[SunHELP] SunHELP Status Update

[microcode at zoho.com]

Looks like mutt ate my email, mortally confused by Andrew's homemade quoting
style. Andrew, please stop doing that! Ok, let's try that again:

I missed Mark's original so I am going on what Andrew quoted:

On Sun, Dec 02, 2012 at 10:24:16AM -0500, Sandwich Maker wrote:

> From: Mark Benson
> Sadly due to Oracle's general ignorance and poor attitude, my Ultra 60
> and SS20 lie dormant

I'll be interested to make a deal with you on your SS20 if I ever get the
money. Don't wait up for me though :-( At this point I can't even cover the
shipping.

> for hobbyist purposes, in favour of DEC and HP Itanium gear that I can
> legally run OpenVMS on for free with a Hobbyist license,  even as an
> emulation on consumer hardware.

Ok, but re-upping every year on OpenVMS...really...is that necessary?  Come
on, HP. Piss or get off the pot.

> personally tend to feel that if Oracle are giving us the middle  finger
> we ought to do the same to their copyright guidelines but I  appreciate 
> a community site can't operate on that basis for legal  reasons. It
> appears HP still get it (albeit under duress from a very active
> community), IBM do too

What? IBM doesn't get it. They've run FLEX-ES out of business. They have
been threatening Hercules with lawsuits for years. It goes on and on. Those
of us in the IBM world would love to be able to run current hobbyist
systems. Some people even have IBM hardware and can't license anything to
run on it. IBM has been making sure new OS releases need new microcode
support, that's how they sell hardware, and plenty of it...there is nothing
available to the hobbyist except for stuff from around 1974 that a few guys
were able to nail down. It was apparently not copyrighted at the time
anyway, not like IBM actually gave away anything they didn't give away back
in the 1970s. It's great vintage stuff, but nobody is going to learn on
that and be able to understand today's environment. It's pure vintage, like
8 bit computing on an old CP/M box. It's more fun than a barrel of monkeys
(if you were there at the time) but it's not even remotely like running a
current production OS like OpenVMS.

I've worked for small ISVs and the cost of getting into the market is
astronomical. IBM doesn't want little guys selling big software.

> so why not Oracle?

Run old Sun-entitlements. That's what I do. If it ain't broke... Solaris 10
Update 8 is a great OS and will fine fine on your U60.

> well, there is openindiana...  though it won't help your ss20.

OpenBSD should certainly run nicely on it. I have an OpenBSD SPARC machine
running under QEMU (I have only UltrSPARC boxes so far, no SPARCS).