I need your pictures of Sun equipment!

Posted by Bill Bradford on Sep 8, 2006

Now that Sun has blocked off most of the System Handbook from people without a support contract, I’m in the process of creating a free equivalent from publicly-available information that won’t violate any of their copyrights.

One part of that, though, will be system pictures. I can’t legally re-use pictures from SunSolve, so I need your pictures (front/back/sides/top/bottom/open) of Sun equipment! If you’d like to contribute, mail the pictures to pictures@sunhelp.org.

Preferrably, your pictures need to be available under a Public-Domain-equivalent, Creative Commons, or GNU Free Documentation license so that they can be freely shared.

4 responses to “I need your pictures of Sun equipment!”

  1. solarisuser says:
    08/09/06 at 9:56 pm

    Be careful, Bill, I am sure the Sun lawyers are already circling like vultures over this one. It still stinks to high heaven what they did, or almost did, to you before.

  2. Bill Bradford says:
    08/09/06 at 10:46 pm

    There’s nothing wrong or illegal about a collection of public information and pictures about Sun equipment – after all, that’s what this site *is*, in effect. I’m just going to be organizing it a bit better.

    As for what happened before; that was quickly and (satisfactorily) resolved. Sun likes me and this site nowdays – after all, they donated a loaded T1000 that will be put into service soon to replace the existing 420R.

  3. solarisuser says:
    09/09/06 at 9:37 pm

    Oh I know there would be nothing wrong with it, but Sun’s lawyers have a reputation.

    I had heard about your troubles before second-hand and it sounded like Sun was being ridiculously heavy-handed, guess it was overblown. Maybe with the next upgrade you will finally dump SPARC..), but stick with Solaris.

  4. Mike Spooner says:
    13/09/06 at 6:30 am

    In the late 90’s, Sun’s legal dept did have a habit of treading on the toes of the other Sun
    departments by being somewhat over-enthusiastic about “hunting down” external fan-sites, independant
    information providers and other “free marketing” sources, often to the horror of the rest of
    Sun Microsystems and their partners.

    The days of such legal extremism appear to be long gone, at least for those of us who put honest
    effort into trying to avoid (inadvertently or otherwise) infringing copyrights or using trademarks
    without permission. These days, Sun seems to be operating a “talk first, then shoot only if need be”
    policy, rather than the other way round.