Supporting infrastructure?
HP are having to pay Intel to keep the chips coming in the short term, they've had to sue Oracle to keep the database engine coming - what does Oracle need to do that? Will their C compilers, test/dev hardware etc still be available? Will they get operating system source access, to ensure parity with their Linux/Solaris/Windows offerings?
A quick search on hp.com for Itanium products suggests perhaps I wanted 'titanium' instead - whoops! If I wanted to develop Itanium software, in the past I could have used Dell or HP workstations - oops, those have been discontinued already. Virtual machine? I can fire up Linux, *BSD, Windows, Solaris, even OS/2 (eComStation) virtual machines for development purposes - anything on Itanium? Never mind that Windows and the Linux distros have both dropped it already (does Oracle have to keep supporting the database on those?)...
It's an alarming demand: support a dying fringe platform in perpetuity?! Oracle don't have to keep supporting Windows, or z/OS, or Solaris if there's no market for it - but suddenly, supporting HP-UX (or NonStop? OpenVMS?) is mandatory whatever happens - until HP finally drops the whole architecture completely.
If I were Oracle, I might be tempted to reply to the judge "OK, but HP will have to provide X Itanium workstations running each version of the OS they want supported, with supported standard-compliant C compilers and libraries to match", where X is at least the number of people needed to maintain and support the products. How can HP drop half the product range itself, then demand other people keep supporting it regardless?!