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Comment by st3fan | Hacker News Reader

Great PR move from Oracle. Playing bad cop, good cop. I think this is purely about getting some love from the crowd that critized them for the Google suit.

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Nah. They don't care what that crowd thinks. I think PJ got it right in the article. Lodsys is probably threatening Oracle customers with patents that cover Oracle software. If that's true, Oracle is suing to take away the threat from Lodsys. They also get to signal to customers and trolls that they won't put up with this sort of thing. Makes a lot of sense.

[edit for grammar]

That's exactly it according to GigaOM

> Oracle has decided to weigh in because Lodsys “has repeatedly threatened numerous Oracle customers” such as Walgreens over the use of a web-chat feature Lodsys claims to own.

- http://gigaom.com/mobile/oracle-sues-to-smash-patent-troll-l...

See Bryan Cantrill's talk from LISA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&feature=playe... , where he has a good comparison of not anthromorpizing Larry Ellison and Oracle. Paraphrased, "Think of him of as a lawnmower. The lawnmower doesn't care about opensourcing Solaris. The lawnmower _can't_ care about it, it's a lawnmower".

Oracle cares about making money and protecting their revenue stream. Getting Lodsys of the backs of their customers is one way of doing that.

Yeah, I saw that - some great stuff in there, particularly on the history of Solaris. It's great context for understanding what's going on in the Illumos world.

The trolls trolling the trolls.

I don't understand why they need to sue anyone. Looking at their financials - they look like they are doing fine.

I always thought patents were meant for defence when you are making money, and attack when you are losing money (my observations - not fact).

Looking at Oracle's cash flow/balance sheet -> they are definitely succeeding.

They don't need to sue anyone, but their customers have asked for protection as they are being threatened by Lodsys for using Oracle products, as far as I can tell. So this is a mixture of customer service, P.R. and flyswatting.

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