decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
Loser, or 'loser'? | 697 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Oracle Return On Investment
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 07 2012 @ 06:34 PM EDT
Given your comment, which I believe, does that make BSF akin to a patent
troll, threatening others to gain extortion $, regardless of the validity of the

complaint?
Or, am I too tough on BSF?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Whether or not Oracle can use this to threaten others
Authored by: hardmath on Monday, May 07 2012 @ 07:15 PM EDT

Despite the "good news" that Oracle "won", their stock price is off half-a-point today. This might be one of those buy-on-the-rumor, sell-on-the-fact things (though it continues a trend from last week). But this "good news" will not carry a sweet smell of success for long as Oracle has no chance of recouping their cost of litigation.

Whether or not Oracle can use this to threaten others, they are assuredly hurting themselves with existing and potential customers. If they are unable to learn the lesson from SCO "the easy way" that suing your customers generally reduces profits, then they will simply have to learn it the hard way.

But more importantly they've lost any goodwill in the Java community they acquired in the Sun Microsystems transaction.

The "write one, run anywhere" pitch was attractive in the late 90's precisely because it appeared to be about platform independence, a form of developer freedom if you will.

It no longer appears that way. The new pitch "we copyrighted the API" resembles nothing like developer freedom. Rather it amounts to a platform lock-in broader and more brazen than any historical precedent, a literally intolerable affront to coders.

If Ellison thinks there's no other game in town besides Java, he's been misinformed. If Oracle continues to flog the "APIs are ours" talking point, they will risk it cutting into their cash-cow RDBMS business as well.

---
"Prolog is an efficient programming language because it is a very stupid theorem prover." -- Richard O'Keefe

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Loser, or 'loser'?
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 08 2012 @ 12:38 AM EDT
Note, that even in a 'loser pays' case, Oracle would not be the loser. They have
won on the 9 lines, and may earn themselves a slight victory on one of the
patents.
So, although the case will be, in reality, a big win for Google, a 'loser' pays
system would saddle Google with all of Oracle's legal expenses.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )