Slashdot Mirror
Oracle Restricts Access To Sun Firmware Downloads
boer lee writes with the news that you can expect trouble in downloading firmware updates for your Sun server if you purchased it before March 16, 2010. "In a somewhat surprising move (and without any notification to customers), Oracle shut down public access to firmware downloads. I learned this the hard way when I contacted Oracle customer service almost two weeks ago. Yes, it took 13 days for me to get access to the firmware download for systems under the standard warranty (i.e. less than a year old)."
Oracle being draconian? Whodathunkit.
Whoa there dude! Check your keyboard, somebody might have slipped you a Dvorak.
Purchased Before March 16, 2010? Doesn't that exclude, like, almost all purchases of Sun hardware?
I really don't like that this happened, but it is not something completely unexpected.
I did think that Oracle said something about continuing support for Sun stuff. I could be incorrect in that, but I was under the assumption they would continue support.
The world is how you make it
This seems rather odd as the firmware is just a binary blob anyway, right? I'm not sure what they achieve by doing this other than alienating their customers. However, does the firmware just happen to fall under an umbrella of things that non-customers should not have access to? That would better explain their position. Or they could just be trying to squeeze an extra dime out of people...
Recently I noticed the oracle sign added to my openoffice.
It got infected by teh evil, but how?
Linky linky
http://wikis.sun.com/display/SunSolve/How+Entitlement+Works
C-x C-s C-x k
You need a maintenance contract to download software patches now, including security patches. Not that they were good with security patches before, they were months behind the Linux distros on releasing them.
What's the easiest way to find out who/what is using an a network port? Disable/unplug the port and wait for someone to call in and complain. This might be the same mentality at work, just a little larger scale.
The less you talk, the more people hear you say.
Sun's service has been sliding for some time now. Oracle appears to be accelerating that decline. We had some RAIDs, originally purchased from StorageTek before the Sun acquisition, come off of the three year warranty they were purchased with. We've been unable to get Sun (now Oracle) to recognize the RAID's serial numbers to get them on the maintenance contract for quite some time now. You'd think Oracle would want our money?
Speaking as a Solaris admin of nine years, this is the best news Dell and Red Hat could ever get.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
All the big customers are switching to IBM and RHEL. So sad.
"support contracts". making people pay for critical security patches. It's like a virus writer holding your machine for ransom until you pay up, and then your machine is "secure" again. This is nothing more than legalized extortion.
Fuck Oracle, and Fuck Sun.
...is an oxymoron. Oracle is going to loose Sun a lot of customers. My employer is already making contingency plans for moving off Sun systems, and we buy a lot of Sun systems.
I mean, come on. This is firmware which ONLY WORKS on your Sun/Oracle hardware. If you own the hardware, you should be able to get the latest system firmware. This might be the final straw in terms of me recommending Sun/Oracle hardware anymore. Personally, I loved them. My work loved them as well. But this is getting ridiculous. Ok, I can understand closing off downloads of different patches to the OS. You want updates, get a service contract because the OS was free. But to cut off firmware updates to their hardware? No one does this. You can freely download the firmware from the manufacturer of everything out there for free, because, to use that firmware, you needed to OWN the hardware which means, the company received their money for it... We have thousands of Sun desktops and servers (no exaggeration, literally, thousands) at work. I have been a very happy Sun Unix Administrator for the last 12 years, but I have to say anymore, I can't recommend we keep buying these things (especially as the majority of the codebase has been slowly ported from SPARC to x86 over the last 5 years). I have still been recommending Sun x86 hardware for their ALOM/ILOM interface and very well engineered gear which tends to last for many years longer than a Dell or HP... But the nickle/dimming to death is starting to make it so that it is not worth it to purchase a Sun box with the extra premium when I similar spec'ed Dell for 30% less, and take that extra 30% savings knowing that about 20% of it will be used in needing to replace the box a few years sooner due to hardware failure.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
This act by Oracle is simply outrageous.
You see if I ever recommend anyone buying a Sun/Oracle server ever again.
Not going to happen. I will now recommend all owners of Sun/Oracle servers phase them out as quickly as possible, since Oracle has proven so unreliable.
And I actually used to prefer Sun's hardware, and recommended them highly...
If you're jacking off to pictures of 1920s film stars, is it still sex?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I am downloading the firmware for my Sparc T5520 server right now. This sounds like a personal problem.
That's what you get for buying from a company that bet on open source hippie crap lol.
That's the weakest and most transparent trolling post I've ever seen. You're giving the rest of us a bad name. On the ground and give me twenty!
