Eminently true. Even with the acquisition of Sun's portfolio, Oracle is still dwarfed by Big Blue several times over. Suffice it to say, IBM has had the most p

Eminently true. Even with the acquisition of Sun's portfolio, Oracle is still dwarfed by Big Blue several times over. Suffice it to say, IBM has had the most patents granted of any American company for the past 17 consecutive years as of early 2010: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/011210-patents-2009.html http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/011210-patents-2009.ht... Certainly an unknown quantity must be quite specious, but the sheer cost of fighting the number of patents they could counter-attack with would probably bankrupt Oracle, not to mention however many turned out to have merit.