Oracle sues SAP for "theft"

March 22, 2007

Wow. The Oracle-SAP battle just turned into a full-scale war. Reuters reports that Oracle today filed a suit against SAP accusing it

of gaining repeated and unauthorized access to [Oracle's] password-protected customer support Web site. This allowed SAP to copy thousands of Oracle software products and other confidential materials onto its own servers to compile an illegal library of copyrighted software code, the lawsuit charged. "This case is about corporate theft on a grand scale ...," said the lawsuit, filed in United States District Court in San Francisco.

Here's the full text of the 43-page lawsuit, which in addition to laying out the allegations in detail - Oracle claims SAP used the allegedly stolen code and documents to enable its TomorrowNow subsidiary to offer "cut rate support services" to users of Oracle applications as a means of getting them to shift over to SAP applications - provides an extensive discussion of the fierce competition between Oracle and SAP (from Oracle's point of view, of course). Oracle is asking for a jury trial.

It will, to say the least, be very interesting to see SAP's response.

Larry Dignan has more.

Posted by nick at March 22, 2007 05:44 PM

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