Erm, i'd say its totally *unsurprising* given what we've seen of how oracle is handling sun nowadays - you tried to get a patch cluster (or even patch info!) lately?
i'm not even going to mention killing off opensolaris or charging for odf plugins.
#include <sig.h>
I've just confirmed this with my Sun account (that doesn't have our contract attached.) At my day job we've purchased over mid-six figures worth of Sun hardware (retail over $1M) in the last two years; this and other Oracle-ization has nearly guaranteed that it's the last that we'll ever buy.
...and it's gone!
Seriously... that is retarded. Horrible way to treat customers, even if they are only past customers. The new slogan sucks too. Sorta like: "We want to be like IBM, we are not sure how yet, but we are going to try this out."
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
At Delphi, the Oracle Larry Ellison speaks:
Larry: "Hmmm... everybody thinks we bought Sun in a clever ploy to offer integrated solutions. That would allow us to out maneuver IBM and their crappy DB2. I know how to show them how wrong they were... I'll shoot Sun hardware in the foot! Along with strangling MySQL and putting a fatal bullet in OpenSolaris, I'll make sure anything valuable from Sun is gone forever. Then let them try to figure out why I bought it."
Tech Analysts: "Curses, he is too clever for us!"
Just another sign that Sun h/w is dead. Almost open support was a hallmark of Sun. They put all of their solutions and problems on line. Nothing hidden and very easy to get access to despite the need for a contract number.
That said, almost any of the open source o/s support forums and sites provide better information for each distribution.
Sun h/w is obsolete, low performance, and risky from an Enterprise point of view. Solaris X86 possibly had some legs but you can fuhgetaboutit as well.
Sigh. It was a good run but there is nothing more unsightly than misplaced technology nostalgia. (says the guy with a 1000 in his garage).
If they are dead, is it necrophilia?
he who controls the spice controls the universe
I hear that! Sun and Solaris have provided me a very good living for some 20+ years now, briefly as an employee several times and just about every contract and position thereafter, but Oracle is just poisoning the well. They fumbled the MySQL relationship, lost the inventor of Java itself, and countless other valued employees. All in the name of making a quick buck off of Sun's corpse. Long live Open Solaris, but I'm supporting Linux and VMWare data centers from now on. So long Solaris, and thanks for all the fish!
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
Good job Oracle! You will only hurt the ones that buy your hardware :) I know, I know, I know maintaining that 20-30% annual support contract is part of the business model, but FIRMWARE updates? Please.....
In other news, Gigabyte and ASUS will start charging for BIOS updates. You just thought your were going to purchase that new 6-core AMD PhenomII and use it with your motherboard. Not so fast... get a premium support contract first! Of course I am just kidding, I hope. Better go download the new BIOS just in case it disappears.
airplanes, yachts or mansions.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Its not a glitch, I received this email from sun after submitting a ticket that i was unable to download the firmware for my workstation on 04/09/2010:
Hello,
As of April 5th customers now need either hardware warranty or a 'system' level contract to download firmware, drivers, etc from either SunSolve or the Download Center.
Sincerely,
Sun Web Team
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
-
When trying to download the current bios and driver iso for my Sun Ultra 24 it says i am not authorized. Please advise.
Sun seems to be going to earn a marksmanship medal in footshooting.
Sun could have had a sizable market lock-in with their VM partitioning and LDOMs. However, because businesses got nervous, the title for VM server of choice in the enterprise has been handed to EMC/VMWare.
Another example is ZFS. Sun should have done like Veritas and licensed ZFS, creating a de facto standard for filesystems. Doing so would have given them top marketshare in a critical sector, and would be a field leader, just like they did with NFS and NIS. They should have let Apple license it under their own terms. This way, Sun's technology would be on a large amount of desktops. However, because it wasn't licensed, it is a very cool product, but it won't attain widespread use. I'm sure by having the core technology widespread, Sun could have made a lot of money by licensing add-ons and enhancements to it.
My question: Where is Oracle going, future-wise? They are alienating their customer base, and they don't seem to be having anything new and improved as an incentive for people to stay with them. Because of this, Sun's competitors are having a field day. In the high end iron department, IBM can offer AIX, pSeries equipment and a VERY well done virtual machine system (VIO, LPARS). In the low end server department, SPARC hardware is pointless, and there is a lot more support for Windows Server 2008 R2 or RHEL than Solaris x86. In the midrange server department, Solaris has the best change of staying around because of the abilities of ZFS, but this is becoming a narrower and narrower market segment. For workstations, there isn't any reason to have a Sun unless one requires the SPARC architecture (which is starting to fall behind x64 in terms of performance). A Mac Pro is as cost efficient as they come, and Dell or HP workstations come with a lot of horsepower.
