We've been talking with both our Sun salesman and HP. It appears that support for Sun hardware will be priced at 12% of net purchase price (i.e. after discount) for both hardware and software support, and 8% for just software. There will be only one class or service, namely high class. We don't think there will be a way to keep running it on older systems and just get security updates, for a lower price.
As for non-Sun hardware, we're being told it is still possible to get support for Soarlis 10u8 and older, but all problems will have to be duplicated on Sun hardware. It is not possible to get support for later releases. HP has a contract to support Solaris for HP systems. Sun has cancelled that contract, but for the next 3 years you'll still be able to get support from HP. I haven't talked with Dell, but since Dell also sold hardware with Solaris, I'd expect something similar for them. This all concerns me, as the net effect is to move Solaris from a mainstream OS to the equivalent of HP-UX. It's still a fine OS, which has some things we like. We may still use it one a couple of machines, at least for a year or two. Our administrative folks may continue using it for the forseeable future for their large systems. But we see a lot of Solaris usage moving to Linux. This may be just fine with Oracle, as historically they have been interested in high end business, and it looks like that will continue. 12% of net purchase for hardware and software with good response time isn't such a bad deal for key servers. However personally I hate to see it, because I rather like Solaris and would like to use it more widely. I don't know anything specific about Opensolaris, but from what I know about Oracle, once they've decided to limit themselves to high-end business I doubt they'll make it easy for Opensolaris to take over the role they're shutting down for Solaris. I'd love to hear that there's a large enough development community for Opensolaris to be viable without Oracle staff participation, but I'd be really surprised. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
