Month: June 2016

Did you think that the highly anticipated, procedurally generated space exploration game No Man's Sky was in any way related to British telecommunications and broadcasting giant Sky? Of course you didn't. But it apparently took the legal system three years to come to the same conclusion.

That's according to Sean Murray, managing director of No Man's Sky maker Hello Games. Over the weekend, Murray tweeted that the company had settled a legal dispute with Sky over the game's name after "3 years of secret stupid legal nonsense." In a follow-up tweet, he added that "this is the same folks who made Microsoft change Skydrive to Onedrive... so it was pretty serious." ("On the plus side perhaps this is the real reason Skynet never happened..." he joked)

Sky did indeed go after Microsoft's Skydrive back in 2014, forcing an abrupt name change from the massive company. Last year, Sky also took legal action against Microsoft's Skype, arguing that the service's logo looked like a cloud "and thus may readily be associated with the word 'sky.'" A European court eventually agreed with that argument.

Oracle is very proud of its cloud sales. But not everyone is very happy about how it got them. (credit: Håkan Dahlström)

On June 16, Oracle Corporation released financial results for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2016, and corporate executives trumpeted the company's cloud services success. According to the latest report, Oracle's cloud infrastructure, platform, and software services collectively brought in $859 million for the quarter ending May 31, compared to $576 million for the same period in 2015. Oracle brought in $2.853 billion in revenues for cloud and had an $8.9 billion (£6.07 billion) profit for the year.

But those numbers don't tell the whole story. Oracle's overall revenue was down, largely because of its shrinking "on premises" software sales, which fell by $224 million versus 4Q FY2015 and by $1.245 billion (£0.85 billion) for the year as a whole. Software license and software maintenance sales still account for 73 percent of Oracle's revenue, while cloud accounts for only 5 percent. Oracle's hardware revenues, which still account for 14 percent of its overall income, fell by 9 percent during the quarter and 10 percent for the full year.

There's some controversy over Oracle's reported cloud sales numbers, however. On June 1, former Oracle senior finance manager Svetlana Blackburn filed suit against Oracle for wrongful termination in October of 2015, claiming that she was fired after she "resisted, refused to engage in, and threatened to blow the whistle on accounting practices she reasonably believed to be unlawful" surrounding how Oracle counted cloud revenues. In a statement to the press, an Oracle spokesperson denied that there was any wrongdoing.