Once again...
Oracle seems to have a chronic difficulty understanding copyright.
In reality I suspect they're just a bunch of delinquent opportunists.
The latest installment of the years-long legal battle between software support company Rimini Street and Oracle was acted out in the US Ninth Circuit court yesterday. In a ruling issued last October, Rimini Street was fined £27.7m for infringing Oracle's copyright and slapped with an injunction banning Rimini from accessing …
Oracle seems to have a chronic difficulty understanding copyright.
In reality I suspect they're just a bunch of delinquent opportunists.
There is no circle of hell deep and dark enough for Oracle to sufficiently punish them for the horror of their turd pile EBusiness Suite.
However, the topic in the article you reference (Oracle trying to copyright APIs), isn't at issue here. It would be if Rimini created their own patches based off of published service bulletins. But that is not what they were doing. They were storing and distributing Oracle-authored documentation, patches, etc.
The company that I was at considered Rimini to see if we could ween ourselves of the fiscal bloodletting of Oracle support. Once Rimini was precluded from distributing Oracle patches in 2014, the best they could promise was to craft patches based upon whatever version of EBS you wound up on when you cut the cord with Oracle. This did not seem to be a very sustainable path, unless one was planning on ditching EBS anyway and just wanted to keep it up and running for a couple of years.
OK, I'll pull out the traditional car analogy.
A car rental company leases a car for a week with the provision that it can only be used with one passenger. The renter uses it with three different passengers in sequence. The car rental company claims that is car theft, and wants the car back immediately, damages plus jail time. The renter claims that it is, at most, a contract dispute.
>Each downloaded already had a license direct from the source, meaning they were
>LEGALLY entitled to a copy. Does it matter from where the copy comes?
I'm not arguing whether it's right or wrong, but now, try that sentence again with "Movies" or "Music" instead of the implied "software".
I doubt the various Hollywood studios will see it any different then Oracle: It does NOT matter whether you already have a license, you are NOT allowed to download the files from P2P sources, forums or whatever.
Say you subscribed to Netflix and can watch GoT as part of that subscription but also downloaded episode from torrent to be able to watch it where Netflix is not available.
If your argument is correct that does not constitute copyright infringement but I'm not quite sure Netflix would agree.
That probably wouldn't count as that would be considered two different formats of the same thing. One not intended for permanent storage.
OTOH, most programs MUST be stored to be usable. It's like with Microsoft and Windows in the past. HOW you got the copy wasn't as important as whether or not the KEY you have is legit.
I don't believe you could find a single entity running Oracle DB that is using the DB standalone. Folks are running specific applications that require Oracle DB as the backend. This is "safe" for the application vendor - how can you possibly go wrong with Oracle as your data store ?? But more and more of these app vendors are also listing MS-SQL as supported. And a large percentage of the small - medium size users are making that switch, or considering it. Your opportunity would not be to get customers to go open source, but to get app vendors to go open source. And there are few of those who have the huevos to abandon Oracle or MS.
Last time I was at Unilever many years ago, and if you are selling databases is there a bigger consumer, they were migrating their entire database backend for their SAP systems off Oracle onto DB2 because Oracle had tried to milk them too hard. IBM were seriously sugaring the pill mind.
If you want to behave like Oracle you deserve to lose business.
Another company I worked for we resolved a million plus license liability to Oracle they had got themselves into. Zero help from Oracle to get them out of it.
Oracle are cunts. Avoid if possible.