On Fri, 2010-03-26 at 12:28 +0100, Svein Skogen wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > On 26.03.2010 12:14, Richard L. Hamilton wrote: > >> There is more information here: > >> > >> http://www.cio.com/article/588163/Oracle_Enacts_all_Or > >> _Nothing_Hardware_Support_Policy?taxonomyId=3234 > > > > Presuming it to be accurate, there are a couple of considerations > > that approach misses: > > > > * some of today's home/educational/small business have influence > > over tomorrow's enterprise IT budgets. Indeed, some people are > > concurrently in both roles, and those are probably among the more > > knowledgeable. > > > > * while there's no profit in committing oneself to support unpaying users, > > they're still good for one (other) thing (assuming they have a way to > > provide it): > > feedback/bug reports. Every time some nobody finds and reports a bug > > before a paying customer does, you don't look like an idiot in front of the > > folks that pay the bills. > > There's also the point that some of those "home setups" could very well > be considered display-cases for larger, commercial, setups. Having > people display (Open)Solaris as a rock solid, high performance, solution > to the problem, could very well be considered some relatively cheap > marketing. > > Consider the following two alternatives: > > - -Force all users of Solaris to be commercial customers, and thereby > forcing quite a lot of those home setups over to Linux, FreeBSD, or > actually Windows (windows has no service-agreement requirement for > patches). They display those setups as "this works". > > - -Allow these small setups to run on fully patched (Open)Solaris for > their needs. Without a yearly fee. Then pay some glossy advertising > bureau to tell about how well the non-displayed solution works. > > When reading those alternatives, consider how much technical people > trust advertising.
Thus my comments pertaining to goodwill. I'll trust a good buddy over a marketroid any day. And they me. A few of whom influence and/or are responsible for decisions at companies Sun was courting. I was the one who was making Sun's case in the first place but decisions were put on hold pending the outcome of Sun's financial woes. Subsequently my message has, in the words of Madea, been; "Run!! Run like hell". Then there are others who've been burned by Oracle in the past and ported their rdbms needs to offerings such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and DB2. In a former life I was on sysadmin side of porting hundreds of big iron boxes to Informix (before IBM bought them). Those memories stick and I know that there are a lot of big companies out there that to this day refuse to even let an Oracle rep through the door. I suspect IBM and HP are about to have some new customers. The irony here being that Oracle is so arrogant they couldn't give a damn. But we digress. -- Ken Gunderson <kgund...@teamcool.net> _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
