As seen here and being discussed here, Sun has decided to restrict support for:#SunSolve Resources:
* Everything available to the general Sun community
* Full access to the SunSolve Knowledgebase
# Sun System Handbook Resources:
* Full access to Sun System Handbook information, including:
o A complete Full Component List (FCL)
o System views
o Component/device information
o Reference lists
o Index pages
to contract customers only. This move will seriously affect many people who end up buying old(er) Sun hardware [such as EXX00 series, Sun Ultra’s etc.] and now restrict them to specutrum contract, paying customers only.
Bad move, I wonder what the reason is?
To suck as much money out of the customer as possible – look how ‘successful’ it has been for SGI/Irix – so well infact, that they’re still not making a consistant profit.
This is quite a step backward for Sun, they have been doing well witht the whole OpenSolaris thing and the CDDL is a great license.
I doubt they would make that much money from retaining these docs, I guess it would sweeten things for serviced customers compared to the non-customer heathens.
This will just be a pure pain in the arse for customers who arent interested in waiting on the phone to hear some drongo read a FAQ back to you.
<sarcasm>
A yeah, another bright idea from the Management. I’m sure Sun’s customers will be delighted, I for my part am utterly impressed …
</sarcasm>
“streamlining online support” They are trying to make it sound positive for the users. Yeah whatever…
I like how the summary left out what will still be available to the general public. Good work!
It’ll be good if it cuts down of the millions of pages of useless crap you currently have to swim through just to find one little thing.
For $120 you can get the basic support contract and enjoy full access to everything, which is still WAY cheaper than RedHat.
I read the FAQ on Sun’s site – docs.sun.com will be unchanged, and security patches will be free, BUT you’ll have to pay for the patch bundles and individual patches.
Now that I don’t like. I understand having to pay extra for specialized patches and preferential treatment, but for patch bundles that are like the Windows SP, you should be able to get them for free.
I’ve been using Solaris in various forms for over 10 years and I’ve almost never needed to contact their support – the online resources were enough most of the time. You built the box, applied the jumbo patch, tuned it and you were in business, and only really needed to update every half-year or so (unless you really wanted to keep up to date with all the security stuff or had very weird and specific issues).
Not being able to do that easily any more is inconvenient, to say the least.
Of course, for corporations the $120 is chump change and, again, way, WAY cheaper than ANY official support offering from RedHat or Novell. I understand support contracts is the only way RedHat is making money but for CIOs that don’t count.
For individuals having fun, you can either keep patching for free with the security updates or just download the new distro that has everything rolled in (including extra functionality) and update that way. That’s still more than you get with RedHat.
Of course, what will probably happen is some kind soul with a contract will just post the jumbo patches somewhere for all to get
I think the REAL problem here is Sun’s shifting focus – if they kept Solaris as a serious, proprietary server platform nobody would complain (indeed, all anyone would talk about would be how CHEAP $120 is for support), but they are opening it up, offering it as competition to Linux and in general playing in fields that asking for money can get you burned.
D
Poloriod, Gillete, HP; strategy = give away the product, price gouge the consumables.
Sun raising the cost of their support will hardly come as a surprise to many of the posters here. This is the flip side of sun’s generous giving away of solaris 10.
I can’t really blame sun, they do have to try to make a profit. But, there may be a real leason about vendor lock-in here. Apple advocates may want to pay attention also. Msft advocates are probably too far gone.
I’m reminded of Homer Simpson lamenting about how the record club first sold him 12 albums for a penny, then the price went way up.
The key question….what will they do next?
Sun simply is too wishy/washy on things, repeatedly their strategy changes by the moment and there is plenty of reason to wonder what unpleasant surprise awaits around the corner.
Least with Linux you have a fairly safe idea of where it’s going, especially with the RHEL clones (CentOS, WhiteBox, etc etc).
For the “big guys” with contracts already, probably doesn’t matter…but for the rest of us “little guys” looking at their open strategy….leaves more questions than answers. Expecially considering how little has been done by sun in the last, say couple months. Where’s the rest of open solaris??? Seems to be more hype than substance coming from Sun, a slowly dying company that just can’t get it’s act together to form a solid, stabile, coherent open source strategy.
