Apologies for reviving a 2-week-old thread, but developments continue. For example, our non-contract Solaris-10 systems using "updatemanager" just got a couple new security patches this week....
[email protected] said: > This will be the undoing of Solaris. One reason Sun got into such bad shape > was because they were far, far to late in accepting the reality of the > _competition_ from the FOSS world. CompSCI majors were using either MS > because of it's ubiquity or Linux because of it's technical superiority and > free availability. Hence, Solaris slipped slowly but surely into irrelevance > in all but the financial services sector. I know CompSCI grads from the > local U, for example, that had never even _heard_ of Sun Microsystems, before > I pointed them to Open/Solaris. I was a CompSci major in the 80's, and worked in a CS department from 1989-2004. I'm still working at a research university now. Solaris visibility in the academic side has definitely declined in that time. Up until this change in security-patch availability, Solaris-10 on x86 hardware has been an easy sell to our research customers who have very little money, due to three things: zones, ZFS, and a very good free OS with free security patches. I'm concerned that this may no longer be the case. > Open sourcing Solaris and making Solaris 10 freely available was starting to > change this. But it happened too slowly and meanwhile the economy crashed, > Sun got swallowed by Oracle, and now Solaris as an option for users who > cannot afford expensive maintenance contracts just to get security updates is > history. You think $350 a years is cheap? Ask small businesses hammered by > the economic meltdown about their bail out checks. Ask people living in > places like S. Africa. While we in Education/Non-Profit institutions may not be typical, this change in policy by Oracle/Sun is a pretty big deal for us as well. I've been in contact with our reseller to see what kind of pricing is available, and one thing semi-useful they've said is that things are in transition, and that an announcement about hardware and software pricing is coming sometime in March. In the mean time, I'd like to observe that while the individual subscription retail price is currently $324/year per system, there is an Education subscription program available, details at: http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/edu/promotions/download/solaris_support .html However, the smallest increment is 100 systems, at roughly $115/yr each, for "Standard Service" (there is no "Basic", updates-only option available in this Education pricing program). While they have this available for both Solaris and OpenSolaris, these prices still strike me as too expensive, when compared against the updates-only academic subscription for RedHat Enterprise Linux which is $30/yr for workstation, $60/yr for server. If anyone at Oracle/Sun is listening, the RedHat pricing seems reasonable to me (and to our customers). Here's hoping for good news in March.... Regards, Marion _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
