[rescue] Oracle making just a little harder to keep old machines in use

[William Enestvedt]

It may be worthwhile to share your feelings with Sun^H^HOracle directly:
last week we had two Oracle staff in here for a heart-to-heart, and they
were both genuinely surprised to hear about backlash online over the
Solaris 10 entitlement thing, OpenSolaris, etc., etc. They didn't seem
to have known/thought about the issue of OpenSolaris being smothered
leading to doubts about what we would see in the next release of
Solaris.

   I warned them that no one uses odd-numbered Solaris releases as much
as we do even-numbered ones, kind of like the Star Trek movies. To
amplify: if all the good bits are taken from OpenSolaris and rolled into
Solaris Next (a.k.a. Sol11) but OpenSolaris is killed, then what's left
for Solaris 12? *shrug*

   They didn't seem too terribly surprised when they showed a slide with
"Supply chain optimization" as a big benefit of the merger, and I began,
"Now, I'm as excited about supply chain optimization as the next guy --
which is to say, 'not at all' -- but where does the customer get any
benefit?" When every system purchase becomes BTO, how does that save
time for the buyer, the VAR, or the seller?

   After the meeting I felt like I'd had a chance to vent, but I didn't
get a strong sense that Oracle As An Entity was going to care much what
we think. The big money is in licensing and support contracts, and those
get signed by people higher up the food chain than sysadmins. Once
you're hooked on Oracle, it's hard to transition away. So they don't
much need to care about people like Us. *deep, defeated sigh*

- Will
--
Will Enestvedt