Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2014/04/07/jdewards_site_shutdown/

Oracle smacks JD Edwards help site with cease and desist order

Reference site thwacked with legal letter

By Jack Clark in San Francisco

Posted in Software, 7th April 2014 17:24 GMT

Updated A JD Edwards technical reference and help site has been forced to close after being sent a cease-and-desist letter from Oracle.

The JDEREF.com site's UK-based webmaster recently revealed that a legal representative from Oracle, which acquired JD Edwards' owner PeopleSoft in 2005, sent the cease-and-desist letter requesting the closure of the site due to perceived IP infringement.

JD Edwards was an enterprise resource planning company that sold software for mainframes, thin clients, and more. Under Oracle, the company is responsible for the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne products and JD Edwards World products.

"It is with a heavy heart that I must inform you that jderef.com can no longer exist, having recently been served legal notice from Oracle regarding information copyright infringements relating to their product schemas," wrote the site's operator.

"This is a bitter blow, not only for me personally, (having invested many hours creating this shared resource) but mostly for the users like you, who have started to depend on the presence of this resource, to use and enhance JDE and its satellite products – to further your knowledge and insight into Oracles flagship ERP products," the operator wrote.

JDEREF

Oracle argues that the free reference site violated its IP

"It was only a matter of time before my little website got the attention of Oracle – but this was not the response I was hoping for."

The Oracle legal letter argued that by providing information about JD Edwards' software schemas, the site was infringing on Oracle as a rights holder. The letter requested that the site admin "remove or disable access to this material."

"As a private individual based in the UK – I have no choice but to concede – I don't fancy going up against charges from Oracle's legal teams," the webmaster wrote.

The JD Edwards site operator argued that as the site was supporting JD Edwards products and that "anyone with access to JDE will technically be able to obtain this information anyway, albeit in a far less convenient and expedient fashion," the letter was "rather narrow sighted."

Back in 2009, we reported how Oracle executive Charles Phillips sought to reassure customers of Sun Microsystems who were worried about the fate of the then–recently acquired company:

Pointing to continued development of acquired software such as JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and BEA Systems' WebLogic, Phillips said: "Look at that track record – when people are worried about what we will do with Sun hardware and MySQL. We have a bit of a track record."

With the JDEREF cease-and-desist, that track record has become somewhat blemished.

At the time of writing, neither Oracle or the administrator behind JDEREF.com had responded to requests for further information.

Update

"The site had been up around 18 months," the JD Edwards website admin told us via email. "I recently updated it to include JDE 9.10 schemas (plus updated the 812 dataset with a lot more data) back in February this year. Since then, I've tweaked the UI and added a few more features based on user requests to improve user interactions."

The admin estimated that about "a month solid" of work had been put into the site.

"I'd like to thank everyone who has contacted me with messages of support – I'm trying to respond to all of them so please be patient – but it's really touching to hear how valuable my 'little website' was to individuals and companies alike – it's quite humbling," we were told. ®