Sun better start licensing their technologies, start working on more cool stuff, and actually support their installed base if they don't want to end up with the same fate as SGI, becoming a niche market at best.
(especially as the majority of the codebase has been slowly ported from SPARC to x86 over the last 5 years).
This makes no sense; The codebase is >99% shared between the architectures. There's very little architecture specific code that doesn't interface directly with the hardware.
True, SUNW^H^H^HORCL has been shifting some of it's resources towards x64 based systems, there's still plenty of SPARC boxes available, new SPARC chipsets in the pipeline.
Solaris itself is pretty much hardware agnostic.
I have to say, at a completely anecdotal level, this shit is absolutely driving a significant migration off of Sun/Solaris and onto Linux with HP/Dell x86 hardware. We're looking at consolidating several hundred SPARC/Solaris boxes onto a significantly smaller number of modern multicore commodity boxes.
I'd been nagging to start on this for the last 3-3.5 years, but it's finally getting traction. Ironically, OpenSolaris would likely have been a better option, but nobody here's got faith in that platform. Just when ZFS was gettin' real good too! :/
Thanks, Larry!!
This weekend I was trying to download Solaris 10. The old license survey that you got in between selecting a platform
and the actual download was busted and redirected to www.oracle.com
I filled out their online trouble ticket and got an email pointing me to the instruction page. I then sent them
a screen shot showing that I was logged in and a zip file of the HTTP traffic between me and Oracle. I didn't get
a follow up email but the Solaris download is mysteriously working again.
I spent the weekend trying to grab a copy of ALOM 1.6 firmware. The Oracle dev site says the 1.6 version is public
and that only prior versions are restricted, but all attempts have resulted in failure. I even went so far as to use
a search engine to try and find an unsecured copy -- no dice. I did find an earlier version of the OBP firmware that
will allow me to install OpenSolaris 2010.03, er, 2010.04, er, 2010.H1
Oracle is about predictable constant revenue generation. When you realize that it makes all sense. You want to own some Oracle gear, you must have a support contract. They don't see why you shouldn't have a support contract thus removing public downloads of firmware makes total sense to them. It's not about the end user, it's about $$$.
none
Most, almost all, other computer manufacturers do not do this. Sun itself did not do this until it was borged by Larry. In the sense of Oracle's approach and business model of shaking everyone down for every penny in their pocket, it makes sense. Except for the very top end giant servers that would be running Oracle software even if Oracle had not bought Sun, this is going to decimate the Sun market that is, for the most part, not accustomed to this much aggressive gouging. IBM now has an opportunity to push PPC based machines as the alternative to x86 architectures. I can only hope they do that.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Oracle are a bunch of morons with bad customer service.
we had a problem where local and remote connections to a fully patched 10G Database were timing out. it took down a major operation and the backup DB was having the same problem. Oracle blamed AIX, AIX blamed Oracle. we got them on a call together and instantly, the AIX support guy sounded way more knowledgeable about what was happening. we asked Oracle if there was a person that knew AIX better on their staff... he said there was but he was off that day. The director of infrastructure said "I have the number of 'so and so' SVP at Oracle, would it help if I contacted him to get the resources we needed on this call" and the Oracle support guy got offended and became very rude.
In the end, the AIX support folks figured out that every time Oracle was authenticating a connection to the database, it required a DNS lookup to get the network hostname of the AIX frame, even for local connections. We had a Domain controller down that day and that caused the connections to time out, even though we had two controllers defined for DNS. the only way around this problem was to use the Hosts file, but that becomes a pain because every entry will need to be validated every so often because if one entry is not correct in the hosts file (does not even have to be the DNS resource) the connection times out. We looked at some of the 11G environments we have and were able to replicate the problem there as well so Oracle has not fixed this issue in their latest release either.
nice that it is so reliable and all.
We have seen this issue with them also. Somehow serial numbers are not recorded properly in the Oracle support database causing us endless headaches with support. This is not just limited to storage sold by Sun, but servers as well.
