[geeks] Oracle Solaris may not be "free as in beer" going forward

[Phil Stracchino]

On 03/31/10 20:27, Geoff Reed wrote:
> Yes, you can only run standard Solaris 10 for 90 days then you are in violation
> of the license agreement if you keep running it, no longer can one run it on an
> open-ended for non commercial or hobbyist use.
> 
> After that 90 days, you have to buy a support contract, not purchase Solaris 10
> to keep running it, and the support contract for Solaris 10 is 8% of the
> original cost of the Sun hardware you are running it on.  there is currently NO
> provision for a service contract for Solaris on non sun hardware.
> 
> so, if you go and purchase a re-marketed V440 for $600, and want to run Solaris
> 10 on it, you get to pay 8% of the original purchase price of the hardware for
> the Solaris 10 service contract.
> 
> this was direct from the support person that gave the support presentation.  I
> talked to the sales rep who deals directly with the company I work for and he
> validated that what the support guy said is oracle's current setup.

> also, unless you have a service contract, there will be -no- patches made
> available for solaris 10 (or presumedly older versions) in the past, sun had
> made available critical security patches if you had a service contract or not,
> now nothing will be available unless you have a service contract.

In short, if this is really how it's going to be, Oracle has just
effectively killed legal hobbyist use of Solaris.  And that's going to
mean a lot of people who will no longer be recommending Solaris when OS
questions come up, and it's going to reduce the pool of people who
maintain current knowledge of Solaris.  Both of those things will be bad
for Solaris and, therefore, for Oracle.

I wonder how we could go about pointing out to Oracle how unwise a
course this is and persuade them to create an explicit hobbyist license?


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
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