Judge denies HP, Oracle motions in Itanium trial
updated 01:30 pm EDT, Wed May 2, 2012
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HP and Oracle have both had motions denied in the Itanium support legal dispute. Judge James Kleinberg of Santa Clara County has given the companies until noon today to contest the ruling, which maintains that none of the claims will be rejected in the early stages of the court proceedings.
The dispute commenced last June when HP sued Oracle over the latter's decision to drop support for Itanium. HP claimed Oracle broke “legally binding commitments” to support servers based on the Intel 64-bit based hardware, and that Oracle engaged in anti-competitive strategies to force HP customers to their own systems.
In the pretrial ruling, Judge Kleinberg says that HP's Itanium statements were “exaggeration or opinion” with the HP Itanium roadmap extention to 2017 being questionable and possibly breaking the law. Oracle was said to have a “basic rationale” for a damages claim, with an expert witness valuing it as $120 million in lost server sales. The assertion by HP that it had a deal for the continued supply of Itanium software and had to rely on assurances from Oracle is “not unreasonable as a matter of law”.
Both sides had motions denied, with HP receiving two and Oracle one. The court has yet to approach a final decision on the dispute. [via Wired]
