[rescue] Re: Solaris 9 issues

[Skeezics Boondoggle]

Couple of responses to the latest digest...

Re: Solaris licensing issues

I don't think Sun is terribly worried about the licensing issues on old
hobbyist machines.  Most of the local Sun folks I talked with get a kick
out of the fact that people run Suns at home and care about the old iron
so passionately.  Never in 12+ years of managing Sun have I once had them
express any interest in checking/auditing our licenses - really, they
might tack on a few bucks during the initial purchase of a higher-end
system for the "server license" but honestly, I think Sun's attitude has
always been "someone running even an 'illegal' copy of SunOS on some old
hardware means one less Windows box"...

Not that I'm encouraging folks to blatently violate license terms. :-)

For every day you run your home network or small business on an old Sun 
box, that's one less opportunity for M$ to be sucking dollars out of you, 
and that benefits everyone, not just Sun. :-)


Re: platform support

Solaris 9 platform support should be available on docs.sun.com.  So far my
take on 9 is that it's largely a bundling of some additional stuff, the
consolidation of all patches to-date, the addition of some new features
that may be back-ported via patches (can you run mixed-speed CPUs in the
Ultra-III machines with Solaris 8 yet?).  I expect that a currently-
patched Solaris 8 box has 99% of the functionality of a fresh Solaris 9
install, but I haven't thoroughly examined all the diffs yet.

And still no bundled C compiler.  Sigh.

(Yeah, I know, it's been *years* since that phenomenally stupid decision,
I should get over it. :-)


Re: thoughts on "hobbyists" and an idea

I would love to see Sun (or _any_ other computer company) put a body or
two on creating an official hobbyist program... or even allowed a
volunteer to put something together for them.  Say we put together a small
non-profit to be the holding company for End-of-Lifed assets - docs,
hardware, spare parts, schematics, old toolings, even old source code,
etc.?  It'd be really, really cool if Sun created (or allowed us to
create) an official repository for their obsolete stuff, so that the
hobbyist community could thrive.  I honestly don't think that a few mad
tinkerers is going to impact new machine sales.

When an old bit of hardware falls off the end of the support schedule, or
they want to drop software support for some obscure thing, they can hand
that off to us.  Perhaps this non-profit could even take on support
contracts for old systems - yes, Sun leaves a few bucks on the table, but
probably far less than it takes to maintain all that old inventory.

Think of all the old stuff that's fallen off of Solaris:  VME support and
the old 4/xxx servers, sun4c & sun4d support, ISA/EISA/MicroChannel
support (in x86 land), various old frame buffers and Sbus cards, etc. etc.  
Wouldn't it be cool to be able to revive/preserve that stuff?

Yeah, I know.  I'm an idealist.  But I *really* wish that something like
this existed already - for example, when they finally purged the rest of
any remaining bits of the old CS6400, it sure would be nice if that stuff
went somewhere to be archived, other than the dumpster or the shredder...

-- Chris