Am 10 Apr 2010 um 15:48 schrieb Edward Ned Harvey:
You should
also discover some obstacle to purchasing it, even if you want to.
Because
they want you to buy it on Sun hardware, or from a huge name
reseller, such
as Dell or HP or IBM. Solaris 10 is also known as SunOS 5.10.
Opensolaris
is free. It is also known as SunOS 5.11. Some day, we don't know
when,
opensolaris should become Solaris 11.
I think the confusion on the first point is that Oracle has two
support offerings for Solaris: there's "systems" support (Premier
Support for Systems), when you want to buy a complete stack from
Oracle and get all your support from them, vs. OS support (Premier
Support for Operating Systems), which allows you to get support for
the OS alone. When I read the docs about supporting offering, they
seem to mention full-stack support first, but the section about OS
support mentions both OpenSolaris and Solaris. As best as I can read,
the clause about unsupported hardware simply means that you can't use
software entitlements from a full systems agreement on any hardware
outside that agreement, requiring such coverage to be sorted
separately. I don't think is as insidious as some of the implications
I've taken from other posts to this list, although it does seem clear
that Oracle markets the full systems package more aggressively and is
likely to have prepared sales and account staff far more thoroughly on
how to sell that offering.
It's not that OpenSolaris will *ever* become Solaris 11 per se. Parts
of OpenSolaris have been and are backported to Solaris 10, a practice
that will almost certainly shift to the "current" Solaris release when
a new major release is made. There will be additional development that
happens parallel to the OpenSolaris community that render Solaris 11,
while OpenSolaris moves on as the development branch of what comes
after that Solaris-wise, which will at some point be given a 5.12
designation or equivalent even before there's a Solaris 12 or what
have you. OpenSolaris is thus the working-product distribution built
from the community-maintained codebase and the binary elements that
are offered whilst replacements from CDDL sources are mooted or are
limited to binary distribution for some of the same reasons that
elements of the Linux codebase contains binary blobs for which there
is no community-licensed source. If you want a source code license for
Solaris 10 (I don't believe that will include access to all of the
code otherwise limited to binary distribution, as there are some
elements that Sun wouldn't necessarily have the right to redistribute
as cross-licensed source), that can be arranged separately. If you
don't like an OS with binary blobs, OpenBSD is about the only game in
town that tries to be that open.
One major difference between OpenSolaris and Solaris that received
little comment is in how they are delivered: much more of the work on
installation and providing an immediately usable product has been
focused on OpenSolaris. You might find that OpenSolaris and Solaris 10
deliver many of the same capabilities on paper, but their packaging
and integration into the build tends to be more extensive and polished
under OpenSolaris than Solaris 10, which is built more to the taste of
people with some longer-term Solaris exposure and expertise. On the
other hand, some of the value-added Solaris 10 products can be
licensed for commercial use from the media kit, whereas it's rather
hard at the moment to get a contract signed for commercial support of
OpenSolaris, at least to judge from some posts to this list.
Unless you're planning to buy the full systems support package for a
high-volume deployment running OpenSolaris, I wouldn't expect the
sales people to know yet how to sell you support. They sell basic
Enterprise Linux support subscriptions for € 76.90 a year, so I expect
they'll be willing to sell you some version of Solaris for a price not
far off that, although possibly not rushing to focus on that when
they're likely trying to produce strong sales bookings in the quarter
after the acquisition, thus demonstrating retention of valuable large
customers, that don't get people straight to second-guessing that
decision. I'm not saying they're right (or wrong) to organise behind
big-ticket sales before volume markets, but I am saying that it's the
sort of thing you'd expect from a large publicly-held technology
concern that's happy to be run by the same sort of financial analysts
who encourage valuation based on the truth told by your Form 10-Q
(i.e. did you make your target 65%+ margins again and are there any
indications that you won't continue to do so?).
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