Oracle is Shutting Down ‘Free’ Solaris Program
For the past several years, Sun's Solaris for SPARC (at least) was "free" - you had to pay for the media and shipping. In that time, I bought Solaris 7, 8, and 9 for my SPARCstation 20. It was a fantastic program as it made sure that people like me would still be running, using, and liking Solaris, long after the linux wagon came to town. Had Sun charged me full price for Solaris, I'd have been running linux on that same box all that time. It was a good move on Sun's part to have this program in place.
Then Oracle bought Sun... and every good thing must come to an end.
This morning I was reading Slashdot and saw that Oracle is suspending the free licenses of Solaris. That's sad.
The funny thing is - I doubt it'll generate much revenue for the company. But it's going to cost them a lot of potential adopters in the kids that get old machines to play with and now won't learn Solaris and thus keep Oracle out of the long-term business. It's just not smart.
But then again, I've never thought that "smart" was a good adjective for Oracle.