No more tomorrows for TomorrowNow suit as Oracle and SAP settle Oracle and SAP have settled their long-running dispute over third-party support outfit TomorrowNow. The case was fought over whether or not SAP subsidiary TomorrowNow was within its rights to download Oracle software to its own servers, by using Oracle customers' licence keys. TomorrowNow 'fessed up way back in 2008, when …
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I do not really get the problem of all this ... apparently, a consultancy firm retrieved software from Oracle's servers using the account of one of its costumers, on behalf of that customer. I do not really understand the problem here ... the software maybe licensed to the customer only, however, the software was downloaded on behalf of the licensee ...
Now, this would create the precedent that consultants will not be allowed to download and install 3rd party software for a customer ... sounds a bit harsh to me.
And how can they claim IP theft ? I mean, it's not like the guy downloaded the sources ... there is no license theft, as the software was retrieved for the licensee ...
I call BS on all this ..
I worked for a company that got into bed with TomorrowNow. I can tell you what they did was wrong from the start.
Oracle bought a company that owned J D Edwards (ERP software company). SAP and Oracle were both attempting to convert all companies using J D Edwards over to their software. SAP created TomorrowNow. TN offered very generous support packages to companies that were using JDE (in the hopes they could convert them to SAP later down the road).
The only problem was TN had no documentation on JDE at all, NONE... So as part of the support agreement, they convinced companies to hand over their userids and passwords to JDE's support site (now owned by Oracle).
TN used the userids and passwords to login and download massive amounts of support documents to support their new clients. It wasn't like they were downloading a few documents to support their clients... They were attempting to download every single support doc available.
sorry... but they should have had to pay the original amount. If they were successful in converting even a small handful of companies, in the long run it'd be worth it.
That's where things get fuzzy in the enterprisey software world. Packages from vendors like SAP, Oracle, CA and other truly "closed shops" have a support structure such that you need a network of the vendor's very expensive consultants to do anything useful with them. I don't do ERP systems, but I mess with systems management tools and databases a lot. Complex Oracle DB installations are _possible_ to do just from the public manuals and documents, but you almost always need access to Oracle's support "notes" to let you know what tweaks need to be done, what order the mystery patch bundles need to be installed in, etc. SAP is worse-- basically the only way to get systems-level experience with the product (enough to go to another company and implement it) is to do time at one of the Big 3 consulting firms. And CA delivers shockingly incomplete products with useless documentation -- any attempt to build a production implementation of some of their tools without (expensive) help is bound to be a nightmare.
TomorrowNow looks like they chose the "less than ethical" route to work around this problem. The consultantware business model really stinks, but SAP was looking to lock existing JDEdwards customers into the same model with a different company.
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