Agreed. One long-term downside of focusing only in the high-end hardware is that you make it easy for people in the low-end/mid-range areas to look for alternatives like IBM, HP, Dell, etc. When these companies grow enough to require high-end servers, they will biased towards what they've been running for years. And then Oracle will have a hard time getting into those markets. And even today Oracle's high-end servers aren't the most obvious choice, so they have to fight with IBM mostly.. and that company sure does have a hell of cash to go aggressively after Oracle customers. Oracle just shows how short-sighted and greedy it is.
none
firmware from the manufacturer of everything out there for free, because,
So you have never used Cisco gear then ?
See ya later, Laaarry.
not
Maybe ... hopefully ... Oracle will spin-off or sell-off the low end Sparc hardware business. That would give them some cash for a business sector that apparently are not interested in. Then they could focus on competing for the high end database server market. IBM is diverse enough and experienced enough to carry out a wide range of business and still compete against Oracle for high-end database machines (they've been doing this for decades, with hardware ... mainframes). Oracle isn't experienced in that front. Sun certainly brings some in, but more work still needs to be done (including paying attention to what they bought).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I've currently had a support request open with them for about 3 weeks now, just to get the firmware I was entitled. Their last response to me was to "build it yourself." They then linked me to http://www.sun.com/opensourcecode/ ...
Oracle's acquisition of Sun is honestly going to be the worst thing that ever happened to them, as they are going to lose all of the previous customers who were buying both Sun and Oracle products due to the way they are handling hardware support.
Need i say more?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The real reason for a support contract is so when your mission critical server shits the bed, the internet isn't providing an answer, and management is breathing down your neck, you have someone to help figure out WTF happened and get it back online.
Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation!
Perhaps this will be enough to push Linux to the desktop... err... server... uhm, workstation?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
To the extent that Solaris certs are still mildly valuable and EOL hardware is available for a pittance on eBay, wouldn't it make sense
for Oracle to at least offer some form of "hobbyist" license? IIRC, Digital did that for Tru-64, selling a license for the OS and compiler for $99.
I know I'd pay $99 for an extremely limited support contract that entitled me to drivers/firmware/software for EOL hardware and nothing else.
[tongue in cheek]Cisco firmware is free. You're free to download any Cisco firmware you like, even for devices you don't have... you just have to have a support login...[/tongue in cheek]
We are a big Sun hardware shop and with the latest bs that Oracle does we will never buy Sun hardware again. They cut the educational discount, I had the same issue with firmware downloads and their support is subpar.
Oracle want your money, when it's profitable.
Sort of. With nothing more then a support login, I'm locked out of the router images I've tried to download. I've been able to download switch images for all the switches I work with as well as the one access point I've need updates for. I dislike not being able to get the images for routers without buying a smartnet contract, but I'll take switches and APs over nothing.
Yeah, I went to get firmware updates for some older Sun hardware I wanted to fix up and ran in to this too. Got the same "support contract is required for firmware updates" crap.
My 11 sun machines are headed to the dumpster, as a direct result of this policy. It's incredibly stupid. It's not like Sun was winning any new customers these days anyway, and now they'll bleed out the few they had. Obviously their intention is to kill off their hardware business, because no one in their right mind would decide to implement a policy like this.
Their model is vertical market with machiavellian control over customers. That model broke in the 1990's. Ridiculous to keep hanging on to it like a moldy wet blanket.
For what it's worth, I'm also a UNIX/Linux sysadmin, and the HP iLO has been steadily improving to the point that it's much better than Sun's iLOM now. Also, the HP servers are now supporting cool features like RAID 6 on internal disks, cheap SAS expansion shelves that give me lots of inexpensive but fast locally attached disk.
We still have some of the X4600s. They were great boxes 2 years ago, but HP is making better servers now.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Just as a note, nortel systems have been pulling this shit for years. You practically need a service contract to access anything more than sales brochures. It's a farcical waste of time and money. A lot of people in the phone industry either avoid nortel, charge thier clients through the roof (if they think they'll get away with it, or install pirated firmware updates etc.
It's a sad day when most know so little about architectures that PPC and Sparc are re-flagged as mere 'alternatives' rather than being recognized for the areas they excel in. The Wintel ideal is a ratio of worse that 2:1 of hardware to services. Each box burning tens if not hundreds of watts. Sparc is an open architecture and handles many threads per core, so for most things you should be able to replace a rack of Wintel boxes with a single Sparc. We'll see how long Oracle allows you to access that Sun paper.
Fujitsu also provides info sparc architecture because it also sells server hardware.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Sun's service has been sliding for some time now. Oracle appears to be accelerating that decline. We had some RAIDs, originally purchased from StorageTek before the Sun acquisition, come off of the three year warranty they were purchased with. We've been unable to get Sun (now Oracle) to recognize the RAID's serial numbers to get them on the maintenance contract for quite some time now. You'd think Oracle would want our money?
