There are ways for HP to get full Oracle support - they just need start producing Itanium processors that are significantly faster than contemporary Power or x86 chips. Or price Itanium servers so low that they actually gain market share compared to x86. Or improve performance/power significantly over what competition overs.

This brings the question what was a partnership between these companies? It was about both partners offering modern, technologically advanced, competitive and attractive product together, for the synergistic effect that brings both parties profits. About both parties following market trends together. This was the way Oracle-HP tandem worked during let's say HP-PA days. HP was offering a modern product (eg. 64 bit when x86 was 32-bit only, large caches, RISC), that got a high market share, not only on servers but also workstations, and that was consistent with market trends - RISC and Unix were hot items that day, they were thought to be the future.

The partnership has never been about one side producing junk and the other being forced to invest in it or promote it, or about forcing the other partner to act against the market forces, or against its profitability etc. At the time of Oracle making the decision Itanium platform was something like that - obsolete, not viable in the future, with market trend being abandonment of it - by Redhat, Microsoft etc. And HP was to blame - they were offering obsolete products, and couldn't convince software partners the future looks better relative to future hardware competition. Notice that Oracle Notice the official version of Oracle was that Itanium had no future. Before that they dropped the platforms that Oracle actually found attractive to develop for - Alpha, PA-RISC. So it was the HP that broke the partnership on Itanium front - by not offering a product that would be worth developing and selling for. How could Oracle honestly recommend Itanium to it's customers if it didn't offer them any benefits at all?


It's also quite clear that Oracle is not an evil party when it comes to supporting hardware or OS platforms (the candidate would rather be HP partner Microsoft). They gladly produce their software even for their direct competitors platform like AIX, mainframe, Windows. It plans to offer software for those HP hardware platforms that are competitive - like x86. There really had to be something wrong about Itanium future to prompt its abandonment by 3 major software makers.

The second bug in the decision is creating obligations out of thin air. If two companies make a statement that they continue partnership despite the employment conflict then the breaking of the contract should be when they end partnership because of repercussions of employment conflict. So HP could win if they show some Mark Hurd revenge mail claiming he will vengence his treatment by trying to cut etc. Such deal doesn't mean that the partnership cannot be rearanged because of other important event - like a planned end-of-life of a product. There's also no specific date in any of the statements that Oracle gave about HP support. And if there are doubts and obscurities then the verdict should be decided on the behalf of the defendant!

The general quality of the proposed decision itself is very low. It shouldn't be making slogan-type statements about future. Where are basic definitions of what "Itanium platform", "Oracle software" mean as in the decision? Where is a any concrete date when the decision ends? You could deal with ambiguitiest had the decision was about past (for the ruling about damages) - you can determine what "Itanium platform" or "Oracle software" were in the past - but in the future all is possible (Itanium phones? Oracle games?), so a decision about the future should contain clear definition and timelines in order to be valid.