I really don't give a rat's ass about Oracle vs. SAP and CEO pissing contests, but I grew up with the law, worked in it briefly, and on occasion have found comic relief in file courtroom documents. Scientology slapdowns aside, there's some good stuff out inthe dockets, whether it's that defense of a student's use of the word "fuck" (anyone have a link to that?) to the entire SCO fiasco, I occasionally take a few hours to read some long document and cross-check it over at LexisNexis.

A buddy told me this morning that I had to check out Oracle's amended complaint. Holy massive collusion, Batman! The scope and scale is un-fucking-imaginable. The aforementioned Sven is SAP's chief counsel and he's fucked. The company knew, all the way to the top. Their documents prove it. The contracts show that customer were participatory in what they had to know was illegal.

When I first heard of Tomorrow Now from a friend who'd left Siebel to join up I asked him how the fuck they could possibly have more information on the software than Siebel itself. He was kinda vague but insistent that they'd succeed and chided me for refusing their offer. TN, he told me, was even going to be offering patches. Umm... how?

Reading through the complaint I found out exactly how: they'd load up their copies of older version, download a patch (which they weren't authorised to take), apply it, run a diff on the machine, then collect the mods and rebrand it all.

Question for any Oracle people out there: how the fuck did Tomorrow Now manage to download five terabytes of software before you noticed something fishy? And that using a bank of 20 servers scraping your entire site and catalog from just one IP address?!

The filing reads almost like a Grisham novel without the guns and hotshot attorneys. I'm going to give away the ending: the last page is a demand for a jury trial. Not even the Chewbacca Defense can save SAP. Their only hope may be Steve Martin's old schtick. I'm positively giddy.

Contractually obligating customers to illegally download thousands of gigs of software from the supplier they're leaving? Fuckwits. Only a German like Henning Kagermann could actually think that Oracle wouldn't sue because then they'd have to sue their own customers, too, utterly failing to realise that Oracle could just grant the customers retroactive licenses in return for, um, returning to Oracle. And paying the back maintenance fees, natch.