Not for kit that old. They'd prolly rather sell you a new array, which their people can actually support. If they even have spare parts for it they probably can't locate them. How many years ago did Sun acquire StorageTek? 5? How old is that pre-acquisition array of yours? At least 5+ years old. Given its age and limited capacity/performance, may I ask why you're still using it? And given the plethora of quality cheap storage arrays on the market, such as Nexsan http://www.nexsan.com/ why would you not just replace that StorageTek array with such a unit instead of continuing your masochist ways with "lock in" vendors such as Sun and Oracle?
IBM is pushing PPC/AIX quite aggressively over here; and I'm porting our in-house code to AIX as fast as I can.
Thank $DEITY I've beed coding rather defensively for a while, so most of my C compiles just fine on AIX. Perl/Python is a cinch, but I will admit some of the Shell scripts (most of them written years before I started here) are giving me some headaches. Too many Sun-isms in those...
If it carries on like this we'll be on AIX as our majority platform before year-end (Power7/LPARS/AIX makes a convincing argument) with Solaris being relegated to only those systems where we really have no choice.
Part Time Philosopher, Oft Times Romantic, Full Time Unix Geek
Endianes plays a very large role when you are dealing with high performance computational models where parts are hand written at the chip level and not in a high-order language to be compiled by a compiler. There are a lot of places where compilers still do not do nearly as well as a skilled programmer will at the instruction level. And this is as a result, very much CPU architecture dependent. Even more so since different CPU's will perform certain instructions faster than others and even then may be better optimized by running a group of 14 instructions to perform a certain task then it would be to run a group of 10 which does the same operation, but needs to utilize a part of a shared chip component which may be in use by another application (think hyper threading and floating point arithmetic unit).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
That's only because Cisco don't bother to tie your support login up with the products you have a support contract for. Instead, they use the EULA to do that. It says that unless you have an up to date service contract for the appropriate hardware, you're not allowed to download firmware.
I don't know the details of the contract you sign when buying Sun-hardware, but if it says you have free access to BIOS-updates or similar for one year or during the warranty period, wouldn't this be considered a contract violation? Can't they be sued for this? I think it wouldn't go very well for Oracle in westen Europe, as many countries here have pretty strong consumer protections (whether the consumer is a company or a private person shouldn't matter in this case.)
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
Snoracle could learn something from Cisco about how to be self-destructive.
Sad thing is that to a bean counter, that wouldn't make sense. To them, because profit is their main/only motive, they want obsolete hardware trashed so they can sell new stuff.
Welcome to the new Sun, which is doing their best to race to the bottom when it comes to customer support, destroying their developer base, and even driving off their fans.
Larry Ellison is the biggest jerk in the tech sector! By contrast, he makes the rest of that sociopathic coven appear almost human.
I met an employee of a storage company whose name I could swear started with "storage" when I was in vacation in Panama. She told me that Sun had fired almost everyone who knew anything after the acquisition because they were the best-paid, and that Oracle had canned everyone who was left; she wasn't even a tech lead, but she had been there longer than almost any other technical employee, so she had become the go-to girl. Assuming we're talking about the same company (are there any other candidates?) there is no one in support at StorageTek who truly understands the product any more and only one person who really knows how to fix problems with old kit like yours. Naturally they are not interested in supporting it.
Next time, buy from someone less likely to be bought out...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's only because Cisco don't bother to tie your support login up with the products you have a support contract for.
That's totally false. I know because I've been both a Cisco customer and employee, and as an employee, I had access to way more firmware images. Presumably, customers are also allowed to download those images, but I sure wasn't. It may be true that some customer accounts have access to all firmware images though.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
But to cut off firmware updates to their hardware? No one does this.
Cisco does. I bet there's lots of other examples but this is the most frustrating one.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I believe Solaris 10 is still free for non-commercial use. The new licensing terms only apply to commercial / production outfits. The download is still there (unless that changed in the past couple of weeks)... Larry isn't going to come busting your door down to make sure you're abiding by the terms.
My experience with Dell over the past several years has been positive. As good or better than any vendor I've dealt with over the past 15 years.
The May 5th 2010 Sun firmware & driver megapack! Please seed after downloading!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
They don't do a very good job then. I've got a Smartnet login and a support contract for a single, specific model of router yet I can download firmware for virtually everything I can think of, including equipment which I've never owned, much less got a support contract for.
