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Solaris 9: Sticker Shock 317

Posted by chrisd from the that's-a-lot-of-cd-blanks dept.
sysadmn writes "With the release of Solaris 9 , Sun has bundled many goodies, including an LDAP directory server and a J2EE application server. At the same time, while a single CPU license is still free, they've begun charging for multiprocessor systems. As a kicker, purchasers of used systems may find that they have to pay Sun an OS licensing fee. (Curiously, the 2 CPU server version seems to be $249, while the 4 CPU desktop is $199. In some cases it's the same motherboard, power supply and memory!). At the upper end, that million dollar machine from Ebay may require a $400,000 fee :-) I like Solaris for many reasons, but I have to wonder: will this pay off? " Solaris is certainly a capable os, but sheeze that seems like an awful lot of money.
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Solaris 9: Sticker Shock More

Solaris 9: Sticker Shock

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  • Sun has already been fighting back advances from RedHat and IBM... I wonder if they will trigger a mass migration away from Sun? Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon [stumbleupon.com]

    • Re:customers move to competitors? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by calidoscope ( 312571 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @02:00AM (#3607680)
      So when is Red Hat coming out with a kernel capable of supporting 128 processors? The licensing fee for Solaris 9 goes up rapidly with the number of processors, the 400 grand fee is probably aimed at the Fujitsu customers. Sun makes the money needed to update Solaris by selling hardware - if people by used Sun equipment, that means less money to sun for development.

      Sun makes a big distinction between systems bought from Sun or an authorized reseller versus EBay, etc. This is probably done to keep the resellers happy.

      There has been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth on comp.unix.solaris, primarily from people having old 4 processor servers lying around (which are worth less than the license). The license for Solaris 8 was really nice, free for machines that could hold 8 or fewer processors. BTW, that license is still in effect for people with media in hand (although it applies just for their organization).

      Sun's hurting themselves more by not getting the Jalapeño systems out - keep up the pressure on the low end. Rumor was that the Jalapeño machines were to be cost competitive with the intel boxes.

      • Sun makes the money needed to update Solaris by selling hardware - if people by used Sun equipment, that means less money to sun for development.

        If peoply buy used CDs, there's less money for the RIAA
        If people buy used DVDs, there's less money for the MPAA
        If people buy used books, there's less money for the authors/publishers.

    • I doubt it very much. People that buy multiprocessor Sun systems are used to paying, and most probably won't blink at those prices. They have to give away the single processor version to compete at all - Linux and BSD are very capable competitors on that hardware, and they're free after all. But Solaris still has the advantage on their multiproc boxen, so people that need that kind of performance will pay for it.

  • UNICOS, Anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lostchicken ( 226656 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @01:40AM (#3607629)
    Sounds kinda like UNICOS to me...

    UNICOS, the Cray OS, would cost Joe Slashdot around half a mil to run, and it's non-transferable. This new sun deal sounds kinda like that.

    However, there is no Linux for Cray. There is Linux for SPARC. So, If Solaris is too expensive for you, don't use it. IRIX is too expensive for me to run on my SGI, but it's not a problem. I don't care, I use Linux.

    • Re:UNICOS, Anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by green pizza ( 159161 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @01:55AM (#3607664) Homepage
      IRIX is too expensive for me to run on my SGI

      Every SGI machine out there is licensed for at least some version of IRIX... depends on when the machine was built. The Indigo2 started out with IRIX 4.05 and was sold well into the release of the IRIX 6.5 stream.

      The O2 originally shipped in 1996 with the O2-only IRIX 6.3. The Octane originally shipped in 1997 with the Octane/Origin/Onyx2-only IRIX 6.4. Pretty much everything built after May 1998 shipped with the IRIX 6.5 stream. If your machine has at least an R10K/250 CPU, chances are it's licenced for IRIX 6.5.

      Depends on where you live and what sort of SGI offices/dealers/VARs are in your area, but most folks have had good luck getting a free/cheap or borrowed CD set of 6.5 and then downloading the latest quarterly update off support.sgi.com.

      There's nothing wrong with borrwing the CDs for a version of IRIX your machine can rightfully use. It's not like IRIX will run on non-SGI hardware... nor were MIPS-based SGIs ever sold without the intent of running IRIX.

      Lots of $500 Octanes on eBay and $400 Octanes on USENET.
  • This means they may be charging people to transfer ownership of the software....

    ... even though the software has already been paid for?

    • Re:os licensing fee? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Mr. Slippery ( 47854 ) <tms&infamous,net> on Thursday May 30, 2002 @02:13AM (#3607704) Homepage
      This means they may be charging people to transfer ownership of the software....

      ... even though the software has already been paid for?

      Yep. Welcome the bizarre world of software "licencing", based on the concept that reading parts of a program into memory as they are needed is making a copy, and thus subject to regulation by copyright. You can own the disk but, under this bogus theory, not have the right to "copy" it into memory.

      Since we humans read text by copying it from the page to our short-term memory (via our eyes), I'm waiting for someone to apply this to books...until you no longer have the right to read [gnu.org]. After all, how is copying from printed text to synapse structure and electrical potential any different than copying from magentic alignments to electrical potential?

