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FRANKFURT/NEW YORK (Reuters) – SAP AG, slapped with a record $1.3 billion fine for stealing Oracle's software, faces the task of salvaging its tarnished reputation and convincing U.S. clients not to flee to Oracle or International Business Machines Corp. While SAP may get the damages reduced through an appeal, a prolonged legal battle could hurt its credibility and give rivals, which also include Microsoft Corp and Salesforce.com Inc, an advantage. ...

The Oracle-SAP battle now has a price tag. On Tuesday, SAP was fined $1.3 billion by the U.S. Federal Court in Oakland, Calif., for illegally downloading Oracle software. Oracle hailed the fine as "the largest amount ever" for software piracy. "For more than three years," said Oracle President Safra Catz, "SAP stole thousands of copies of Oracle software and then resold that software and related services to Oracle's own customers. ...

Novell's copyrights for the Unix operating system will remain under Attachmate's control as part of the companies' pending merger, a Novell spokesman said Wednesday. The confirmation, which came in a terse message posted to Novell's website, seems to rule out questions of whether Unix assets are part of some 882 patents being sold to a Microsoft-led consortium, CPTN Holdings, as part of the deal. "Novell will continue to own ...

Netflix moved some of its most crucial IT operations over to Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud in order to save money and gain flexibility compared to using more Oracle software and IBM iron. "Our datacenter runs Oracle on IBM hardware, we could have switched to commodity hardware in a data center, but skipped that step by going to AWS," Netflix cloud architect Adrian Cockcroft told the consulting firm Cloudscaling in an interview posted T ...

With the release of Opera 11 beta for testing this week, Opera Software's innovative platform promises to take tabbed browsing to the next level. Though the Norway-based browser maker only holds 2.3 percent of the browser market according to Net Applications, each successive release of the company's platform has sported trend-setting features. Opera 11 beta is no exception. Opera's new browser further builds on the tabbed-browsing innovations it ...

back in March, effectively inviting companies to create business software for the cloud that would sit alongside the standard set of Google Apps. Marketplace apps can take data from the existing apps, so can utilize your e-mail contacts database, for example, or your spreadsheets. Additionally, you can login to marketplace apps using your Google domains account for seamless switching between apps. There was something of a slow start but ...

Some of the developers behind Google Wave have submitted their software to the Apache Software Foundation for inclusion. The project is now a candidate to become a Podling within the Apache Incubator, ASF's preparation stage for Apache open-source products. Google first introduced Wave in 2009, only to abandon the project a year later, citing low user adoption. A wave is a digital conversation that can span different electronic modes of com ...

Rumors of the death of Google Wave are perhaps somewhat exaggerated. Google may have pulled the plug on the short-lived Google Wave, but the concept lives on in an open source project being embraced by the Apache Software Foundation. The ambitious goal of Google Wave was to revolutionize online communication and collaboration. Similar to the way unified communications platforms attempt to integrate different methods of communication to improve efficiency and ...

The holiday shopping season is a great time to get tech products at discounted prices, but it also creates a golden opportunity for the Web's scam artists. The FBI, McAfee, the Better Business Bureau and F-Secure are all warning about cybercriminals who will try to take you for a ride this holiday season. Here are their most pertinent warnings and tips for staying safe: The Infamous Free iPad Bogus free iPad offers started pop ...

Kiwi, the powerful-yet-minimal Twitter client from YourHead Software, has taken flight with... wait, no, that’s not right. Well, it got a huge upgrade to version 2.0 Wednesday morning, gaining a bunch of new features that make Twitter faster and easier to use. And given that the previous version made our GemFest 2010 list, that bodes pretty well for users. New in Kiwi 2.0 is a tabbed interface, allowing greater flexibility if you manage multiple accounts or ...