Flame all you want, truth sometimes hurts 😉
they are pulling their head out of their ass they jam it back up there with full force.
When is the board going to start firing some of the dumb ass managers and decision makers over there.
And ignore the news posted above.
It just make people misunderstand, nothing more than that.
(If you want to post news, WRITE it, don’t COPY & PASTE.
Well, actually, copy & paste is not that bad .. if you do it with care. Which in this case … I don’t think the poster even re-read his post!)
Apparently, the older hardware docs will still be under their archives for free access. At least that’s what some of the other discussions about this are concluding.
“Least with Linux you have a fairly safe idea of where it’s going, especially with the RHEL clones (CentOS, WhiteBox, etc etc).”
No one really knows where Linux is going, whether the next RHEL will be binary compatible with the previous one, or what distros ISVs will support over time. Linux is really good, but stability over time isn’t one of its strong points. Really, what Linux is best at is as a breeding ground for new software that filters down over time into more time-stable platforms (e.g., Solaris 10 JDS). This is not a bad thing at all, because people who want something more cutting edge get what they want and people who want something more predictable also get what they want.
“No one really knows where Linux is going, whether the next RHEL will be binary compatible with the previous one”
No one knows if the next version of Windows is going to be binary compatible with the previous one either… we just presume it will be because all previous versions have been backward compatible, and it would be idiotic for the company who makes it to break that compatibility.
No one really knows where Linux is going, whether the next RHEL will be binary compatible with the previous one
There is no such promis for Solaris either. Just like Red Hat promises for therir enterprise editions, Sun promis that old solaris software will run unmodified on solaris 10.
i wonder how many new people with give solaris a chance if they get a harder time to get the information needed.
From what I understand… this only affects the hardware handbooks (needed for people who service Sun equipment).
Its still a brain dead policy… but not for the reasons the above posters have been commenting on.
i.e.
Patches and Answerbooks (docs.sun.com), etc. are still available.
“There is no such promis for Solaris either. Just like Red Hat promises for therir enterprise editions, Sun promis that old solaris software will run unmodified on solaris 10.”
Sun advertises binary compatibility right on their website–it is a promise. They even say they will fix Solaris if someone shows them that compatibility wasn’t maintained in some way.
How can Red Hat make promises of binary compatibilty between kernel revisions, GCC revisions, etc.? They might be able to provide source compatibility, but that is different than what Sun advertises.
Sun advertises binary compatibility right on their website
Right here, in fact:
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/programs/binary_guarantee.xml
Folks,
I’ve been told by my friends who work at Sun that a major,
major reason why this change has been made is to prevent
Sun’s competitors from gaining an advantage because Sun
hasn’t been controlling who could access their IP.
All those infodocs, FAQ answers and SDRBs along with the
system handbook stuff is very valuable to Sun’s competitors
since if you piece things together you can come up with
some significant information about how Sun designs and
implements various systems or components. You also get
troubleshooting information which Sun has paid its staff
to produce for support contract customers.
I think the bottom line is that Sun doesn’t see why it
should give away this information to everybody when it
only exists due to their paying customers.
The actual announcement can be read at http://sunsolve.sun.com/pub-cgi/show.pl?target=content/content25
My reading of it says to me that basically sunsolve is not changing, you will still have your free collectin and your contract collection. I have not chased this up with anyone internally (and if I had I probably couldn’t say it here), but I can’t see anyone trawling through the tens of thousands of documents marked for the “free collection”, reviewing and changing them to be marked “contract” if they think they need to be moved.
Indeed pretty much everything that I is destined for the free collection by default.
The changes will be in what is available in the online system handbook.
I also feel I need to address one of the prior comments here from walterbyrd.
Sun raising the cost of their support will hardly come as a surprise to many of the posters here
I was under the impression that we had just made support an awful lot cheaper.
Alan.
There was a markup typo in my last note, it should have read
Indeed pretty much everything that I write is destined for the free collection by default.
Alan.