      • Welcome the bizarre world of software "licencing", based on the concept that reading parts of a program into memory as they are needed is making a copy,

        This is one of the huge myths of copyright law and is often cited to justify mandatory software licensing vs. purchase. Section 117(1) of the Copyright Act amended in 1976 thoroughly debunks this:

        Sect. 117. Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs

        Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106 [17 USCS Sect. 106], it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:

        (1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or

        (2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.

  • If you need the power (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ObviousGuy ( 578567 ) <ObviousGuy@hotmail.com> on Thursday May 30, 2002 @01:40AM (#3607631) Homepage Journal
    You usually have to pay for the kind of power that you need.

    If you want to serve some OSS projects, then all you need is a handful of Athlons and Linux. But if you want to serve a large enterprise system, you're going to need some big iron and big iron software.

    These fees are not as expensive as having your network crash because some zealot thought he could set up an equivalent network in Linux instead of Solaris.

    • Devil's advocate. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by cbr372 ( 193706 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @01:58AM (#3607669)
      Ordinarily I'd agree with you. It's a fact that Solaris has traditionally been the one of staunchest Unix systems available, and its stability has been proven in data centers the world over. However, in recent years, Linux on Sun hardware has improved to the point of actually been faster on Sun hardware than Solaris itself. Of course this doesn't hold true for 64-processor E-10000 systems, or other very high-end Sun systems, but for the average E-450 and E-250? What you don't seem to grasp is the fact that very few companies actually need the kind of power provided by ultra high-end hardware that Solaris performs best on. Yes, it does have its place and many companies will continue using that high-end Sun (and other corporations') hardware, but most companies just don't need it.

      But if you want to serve a large enterprise system, you're going to need some big iron and big iron software. These fees are not as expensive as having your network crash because some zealot thought he could set up an equivalent network in Linux instead of Solaris.

      Yeah. Zealots like IBM who have ported Linux to their 370 Mainframes. how much bigger Iron do you need? I agree with you to a certain extent, Solaris is still the top Unix system available, but in some respects, Linux is already far ahead of it, for example, in terms of portability and flexibility. Solaris won't go away in a hurry, but Linux also has its place, as does *BSD and other systems.

      • Re:Devil's advocate. (Score:5, Informative)

        by guacamole ( 24270 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @03:20AM (#3607854)
        Ordinarily I'd agree with you. It's a fact that Solaris has traditionally been the one of staunchest Unix systems available, and its stability has been proven in data centers the world over. However, in recent years, Linux on Sun hardware has improved to the point of actually been faster on Sun hardware than Solaris itself. Of course this doesn't hold true for 64-processor E-10000 systems, or other very high-end Sun systems, but for the average E-450 and E-250?

        Linux on anything non-x86 is useless except for embedded applications. Do you wnat to loose all of application support? Do you want to loose the vendor support? Do you want to exchange a stable, robust datacenter quality OS that was designed for this type of hardware for Linux which probably is even less feature-rich and stable on sparc hardware than it is on x86? Do you think people would have paid 2x the price of comparable x86 hardware for those E250 and E450 to run Linux on it? Solaris and its applications is the main reason companies shell out their bucks for sun machines, not the hardware features. If you like Linux, for god's sake, get an x86 box, not a sparc. Viceversa is true for shops that prefer Solaris.

        As for portability, although, it is offered only on two platforms, Solaris is still pretty portable, more so than many other unix variants. Solaris was designed and developed in a portable manner. It runs on x86 and SPARC today. Solaris 2.5.1 used to run on PPC but Sun canned that project early on. Rumors from quite respectable sources suggested that Sun engineers had Solaris running IA64 emulator before any other OS did.

        • The notion that an E250 (or 450) is better than a free *ix on good quality IA32 hardware is horseshit indulged in by zealots who can't let go of their proprietary hardware.

          If you were talking E10k or 6800/15000 class hardware, you'd be right. But a 250 is a worthless proposition, which is why Sun's low end systems are all just PCs with UltraSPARC CPUs these days.
          • When I can run an x86 box without having to upgrade
            Linux on it every 18 months, and with NFS3 implementation that doesn't suck, and with a RAID/Volume manager that doesn't suck, -then- I'll might consider buying it. Until, then, I prefer putting Sun servers in the machine room.
      • But if you want to serve a large enterprise system, you're going to need some big iron and big iron software. These fees are not as expensive as having your network crash because some zealot thought he could set up an equivalent network in Linux instead of Solaris.

        No you dont, several mega-corperations have already proven this. Yes The likes of AT&T and MCI have some Big iron left over but if you watch their stockholders reports that talk about the big purchases Nither have bought a mainframe in over 20 years. and from talks with people at both everyone is migrating away from them to either clusters or discreet servers. 9/11 changed more than the world, it changed the mindset of corperate america...

        The scary part... I know of one of those companies above that will be sliding toward a microsoft solution... and there is nothing that microsoft sells that runs on big iron let alone medium iron.... So it will have to be clustered SQL... MS - SQL....

        the thought of that makes me feel like I just drank some spoiled milk.

      • in some respects, Linux is already far ahead of it

        I don't agree. Consider that with modern Solaris, one can take apart and reassemble most of a server while it is still serving. Also consider that Solaris is extremely well documented and supported. Also consider that Solaris configurations tend to be more consistent, predictable, and maintainable.

        Sure, it is harder to argue for Solaris on a computer that is essentially disposable (i.e., a PC), but when that computer is indispensible, