It seems that once litigation has been initiated, lawyers make it almost impossible to stop, however foolish it makes you look. And so it is that although it appears that Informix Software Inc has discovered that there appears to be no case to answer in its suit against Oracle Corp over employees that jumped ship to Oracle, so that the suit has had to be modified out of all recognition, it is still blindly plowing on with it. The only individual it is still beating on is former Informix vice-president Gary Kelley, who is still charged with allegations include breach of contract, threatened misappropriation of trade secrets, tortuous interference with prospective advantage, unfair competition and breach of fiduciary duty. To its embarrassment, Informix has found no proof that the departing employees took and have made use of any trade secrets, so it has had to reduce its charge against the engineers to the threatened misappropriation of trade secrets, and Informix is forlornly asking the court to prevent the engineers from working on Oracle projects where they might consciously or inadvertently use proprietary Informix information, its general counsel David Stanley told PC Week. There is one apparent instance of apparent appropriation of confidential material when one of the engineers who, three days before resigning, logged onto the Informix system from home and downloaded 7Mb of data to his home computer, something employees aren’t normally authorized to do. The file contained proprietary information about the Informix Extended Parallel Server as well as benchmarking, delivery and customer feedback on other Informix products. It was returned to Informix three weeks after the lawsuit was filed.
