BTW: I am aware that the OGB minutes say otherwise than that separate
OS support will be made available:
https://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=125252&tstart=30
I don't get why this isn't reflected in the "Oracle Hardware and
Systems Support Policy" doc released 16 March 2010 (http://www.oracle.com/support/collateral/hardware-systems-support-policies.pdf
). I also don't get why Solaris and OpenSolaris support subscriptions
wouldn't be offered when Oracle Enterprise Linux has just such an
offering, but I suppose this kind of item won't show up in any case
until the online stores are properly merged.
Am 12 Apr 2010 um 16:00 schrieb Bayard Bell:
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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