Today, a not so surprising news showed up in my RSS feeds. It’s from PCA, an update tool I use for Solaris (because the tools from Sun are useless).
Attention: The patch policy has silently been changed by Oracle quite severely. The new strategy, which is also documented in Software Update Entitlement Policy for Solaris, enforces the requirement of a support contract to download any patch.
Unlike before, even security patches are not available for free anymore.
Until recently, Solaris 10 was free to use and Sun provided security patches for free as well; if you wanted further support you had to pay. It’s a widely used economic model in the open source world and has the great advantage of “hooking” up small companies to your products by still making them usable in a production environment.
At the company I’m working at, that’s exactly what happened with MySQL: we could use it for free to see if it fitted our needs and when the time came for us to need support, we paid for support. Everyone wins.
Now Oracle has pretty much cut every small Solaris user from using it in a production environment, to me it looks like they don’t even want to care about them. Solaris is still used in a lot of big corporations who pay a lot of money for support, but I wonder how long this will last…Just for fun I’m pasting some phrases from Oracle’s documentation:
- A separate Sun support contract is required for every system to which you apply Solaris Software Updates, including test and development systems.
- If your support contract lapses, you loose the right to use most Solaris OS patches and you must remove them from all systems.
Remove patches from a system, is this a joke? Did the guys who decided that already work in IT? Yeah great Oracle, that’s REALLY a good way to treat your future customers. Now you can be sure that I will try to replace every Solaris I see with a Linux box.
It’s sad for Solaris, the technology behind the OS is good but due to bad management decisions it’s getting less and less market-share. I feel sorry for the few passionate people behind Open Solaris.
Some may argue that RHEL is also a paid OS, but at least it’s clear from the beginning and Red Hat donesn’t screw their customers with dodgy moves like that in the middle of a product life-cycle. And you still have CentOS if you don’t want support. What Oracle just did is a hold-up against the small Solaris users and I’m really angry at them.
I couldn’t agree with you more. I’ve been a long time Solaris user and general fan of Sun. but what oracle has done is inexcusable and has forced me to look else-ware I too will encourage my customers to steer clear of Solaris and as much as possible any other solution that is paired to a greedy anti-social company like Oracle.
I also feel like I’ve lost a dear old friend and had a huge chunk of my life taken away from me. Thanks Larry Ellison for killing a truly world class operating system! I hope someone erects a Privy in your honor.
And I just considered Oracle Solaris as and option over Linux.
No way that is going to happen with such a policy, I rather stick to Windows Servers then.