Nah. They don't care what that crowd thinks. I think PJ got it right in the article. Lodsys is probably threatening Oracle customers with patents that cover Oracle software. If that's true, Oracle is suing to take away the threat from Lodsys. They also get to signal to customers and trolls that they won't put up with this sort of thing. Makes a lot of sense.
> Oracle has decided to weigh in because Lodsys “has repeatedly threatened numerous Oracle customers” such as Walgreens over the use of a web-chat feature Lodsys claims to own.
See Bryan Cantrill's talk from LISA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&feature=playe... , where he has a good comparison of not anthromorpizing Larry Ellison and Oracle. Paraphrased, "Think of him of as a lawnmower. The lawnmower doesn't care about opensourcing Solaris. The lawnmower _can't_ care about it, it's a lawnmower".
Oracle cares about making money and protecting their revenue stream. Getting Lodsys of the backs of their customers is one way of doing that.
Yeah, I saw that - some great stuff in there, particularly on the history of Solaris. It's great context for understanding what's going on in the Illumos world.
[edit for grammar]