Solaris 10, the official stable version of Sun's UNIX operating system, is no longer available to users at no cost. Oracle has adjusted the terms of the license, which now requires users to purchase a service contract in order to use the software.
Sun's policy was that anyone could use Solaris 10 for free without official support. Users could get a license entitling them to perpetual commercial use by filling out a simple survey and giving their e-mail address to Sun. Oracle is discontinuing this practice, and is repositioning the free version as a limited-duration trial.
"Your right to use Solaris acquired as a download is limited to a trial of 90 days, unless you acquire a service contract for the downloaded Software," the new license says.
What this means is ... time to brush up on FreeBSD.
From an email thread. G.R. was at an Oracle-Sun welcome event this week ...
After that 90 days, you have to buy a support contract, not purchase Solaris 10 to keep running it, and the support contract for Solaris 10 is 8% of the original cost of the Sun hardware you are running it on. There is currently NO provision for a service contract for Solaris on non sun hardware.
So, if you go and purchase a re-marketed V440 for $600, and want to run Solaris 10 on it, you get to pay 8% of the original purchase price of the hardware for the Solaris 10 service contract.
Unless you have a service contract, there will be -no- patches made available for solaris 10 (or presumedly older versions) in the past, sun had made available critical security patches if you had a service contract or not, now nothing will be available unless you have a service contract.
J.P.
If anyone can completely alienate their customers by putting the screws to them, all while making patently pornographic amounts of cash, it's Oracle. This will be fun to watch.
