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Solaris 9: Sticker Shock
sysadmn writes "With the release of Solaris 9 , Sun has bundled many goodies, including an LDAP directory server and a J2EE application server. At the same time, while a single CPU license is still free, they've begun charging for multiprocessor systems. As a kicker, purchasers of used systems may find that they have to pay Sun an OS licensing fee. (Curiously, the 2 CPU server version seems to be $249, while the 4 CPU desktop is $199. In some cases it's the same motherboard, power supply and memory!). At the upper end, that million dollar machine from Ebay may require a $400,000 fee :-) I like Solaris for many reasons, but I have to wonder: will this pay off? " Solaris is certainly a capable os, but sheeze that seems like an awful lot of money.
Thankfully many other companies have kept a single price for their OS regardless of system size. IBM AIX is still that way, as is SGI's IRIX. In fact, the only real IRIX cost when buying a new machine from SGI is the (oddly) required media fee of about $200. I've been pretty happy with IRIX, it gets a pretty decent update each quarter, as does the SGI freeware archive (http://freeware.sgi.com) -- I wish sunfreeware.com was.
But then again, if a person buys a brand new 512 CPU SGI Origin 3800 with 1 TB of RAM and and 25 TB of disk, SGI outta toss in a free car. Or house. In the swiss alps.