Oracle has filed a lawsuit against HP Enterprise for allegedly helping its partner to provide software support for the Solaris operating system.
In a complaint filed in federal court in San Jose, California, Oracle claimed that HPE was aware of the marketing of support software carried out by its partner Terix Computer.
It also alleged that HP knew that the technical support provided by Oracle for Solaris updates was a paid service.
“[In] its effort to generate additional support service revenues, HP falsely represented to customers that HP and Terix could lawfully provide Solaris Updates and other support services at a lower cost than Oracle, and then worked with Terix to improperly access and provide Oracle’s proprietary Solaris Updates to customers,” Oracle said in the lawsuit.
The filing said that HPE customers who install updates for its HP-UX server are also required to pay for support. HPE has also filed a lawsuit against a third party firm for allegedly gaining access to such updates and using them to compete with it.
HP was sued for copyright infringement in the Solaris case and Oracle is seeking the court’s help to stop HP from distributing its software code.
“While a customer may engage a third party — instead of Oracle — to provide “break-fix” support services on Oracle hardware, neither the third party nor the customer can access or use Oracle’s support website to obtain the proprietary software that runs on that hardware without a support contract with Oracle because the Solaris Updates are Oracle’s copyrighted intellectual property,” the filing said.
Oracle earns a major chunk of its revenues by selling support services for updates on its software products.
However, Oracle has not specified damages it is claiming from HP in the case. Terix had already paid $57.7m in damages to Oracle for unlawfully obtaining copyrighted Solaris patches.
“Oracle obtained a judgment against Terix, and will continue to pursue companies like HP that misappropriate our software for their own financial gain,” Bloomberg quoted Oracle General Counsel Dorian Daley as saying in a statement.
Similarly, Oracle received $356.7m in damages from SAP for buying support services from a third-party firm TomorrowNow. The legal dispute that ran for years finally got settled after SAP accepted that it had illegally downloaded significant amounts of Oracle support material.
HP and Oracle had been in legal conflicts in the past, since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, becoming a direct competitor to HP.
In 2010, HP had sought a court order to stop its former chief executive Mark Hurd from moving to Oracle. In 2011, HP sued Oracle to stop the company from ending support services for its high-end HP systems.
“HP’s activities infringe Oracle’s intellectual property rights and interfere with Oracle’s contractual and prospective economic relations. Oracle brings this lawsuit to stop HP’s wrongful conduct and for damages caused by HP’s diversion of Oracle’s customers through the unlawful use of Oracle’s intellectual property,” Oracle added in the filing.
Source: cbronline.com
