Slashdot Mirror
Solaris No Longer Free As In Beer
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."
To quote Johnny Ringo form Tombstone "Well... Bye."
Seriously, if Oracle thinks they've got a money maker with Solaris, they are in for some sore disappointment. We use Solaris quite a bit at work, since we have a long UNIX legacy and still run SPARC systems. The thing is a bitch. All kinds of reasons not to like it. We only use it on our SPARC systems, and then only because that is pretty much what you have to use. Our x86 stuff is all Windows or Linux.
So I don't see what they think they are going to gain here. If they think they'll start making big in roads to the x86 market, good luck. They had enough trouble when it was free, charging isn't going to do them any favors. If they are charging on SPARC hardware, well that seems kinda dumb. SPARC is expensive as hell and generally only purchased these days by companies that either need high end systems (mainframes and the like) or by those with legacy SPARC apps they don't want to port.
I just can't see how they figure this will work. If they want to push their hardware, the software needs to be free since the hardware is already expensive and they are fighting an uphill battle against x86, which I might note is gaining more high end capabilities each generation. If they want to instead because a software firm, fine, but first Solaris has got to get a whole hell of a lot better. It can't compete with Windows as it doesn't have the app base, nor good desktop support so it has to compete with Linux. Well if you are going up against a free OS, you've got to find something (probably more than one thing) you do better than they do. With Solaris, I don't see it at least on normal x86 servers.