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Oracle/Sun Enforces Pay-For-Security-Updates Plan

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the you-get-what-you-pay-for dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Recently, the Oracle/Sun conglomerate has denied public download access to all service packs for Solaris unless you have a support contract. Now, paying a premium for gold-class service is nothing new in the industry, but withholding critical security updates smacks of extortion. While this pay-for-play model may be de rigueur for enterprise database systems, it is certainly not the norm for OS manufactures. What may be more interesting is how Oracle/Sun is able to sidestep GNU licensing requirements since several of the Solaris cluster packs contain patches to GNU utilities and applications."

2 of 238 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Just like Redhat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    o rly?

    http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/5Server/en/os/SRPMS/

  2. Re:Just another step... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    There's a big difference - it used to be you needed a contract to use their patch update manager (and one contract covered all machines), but not just download individual patches or patch clusters (which, BTW, are integrated into the latest full OS downloads, and in fact at least one Sun person I've seen has recommended just grabbing the latest full OS download and using that to apply updates!). Now, not only do you need a contract, but you need one for each machine and OS version separately, and you can't actually buy the contracts from Oracle anyway. There's NO way to purchase them online (in fact the one link that's been posted multiple times as "I've verified this works" by Sun/Oracle people takes you to the Oracle 404 page), and when you leave your name with the pre-sales people to have sales call you, you don't get called back (since there's no way to actually talk to a sales person directly).

    I suspect that Oracle is doing everything they can to passively kill Solaris without admitting it, that way they can say it wasn't their fault (or plan all along) when the regulators and shareholders come asking questions... If I had my choice, I'd be off Solaris completely, but at least for right now I don't. What's really interesting is what this is going to do to all those proprietary software vendors who require Solaris as the server OS for software used in regulatory compliance-audited environments. Since no patching = non-compliance, the ripple-effect is gonna be HUGE...