support payment.
Besides it's important to add that oracle "support" doesn't give you any real support, ok, maybe their platinum services do that, but I've never met anyone who would even consider buying them. It's basically obligatory payment which gives you access to patches and (limited) knowledge base, if anyone thinks that oracle support will solve any real problem for him, he's very wrong.
"Do I understand this correctly? Rimini provide some kind of oracle managed service but think that they can use other peoples licenses?"
Yeah basically... it looks like a customer would already be running Oracle; they didn't want to spend the big bucks on running it on their own hardware. So, Rimini would copy this software onto a system on their end instead.
So, first off, not "IP theft" in any sense of the words. Remini and their clients in a few cases exceeded the letter of their license terms. But they were not exceeding the "spirit"; they weren't exceeding number of users, or running excess copies of Oracle, or exceeding licensed hardware limits, or using the copy of Oracle licensed to one client to serve other clients, or really anything that should be any of Oracle's concern. But (just like Microsoft) Oracle has some extra-special clauses in their licenses which Rimini and some of their clients were violating.
"The Court's ruling today, like the Court's ruling in February, is an important vindication of Oracle's intellectual property rights" ref Geoff Howard attorney at law for Oracle
Oracle Linux is a Linux distribution totally copied from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), repackaged and distributed to Red Hat customers, by Oracle in an attempt to steal Red Hat support customers. Paraphrased from Wikipedia
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