I really tried to be upbeat about Oracle acquiring Sun Microsystems. I thought for sure that they would do all they could to encourage wide use of Solaris and would invest heavily on Solaris and the SPARC platform.
Whether or not they invest in Solaris and Sun's hardware platforms remains to be seen but one thing is now every clear. They have no intentions whatsoever of treating their customers and potential customers with respect.
Instead they decide that they should handle support and licensing just like they do with their other products. This includes charging well over $300 a year for access to critical security patches.
I have been a long time fan of Solaris over the years and still think it has a lot of merits technically. But those merits mean nothing to me if I'm forced to pay for security patches. There are a lot of small shops out there running Solaris that don't want or even need the hassle of a full support contract just to get patch access.
I might feel a bit better about this if you could simply pay for only basic sunsolve access to documentation and patches only and do self-support. for a reasonable price (say $50 to $100 a year) but charging over $300 a year for something we used to to be able to do ourselves for free is just insane.
I also consider blocking access to security patches to be irresponsible. The net is more hostile than ever today and there will now be even more unpatched Solaris boxes out there just waiting to be rooted, and all because Oracle wants to squeeze as much as possible out of Sun's remaining user base.
So as much as it pains me to do so I will be moving off of Solaris on my web server and switching either to CentOS or one of the BSD flavors. I will still run Solaris on my desktop system on my private network but I think my love affair with Sun has just been killed by Oracle. Thank you Oracle for taking a great company like Sun with tons of talent and some of the best most innovative technology out there and killing it by forcing it to conform to Oracle's culture.
It's been a great ride but I feel that Sun will share the same fate as DEC unless Oracle changes It's ways and soon. RIP Sun Microsystems 1982-2010 you will be missed.
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