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

[Geoff Reed]

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.

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.

the support guy said "well, there's opensolaris".  My response was "but
opensolaris does not run exactly like regular solaris."  plus how long until
they kill it off?

when I asked after the whole presentation was over about solaris 9 or 8
licensing, I was told that there were no current plans to change it at the
moment, but... (shrug)

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.

this latest poo is making us look at x86 hardware and other non windows
operating systems as this has the potential to make the TCO on Sun-Sparc/solaris
servers go through the roof as previously Sun made custom support contracts for
solaris and hardware, and under the new system, there are noly 2 options,
solaris only for 8% of the original purchase price (although retail price was
bounced around also) and hardware service contract, including solaris for 12%.