... been reading this topic for a few days now... time to jump in...
To the "marketing guys" that are said to lurk on this list:
*Get with the program and listen to your CEO*
Sun Rays are great technology. Stop shooting yourselves in the foot with
all this pussy-footing, mind-changing stuff on licensing.
You don't have to open-source SRSS (yet). Just remove the so-called RTU
and drop the price of the DTU. And then *start to promote/market the Sun
Ray*. The SMB and educational markets are crying-out (far more than you
obviously even in your wildest dreams imagine) for this type of technology.
I live for the day that "Sun executives" realise the potential of the
Sun Ray.
For the record, I have dealt with Sun, across the globe, for nearly 20
years. It is a great tech company. But, at times, "marketing" leaves a
lot to be desired (sigh).
Regards
Chris
Meik Hellmund wrote:
I think there is now a serious problem for educational institutions.
For quite some time (~2001- ~2005, sorry if I don't get
the dates right - anyway, it was the time we bought a lot of sun rays)
our sun partner explained to us that all RTUs are covered by the
"Sun EduSoft software portfolio":
<http://web.archive.org/web/20040407042748/www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/edu/promotions/edusoft/institution/>
For a symbolic price of ~500$/year per university(!) it gave us the RTU
for a lot of software (Solaris, Staroffice, SRSS and a lot more, see here:
<http://web.archive.org/web/20040407044601/www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/edu/promotions/edusoft/institution/productlist.html>
) on every machine on the campus.
In 2006, our Sun partner had good news for us: we can save 500$/year, Sun has
discontinued EduSoft since the software included is now free-to-use anyway,
for anybody.
Now we learn that this is not true anymore for SRSS.
If you know anything about the budget of state univerities then you know
that we can't pay $6250 for a 50-seat students pool in addition to all
the hardware we bought from Sun. (Not to mention that our PC partner
would happily replace one third of the pool by shiny new PCs for this
"right-to-use" money.)
Staying indefinitely with the last SRSS version included in the
EduSoft programme is also not a long-term option - and I am not
even sure whether this were legally clean - EduSoft worked with
annual payments.
So what offers (concerning SRSS) has Sun to make to universities -
after they have a) scrapped EduSoft and b) stopped providing
SRSS free-to-use as part of the solaris enterprise system?
Meik
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