> I read the license several times, but, shame-on-me, I > think it is EXACTLY what it should be (and actually > what it should have been). > > Sun was trying to play a nice guy, but failed > miserably. That has affected not only Sun and Sun's > shareholders, but also many of Sun's career > employees. Of course Oracle could be a little bit > more open, but pendulum swings.
And does as much damage in one extreme as in the other. Although I must admit that my preference excludes the half of the swing where all the control freaks would be happiest. I really don't think that Sun's problems came from giving away too much software or source code, nor from having choices of maintenance contract other than Super Platinum Deluxe Buy Our Entire Stack Or Get Screwed. Their problems were in sales that rewarded volume over profit (reward sales at a loss? what sort of nuts is that?), marketing that didn't manage to communicate the value of their product range, and too frequent slippage of SPARC CPU designs. Their pendulum also swung, from workstations to huge servers. Maybe Oracle is doing something right there, doing more with the T series CPUs in the future. But they've got to learn that everyone with any money to spend is a customer, not just Fortune 500; that computer is a general purpose device and not just something to sell their database and middleware; and that even people with no money to spend now may well control plenty of money in a few years. Make your entire lineup work well together, sure. But don't make it prohibitive to only use part of that lineup. If I want to run Postgres on Solaris x86 on a homebrew system, what's it to them, as long as I don't need extra chipsets supported to make it work? An OS-only, online update+reference info only (no assurance of specific response by actual persons) license and software support contract should be available, and in low three digits of $$ for two sockets or less. M$ and DeadRat are the enemy, and Solaris needs to be obviously cheaper to run (esp. since bodies that know Solaris aren't cheaper). -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
