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

[Patrick Finnegan]

On Wednesday 31 March 2010, Geoff Reed wrote:
> I went to the Oracle-Sun welcome event in Seattle yesterday, it's
>  worse than it looked like.
> 
> 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.

Well, I thought that Oracle was going to kill off SPARC and Solaris, but 
I didn't think it'd be like this.  It's pretty ingenious really.  Oracle 
can kill off anyone trying to use Solaris and SPARC while still giving 
the appearance of trying to sell it.

FWIW, Oracle has also killed off the educational "Matching Grant" 
program this year, which discounts certain configurations of their 
equipment by 50% for .edu's.  Without that, it's way less likely that 
people here at Purdue will consider buying Sun gear, outside of the 
people that insist on running Solaris on SPARC because "Linux isn't 
ready for the enterprise."

Pat
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