On 02/10/2010 19:11, Octave Orgeron wrote:
At the end of the day, companies that use Linux in production pay Red Hat and Novell for support and it's not all that different from paying a support contract with Sun Oracle.
Not necessarily so. I know many companies with lots of x86 servers running CentOS or Solaris 10 with no support for an OS and only a basic support for HW.
Now at the same time the do have some servers like database clusters, etc. where they do buy support for OS as well.
The thing is that Oracle will loose many of them if they won't be able to deploy Solaris 11 x86 for free, they will switch or keep using CentOS.
Now they haven't been paying anyway, so what's the loss? Well, it is all about mind share. Quite often they tend to deploy the OS they are mostly familiar with on their more critical infrastructure where they do want a higher level of support. And unfortunately they will chose Linux more often.
I don't know - perhaps Oracle should consider a special license for up-to 2-socekt x86 servers which would allow production deployments for free with no support?
-- Robert Milkowski http://milek.blogspot.com _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
