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

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."

Comments

Sidestepping Nothing

[CritterNYC]

They're not sidestepping anything GPL-wise. The OS patches contain some GPL binaries and some proprietary binaries. They are side by side, which means the proprietary binaries are not subject to the GPL. The entire patch package, therefor, can't be redistributed. The GPL bits within the patch can be freely redistributed. As can the source for those bits, which Sun/Oracle is (presumably) making available as they always have to comply with the GPL.

So, they are sidestepping nothing.

Re:That's a nice server you got there

[ircmaxell]

Actually, that brings up a point. Since this is about security flaws in their distribution, wouldn't this make them liable if something happened to your sever? "They gave me faulty software which THEY KNEW WAS FAULTY because they wanted to charge me $xx to get the fix"...? This isn't about feature updates (which they could justify charging for), it's about flaws in what they gave out... Now sure, you could say that the flaws were outside of their control because they came from upstream. But if that was the case, how in the world could they justify charging for those updates as not being extortion?...