Well I think it really depends on the type of client. For the clients I typically work with in the financial services, e-commerce, insurance, government, and telecom space, they all buy enterprise wide support contracts. They typically don't pay for dev/test servers beyond a gold level HW and maybe SW support contract. For production servers, they all buy gold or platinum level HW and SW support contracts. I've only seen one Fortune 500 investment bank not have a support contract, but that bank went under and was bought out by the bank I was working for.. and what a mess that environment was.. buying spares off of ebay. But for SMB's and start-ups, I've typically seen HW support for atleast the production servers. The big problem for Solaris and even Red Hat shops is that you have to atleast pay some level of SW support to get patches and break-fix support. So at the end of the day, you can use all sorts of OS's for free, but if you want support, patches, etc. you have to pay. And that's just the way things work. You can definitely get by for a while without that kind of support, but eventually you'll need it.
Of course lots of shops use software illegally or without support contracts. But these are typically the same companies that don't have regulatory compliance or major security issues. Like anything else in IT, it just "depends". The difference between Oracle and Red Hat is that Oracle has a large legal department that can go after large clients who are not in compliance with the licensing. Red Hat is still too small of a company to do that. Could Oracle get a larger mind share with Solaris by giving it away for free? Definitely it could get a larger mind share and probably crush Red Hat. Honestly, if Sun had given away Solaris for free a decade ago and not had any RTU restrictions on 8+ CPU boxes, I seriously doubt that Linux would be where it's at today. Hell, Sun would have sold more SMP servers as it's easier to manage a few large servers over hundreds of 1/2 CPU boxes. Even more so if Sun had open sourced Solaris a decade ago. But that's all water under the bridge. Oracle still gives away a lot for free in Solaris and with the hardware, so it's really not that bad of a deal when you look at the TCO. Compare it to running AIX on Power or HPUX on Itanium and Solaris is pretty damn cheap. Now compared to Red Hat, you really have to look at the hardware, software, and the number of servers required. I've worked in enough environments where a x64 box running S10 can reduce the number of physical servers you need in half compared to Red Hat. So there is plenty of value in Solaris if you ask me. At the same time, the business reality is that it takes a lot of money to develop and support an operating system. Look at Red Hat, they get by with probably 90-95% of the work being done by the community and just packaging it up right and including some Red Hat specific distro code. But to build, test, maintain, and innovate for a whole OS is expensive and complicated. Anyone who has run any distribution of Linux long enough knows that the quality just isn't there, things break all the time. I can't stress enough how many shops are stuck on RHEL 3 or 4 because of things no longer working in RHEL 5. Solaris on the other hand, I've taken code from the 2.5 days and it still works on 10, no way I could do that on ANY Linux distro. And while there's plenty of hype to power Linux for a bit longer, I think it's just a matter of time before there is another Unix-like clone out there that will over-shadow it. It's just a matter of time. Hell if the OpenSolaris community plays its cards right and one of the Illumos distros works well, Linux could be overshadowed. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Octave J. Orgeron Solaris Virtualization Architect and Consultant Web: http://unixconsole.blogspot.com E-Mail: unixcons...@yahoo.com *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* ----- Original Message ---- From: Robert Milkowski <mi...@task.gda.pl> To: opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org Sent: Sun, October 3, 2010 2:36:05 PM Subject: Re: [osol-discuss] Solaris 11 Express On 02/10/2010 19:11, Octave Orgeron wrote: > At the end of the day, companies that use Linux in production pay Red Hat and > Novell for support and it's not all that different from paying a support > contract with Sun Oracle. > Not necessarily so. I know many companies with lots of x86 servers running CentOS or Solaris 10 with no support for an OS and only a basic support for HW. Now at the same time the do have some servers like database clusters, etc. where they do buy support for OS as well. The thing is that Oracle will loose many of them if they won't be able to deploy Solaris 11 x86 for free, they will switch or keep using CentOS. Now they haven't been paying anyway, so what's the loss? Well, it is all about mind share. Quite often they tend to deploy the OS they are mostly familiar with on their more critical infrastructure where they do want a higher level of support. And unfortunately they will chose Linux more often. I don't know - perhaps Oracle should consider a special license for up-to 2-socekt x86 servers which would allow production deployments for free with no support? -- Robert Milkowski http://milek.blogspot.com _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
