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)."

Comments

Purchased Before March 16, 2010?

[WrongSizeGlass]

Purchased Before March 16, 2010? Doesn't that exclude, like, almost all purchases of Sun hardware?

Re:Seems a bit silly at first glance...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

More than that. Plenty of binary blobs are considered to be serious business(see just about any proprietary software).

Firmware, though, has more or less the ultimate in dongle-based copy protection... It's of essentially no use at all without the hardware, which is what you paid for anyway(the only exception would be those situations where the difference between the high end model and the midrange/low-end model is a couple of firmware locks. In such cases, the "high end" firmware is probably of considerable interest to owners of the "low-end" model who know which way to point a hex editor...).

Re:Oh, good Lord.

[FlyingBishop]

No, Oracle is just trying to put it behind a paywall so you don't know what you're getting into until it's too late and you already own the hardware.

Re:Looking more and more like I will stop using Su

[Skapare]

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.