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

Re:As a industry best practice...

[FreeUser]

That is an old tale, but not told the way you wrote it. A (somewhat) corrected version:

A scorpion was travelling across the land when he came to a river. Wanting to get across, he approached a frog to help him get across.

The frog replied "Why should I help you across because you will sting me and we will both drown."

The scorpion said "I promise not to sting you."

They are half-way across the river then the scorpion is startled by a splash of water and stings the frog. The frog cries out as his body begins to paralyze "Why have you done this? You have doomed us both!"

The scorpion replies "What did you expect Frog? This is the middle-east."

One might substitute "This is business" for "This is the middle-east" and be closer to the mark, but in reality, it's more a pissing match between internal teams in Oracle/Sun, with the entrenched Oracle interests putting their newly acquired Sun lackeys in their place. It's a shame, because while I think the open development model of GNU and Linux give it a leg up over Solaris, with the advent of Open Solaris it really looked like we'd have a healthy eco-system with room for both. Thanks Oracle...for nothing.