Mr. Ellison, known as a fierce adversary, has used the case to attack Léo Apotheker, SAP’s former chief executive and now chief executive of Hewlett-Packard. He has said in public statements that Mr. Apotheker oversaw a vast copyright infringement plan.  But Mr. Apotheker’s name was not mentioned during Mr. Ellison’s testimony on Monday.  Oracle has tried to serve Mr. Apotheker with a subpoena to appear in court, but its lawyers have been unable to find him.  In a statement last week, Oracle said that Mr. Apotheker was apparently staying away from H.P.’s headquarters to avoid being served.  H.P. has responded that Oracle had the opportunity to ask Mr. Apotheker any question it wanted during an earlier deposition.  Mr. Ellison said in court that Oracle would have charged SAP around $4 billion to license the software. He explained that the price tag would be that high because it would open the door for SAP to poach up to 30 percent of the customers Oracle got through several major acquisitions.  “If they could get that software for nothing, we’d have a hard time paying 100,000 employees,” Mr. Ellison said Monday in response to a question from David Boies, the prominent lawyer from the firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner who is representing Oracle.  Mr. Ellison seemed at ease during his testimony before Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton and an eight-person jury. He sometimes disputed the assertions of the opposing lawyer, Gregory Lanier, of the law firm Jones Day, who tried to hammer the message that the damages should be lower than Oracle contends.  He repeatedly asked Mr. Ellison to point to any e-mails or other internal documents showing that Oracle had ever feared that it would lose a large number of customers to SAP.  “I do not write those kinds of things down,” Mr. Ellison responded.  In the end, Oracle lost 358 customers, or 2 percent to 3 percent. Some of those customers, SAP has argued, would have left anyway.  Mr. Lanier also showed e-mails in which Oracle executives wrote of seeing few defections to TomorrowNow, which SAP acquired in 2005.  Mr. Ellison replied that he was very concerned about the potential threat from TomorrowNow and that he did not necessarily agree with early observations by other Oracle executives.  In any case, Mr. Ellison said that no one at Oracle had been aware that TomorrowNow’s employees were stealing Oracle’s intellectual property until later. If he had discovered it earlier, he said, he and his colleagues would have considered the risk far greater.  A version of this article appears in print on November 9, 2010, on Page B10 of the New York edition with the headline: Licensing Fees the Main Topic of Oracle Testimony. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Licensing fees are a central point in the legal battle over how much SAP should pay in damages for stealing Oracle’s software.