[geeks] Older versions of Solaris?

Sevan / Venture37 venture37 at hotmail.com
Mon Oct 27 13:23:41 CDT 2008


> Just to make a point, Solaris 2 was not free (as in beer). The cost of a
> copy was around $500 (from what I remember) for 2.1, up to 2.6. Solaris
> 7 also cost similar money. At some point Sun decided they needed to
> compete with Linux and offered Solaris 7 for free if you paid for
> shipping.
>
> This was not all versions, only the original Sun version. The version that
> Tadpole sold for their laptops (e.g. 3GX) was never reduced in price.
>
> You could get a copy of Solaris 7 for Intel or SPARC, or a combo pack.
>
> This was just the media, it did not include the licenses. You
> could get a restricted amount of licenses for free from the website,
> although Sun did not include an mechanism to check if you were licensed
> and to track them.
>
> Basicly if you used the computer for production work you still had to
> buy a license. Commercial (or amateur) software development was covered
> by the free license.
>
> To put it into perspective, at that time most people still had 56k modems.

ROFL
The original personal usage/hobbyist license for Solaris 7 was for any system
with 4 cpus (sparc or x86) or less which made me chuckle at the time cause a
dual cpu PC alone was something I could never afford with my pocket money let
alone something faster then my PPRO-166.


Sevan / Venture37
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