Re: End of "Free" Solaris binary licence program - now it's free.

From: Casper H.S. Dik (Casper.Dik_at_Sun.COM)
Date: 02/20/05 

Date: 20 Feb 2005 12:36:58 GMT

Dave <nospam@nowhere.com> writes:

>Perhaps, although I gather the details of the OpenSolaris are not clear,
>so its unlikely anything will come of that soon - if ever.

The OpenSolaris code base does not include the source to
abandoned compnents such as sun4m support. I think
also that sun4m systems had trouble supporting dtrace
or some other things currently in use throughout the
system.

>But what are people supposed to do *now* if they have an oldish Sun
>today and want to install a Solaris OS on it?

The old free binary license program was always very
restrictive; I think most sun4m systems didn't even qualify
as they could have multiple CPUs installed.

It was also never legal, I seem to remember, to use a free
binary license on a grey market Sun system. (Silly, but)

>Of course Sun could say "The last Sun 4m machine is too old to support".
>I can accept that, but there are a lot of hobbiest around with them. I
>suspect the goodwill that providing an OS for Sun 4m machines would be
>of more benefit to Sun than the cost to Sun. I guess the real cost is
>not bandwidth or disk space, but of the management time and lawyer costs
>in doing this. It can't take too much effort though to just apply
>exactly the same license conditions as on Solaris 10.

But there are reasons that Sun may not want that: we want people
to use Solaris 10. So such a license would need to be drafted
as "You may run Solaris 9 only on hardware not capable of running
Solaris 10". I don't think there's anything wrong in pushing
S10 by differentiating the licensing issues.

Casper

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