Big bad news all over for Oracle. With all the law suits it seems as though Oracle has gone from making software products to taking up a legal practice.
Lets take a look at the top recent law suits:
From the US department of Labor:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2019/01/27/oracle-accused-of-underpaying-women-and-employees-of-color-learning-lessons-for-companies/#7da0b4f36c58
Computer software company, Oracle, has been accused of discriminating against Black, Asian, Hispanic and female employees. A federal lawsuit has been filed alleging that the company is biased and refuses to hire applicants from certain backgrounds. A compliance audit revealed discrepancies in pay and disparities in the number of diverse employees hired. The U.S. Department of Labor has filed a lawsuit against Oracle, stating that the company underpaid women and employees of color upwards of $400 million. Oracle has also been accused of underpaying 5,000 female employees, with Asian employees also claiming lower pay than their counterparts. Of the 500 people that were hired at the company for technical roles, only six were Black and five were Hispanic.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/23/dol_accuses_oracle/
Updated The US Department of Labor has doubled-down on Oracle, accusing the IT giant of “stark patterns of discrimination” against women and minorities since 2013.
The department's officials hope to cancel the IT giant's lucrative government contracts if allegations that folks have been cheated out of hundreds of millions of dollars are proven true.
The department's complaint [PDF] was submitted Tuesday, and will be heard by the Dept of Labor's Office of Administrative Law Judges. This latest sueball expands upon a legal bomb dropped on Oracle by Uncle Sam in 2017. That earlier brouhaha was paused to give the Silicon Valley titan a chance to come to some arrangement with the labor watchdogs. The process went nowhere useful, and so now the US govt has gone ballistic.
Specifically, it is claimed the database goliath shortchanged women and minorities – anyone who wasn't a White male, basically – by a hefty $400m in lost wages.
The allegations, lodged by the Dept of Labor's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), arrived hard on the heels of a civil class-action lawsuit, filed last week in California, also accusing the cloud biz of pay discrimination.
But wait there is more. Oracle is suing the penatgon
Google takes Oracle to the supreme court:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/25/google_supreme_court_oracle_java/
Google has taken the years-long spat with Oracle over its use of Java code in the Android mobile operating system to the US Supreme Court.
The search engine giant announced yesterday that it had asked the US's highest court to review the copyright dispute, which has gone on for the best part of nine years.
Its petition (PDF) for a judicial review from the Supreme Court – which in 2012 declined to hear the case – said the opinions of the Federal court throws "a devastating one-two punch at the software industry".
The petition for the judicial review calls on the Supreme Court to answer two questions: whether copyright protection extends to a software interface; and whether Google's use of a software interface in the context of creating a new computer program constitutes fair use.
In a blogpost about the appeal – loftily titled "Oracle v Google and the future of software development" – Google's chief legal officer Kent Walker accused Oracle of "trying to profit by changing the rules of software development after the fact".
Walker said that, if the Supremes does not step in, "the industry will be hamstrung by court decisions finding that the use of software interfaces in creating new programs is not allowed under copyright law".
Google built the Android platform "following the computer industry's long-accepted practice of re-using software interfaces" and it received the support of Java's creators at the time, he said.
"Oracle's lawsuit claims the right to control software interfaces – the building blocks of software development – and as a result, the ability to lock in a community of developers who have invested in learning the free and open Java language.
"Unless the Supreme Court corrects these twin reversals, this case will end developers' traditional ability to freely use existing software interfaces to build new generations of computer programs for consumers."
Oracle Sues over Pentagon Cloud Contract:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/23/aws_issues_rebuttal_to_oracles_claims_in_pentagon_cloud_contract_sueball/
Oracle's lawsuit over the Pentagon's $10bn cloud contract is cherry-picked "spin", AWS has said in a submission (PDF) aiming to stop Big Red accessing internal documents and deposing two former government staffers.
Oracle is suing the US Department of Defense over its decision to hand the mega-cloud contract, Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), to a single vendor.
A second complaint made to the Federal Claims Court was that the government had "crafted" the request for proposals' "gate criteria" to limit the number of vendors that could compete.
After this allegation, the cloudy arm of the 'everything store' intervened in the case, and in its latest submission, filed last week, called on the court to reject Oracle’s requests for additional materials.
There have already been complaints that Oracle lied and made misleading remarks about its cloud revenue... "Cloud Washing" This will soon come to light. No new growth, every customer on the planet is looking to get off Oracle, loss of government contracts... Tons of lawsuits, (with the federal government)... does it get any worse?