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Solaris No Longer Free As In Beer

Posted by timothy on from the leisure-suit-larry-ellison dept.

rubycodez writes "Oracle, having acquired Sun Microsystems, including its Unix, will no longer give away free Solaris licenses. Oracle also states that some features of its Oracle Solaris will not appear in OpenSolaris, which means OpenSolaris may start to die."

2 of 392 comments (clear)

  1. Re:That's fine by SQLGuru · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    *THIS* is the year of Linux on the desktop. Wait, no, this one....errr, this one?

    Ah, screw it, Linux on the desktop is still years away. And it will be until all of the fractured versions converge into only one or two. A combined Gnome and KDE exists. And it's as simple (dumb?) as Windows. Until then, it will pretty much be a geek's toy.

    I'm a savvy computer user and I can't tell you which is the "best" combination of Linux. Maybe someone should put together a decision matrix that says "If you want XXX, then you need KDE. If you want YYY, then you need RedHat. If you want ZZZ, then you need...." Present a bunch of sliders about how important all of the major features are and it tallies them up to recommend a Linux environment that will work best for them.....and maybe even link to a specific build that meets the needs.

  2. Re:That's fine by SQLGuru · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    If you can follow threads, my response was in a chain that was talking about FreeBSD and a response that they thought it was dead. Sure, offtopic of the article, but not the current line of commenting.

    And as for my point, it's that I wish that all the Linux distros in all of their many flavors would come to a point where they merge into one so that I can actually switch to Linux. There are so many distros and so many desktop environments and so many package managers and and and..... Sure, choice is nice and all, but I've yet to see a really good post that tells me (in one place) why I would choose one distro over another or why I should pick Gnome or KDE or whatever. I'm not afraid of Unix/Linux -- I've used several versions. But if a user picks the wrong version of Linux, they'll have a horrible experience with it and probably never come back. Until every (most?) users who tries it has an experience that matches their needs, Linux will always be a small component of the desktop world. And if that never happens, I (and most users) could care less if OpenSolaris or FreeBSD or whatever other flavor has their license jerked around by the likes of Oracle or whoever runs the flavor you perfer.