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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."

6 of 392 comments (clear)

  1. They certainly like to send people away. by sethstorm · · Score: 4, Interesting

    For trying to get people to want to use the OS, Sun and Oracle sure like to piss people off.

    Oracle just seems to make it more pronounced.

    --
    Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
  2. May? by symbolset · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Will. Oracle is not in the business of giving stuff away for free.

    Have you heard? They license their database software not by the servers it runs on, nor by the processor, but by the core. How absurd is that? Does it cost them more to produce a database that works on more than 4 cores, or to support it? Believe it or not, they also charge extra for installed memory, as if that had anything to do with their production or support costs. Failover? Now you're into serious money. And don't you dare run it on stuff that's not on the secret list, or your support contract is invalid.

    If Cisco's motto is "that feature is enabled through the purchase of an optional license", Oracle's is more so.

    I guess Oracle doesn't get that we have options, and the pace of hardware technology will quickly erase any software advantage they think they have.

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    1. Re:May? by Builder · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You need to persuade ME that you can support your products. Every chance I get, I replace Oracle products with non-Oracle products because I'm pretty much sick and tired of having to rely on some random guy at Veritas who has happened to see the same RAC problem as I am having when your tech monkeys force me to raise a ticket with my storage vendor because theyr'e too clueless to work out the problem.

      About the only things I'm likely to keep (for now) are coherence and Java, just because there's nothing else out there that competes with it. But for most of my other needs, other products exist. MSSQL, JBoss, etc.

      We don't get the support we pay for, not even on a level 1 outage, so I'll be damned if I ever spend another cent with Oracle that I don't have to.

    2. Re:May? by swilver · · Score: 5, Interesting

      If you treat any of those products the way you bungle your main Oracle product, then I'm sure they'll soon be as despised as your 1970's Database that needs constant supervision and doesn't even know the difference between NULL and a known empty value.

      Eventually I think having the programmers, architects and designers against you is gonna cost you -- I sure as hell will not use your Database product as more than a glorified storage system (and a picky one at that), I will not touch JHeadStart or Oracle Developer with a 10ft pole, and I will actively try and replace anything Oracle with a free solution. It will no doubt please you that Oracle has been above Microsoft on my "evil" list for quite a few years now.

  3. Re:start to die? by paganizer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I picked up a bunch of solaris hardware during the dot-bomb for scrap metal prices; none of it was top-end even then, but gods I love their stuff. I loved their software ca solaris 7, but as linux got better...well, I would still take Solaris 10 over most Linux distro's. And I grabbed the free distro of Solaris 10 as soon as I heard about it.
    IIRC, in storage I have a SPARCstation 5, a ZX, a ELC, 2 or 3 Sun Ultra 5's, a Ultra Enterprise 3000 (which, BTW, rocks) and some other stuff that I have to think must have been one-offs, like a Solaris laptop and a really very pretty workstation that does not seem to exist; it's Dark orange and blue.

    I used to have most up and running, in my little mini-datacenter, but I moved to some place without decent internet and had to move my servers to hosting services (which, by the way, after having everything in my basement from 1994 to 2003, was a convoluted mess from hell to get sorted out).
    I might be helping to start up an ISP soon, which means I get my datacenter back up...yay!

    --
    Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
  4. Re:I feel sorry by Venik · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Clearly, very few people here have any enterprise-level Solaris experience. In terms of stability and performance I compare Linux to Solaris like you compare Windows to Linux. Well, this may be too harsh but this is mostly addresses to the fat dorks on Slashdot screaming "death to Solaris". The biggest file server guys like that had to support is the one sitting under their desk with all the porn on it.

    When I transitioned from Solaris and AIX to supporting RH and SuSE several years ago, I experienced somewhat of a shock: servers hanging on shutdown, lousy NFS performance, Samba slowing down to a crawl under moderately heavy load and a crapload of other issues I never thought a unixoid OS can suffer from. All these problems coupled with consumer-grade hardware and what you get is one big, never-ending downtime. Something is always down or barely limping along.

    There were times when all our servers were running Solaris, AIX or HP-UX. I could come to work, drink my coffee, read the news, space out for a couple hours, then break for lunch, work a couple hours on some project and go home. As more and more real servers are being replaced by cheap HPs and Dells running the blasted RHEL or, worse yet, SLES, all this free time I used to have is a distant memory.