It appears the Solaris free ride is over. Oracle is clamping down on the freeloading riffraff.
No more perpetual use of the operating system without coughing up some dough. Oracle says any downloads of Solaris 10, the stable version of the Sun operating system, are only good for a 90-day trial then you have to pay for a support contract to keep using it.
Under Sun’s administration it was free for the price of a valid e-mail address and a form specifying the number of systems the stuff would be running on.
OpenSolaris, the free community version, is not impacted – at least for the moment – but as a monetizing inducement, shall we say, it looks like Oracle may not open source new features being developed for Solaris.
Oracle’s director of Solaris product management Dan Roberts let it be known that “There may be some things we choose not to open source going forward similar to how MySQL manages certain value-add at the top of the stack. It’s important to understand the plan is now to deliver value again out of our IP investment while at the same time measuring that with continuing to deliver OpenSolaris in the open.”
InfoWorld discovered the policy change, which set off dire predictions in the blogosphere about how users will flee Solaris for free Linux – which the free Solaris was meant to counter – or jump to non-Sun distros such as Nexenta, Schillix and Belenix and create a rift between Oracle and the OpenSolaris developer community.
The move also raised speculation that Oracle will try to monetize Sun’s quiver of open source widgetry like OpenOfffice.
InfoWorld observes that the one-sentence policy restatement doesn’t say that existing unpaid users will be ousted. But the implication sure is there.
It says, “Please remember, your right to use Solaris acquired as a download is limited to a trial of 90 days, unless you acquire a service contact for the downloaded software.”
Meanwhile, the Register says it’s heard the Solaris SystemZ port to IBM’s mainframe is dead – with Oracle closing down key parts of the code to developers – which makes utter sense given Oracle wants to take IBM down.
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