Yes, there's nothing necessarily wrong with a unified support policy in itself. But Oracle has also adopted the policy of not allowing users the option of paying a (significantly lower) fee to get updates without getting support. This seem to be bad business, not to mention open hostility to users.
It is a matter of what economists call price discrimination. There is a class of users who are willing to pay on the order of $30-100 a year to get updates/patches to Solaris, which makes using Solaris a practical possibility for them. These users are not willing to pay $1000/year to get service. On the other hand, the vast majority of customers who are willing to pay $1000/year for service don't see it as an option to use an OS unless it comes with official support, so they would not forgo such support even if the option of obtaining updates/patches without support were made available. Thus, by not offering the option of updates/patches without support, Oracle is making itself lose a class of paying customers, while attending to such customers' needs would not significantly affect the revenues from its other customers. This is economically irrational, quite apart from the harmful effects such a customer-hostile policy has on the company's image. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
