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

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Wed, 31 Mar 2010, Phil Stracchino wrote:

>> 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.
>
> 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.

This is largely how Solaris was licensed in releases 8 and earlier.
Hobbyist use of Solaris was technically discouraged, but Sun would look
the other way precisely because hobbyists are great evangelists.

The only major change is that patch access is completely shut off without
a paid license.  I doubt this will bite Oracle worse than Sun's previous
business model of "1) Give everything away, 2) ...., 3) PROFIT!"

-- 
Jonathan Patschke  ) "Oh, judge, your damn laws: the good people don't
Elgin, TX         (   need them, and the bad people don't follow them,
USA                )  so what good are they?"          --Ammon Hennacy