Any chance the reason for the change in policy on the firmware upgrade accessibility has anything at all, what-so-ever, to do with problems with the firmware and/or code?
I'm a long time user of Sun Microsystems and the products they made. I first had contact with Sun's products at university in 1990, but never really had the chance to work with them until 2004. Then I got a Sun machine, a blade 100, at home, and I was able to download Solaris 10 and install and use it. I could see how it worked, learned about it, and began telling my employer, and IBM stronghold, how great it was and what I could do with Sun and Solaris. I got ridiculed, jokes made at me, but I perservered. I was able to convince them to take two Sun V440 servers to replace their failing web server. The success was huge, stability and availability of the web service under Solaris and my administration really got noticed. Despite the success, I still had to suffer massive amounts of jokes about Sun, Solaris, and their products, and anything that spoke out against the holy IBM was of the devil, especially me and the servers I administered. Still, I perservered, and I showed them what was possible. Through my dedication, my withstanding the jokes and straight out attacks against me and Sun/Solaris, and the ability and experience from trying things out on my expanding personal Sun server infrastructure at home, I convinced them to buy in total 28 Sun servers. The success with those was huge too, they worked and were reliable. At home I had a growing collection of Sun hardware, small used machines (V100's, V210's, Blade 2500's, S1 storage array) with Solais 10, and I was very happy with them. I was able to get the OS, and the critical patches to keep my personal systems happy, it worked as I wanted it. Now Oracle bought Sun, and promptly changed all the access rules. Suddenly I need a support contract to run my Sun's and Solaris at home. Suddenly I need a support contract to get firmware updates. Suddenly I need a support contract to get access to information, and all the things I previously had free access to, the things which let me show my employer what great products Sun has and what they could do for them. My employer bought 28 Sun Microsystems servers because of me. Sun was very grateful for what I did, and they showed it. They helped me get a cluster course when my employer didn't want to give me one, they gave small presents like Sun coffee cups, simple "thank you"'s from our Sun rep. and support with information that helped me a lot. I felt good with Sun, I was happy with them, really happy! How does Oracle thank me? By shutting me out of everything, no information, no updates, no access to anything. If I want something then I have to cough up lots of money. They have completely left me out in the cold with my hardware investments at home. In short, Oracle doesn't care about me, unless I have a fat bank account that is. Oracle has betrayed me badly. They've betrayed loyal Sun customers. They've betrayed the people who supported Sun through thick and thin. They're insulting us every step of the way. I'm sure more will come too. Oracles handling of us is a good way to make sure my employer won't buy anything more from them in the future, and migrate away from Solaris to other solutions. They have already made the right moves to make me and others I know recommend against Sun and Oracle solutions, and every change they make reinforces this decision. Oracle wont wake up to the damage they're doing until it's too late, far too late...
If they make you buy support contracts now or have a current warrenty (re: new Sun hardware) to get firmware updates - this will kill people selling used Sun hardware. I bought a used Sun UltraSpark 10 off E-Bay - now I can't get updated firmware for it unless I know give Oracle $$$ for a support contract - something I DON'T need. This is going to hurt those buying/selling used Sun hardware...
The Truth is a Virus!!!
I don't know about anyone else, but I really don't see how this ends well for Oracle.
This will be sure to enamour those admins that sweat over Sun boxes for decades, and probably have a legacy system at home. This is a fine example of how Oracle is clueless about the environment surrounding a product line.
Sun will drift -further- into oblivion based on this. The very people that maintain the value proposition of Sun Platform will be on to White-Box-Lintel or Other HW vendors platforms.
Does Oracle expect us to maintain service contracts on dev and home systems? Hrumph... Bye Bye Sun. Good Luck Larry.
Maybe Larry wants to push all the Solaris Admins away, so they can not be bothered by them?
Signed - Alienated
The units work fine, and will be decommissioned early next calendar year. No need to replace them.
To be fair, Cisco doesn't "cut off" access. You never had access in the first place without a service contract. And that contract includes access to everything -- not just updates and patches but completely new versions and completely different feature sets. Sure Cisco could lock that down a lot more than they ever have, but I don't think there's a need or any finacial motivation.
While I was tempted to troll I thought I'd be serious: What's the big deal? You're not running your production system on hardware without a support contact anyway are you? If anything this gives you some value for money!
I've said it elsewhere in the thread but hey: you have boxes that are running production jobs. Surely you have them under support? Whats the big deal?