One moment
One moment, something is very unclear here. Ok, we have Sun machines, hosted and maintained at HPE data center. For couple of customers like Comcast. Somebody wanted to save some money and bought solaris support from Terix instead of Oracle. Who was that, HPE or Comcast? If it was HPE then it was plain stupid move and somebody should be fired for that, it was sure thing Oracle won't leave it that way and will want to sue. But usually it's end customer who provides things like software licenses, support contracts etc, not hosting company. Hardware support contracts ok, they are usually managed by hoster, so if it would be about bioses then ok, case clear. But OS patches? It should be customer responsibility to have OS license and support contract, not hoster.
I have similar example from company I worked in, we too hosted servers in HP and they provided OS support. And we did have some solaris x86 machines. HP at each installation request wanted us to provide OS license and support contract that we had to purchase by ourselves from Oracle and without that they didn't accept any new HW installation requests.