Big Red’s complaint claimed HPE had falsely represented to customers that it and Terix could lawfully provide Solaris Updates and other support services at a lower cost than Oracle, and that the two had worked together to provide customers with access to such updates. The suit against HPE was thrown out of court in 2019, but revived in 2021 when a judge denied HPE’s motion for a summary judgement in the case. Terix settled its case in 2015 for roughly $58 million. Last year, the case went to court and in June a jury found HPE guilty of providing customers with Solaris software updates without Oracle’s permission, awarding the latter $30 million for copyright infringement.
But that wasn’t the end of the matter, because HPE was back a couple of months later to appeal the verdict, claiming the complaint by Oracle that it had directly infringed copyrights with regard to Solaris were not backed by sufficient evidence. This hinged on HPE claiming that Oracle had failed to prove that any of the patches and updates in question were actually protected by copyright, but also that Oracle could not prove HPE had any control over Terix in its purported infringement activities. Oracle for its part filed a motion asking the court for a permanent injunction against HPE to prevent it copying or distributing the Solaris software, firmware or support materials, except as allowed by Oracle. Now it appears that the two companies have come to some mutually acceptable out-of-court arrangement, as often happens in acrimonious and long-running legal disputes.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.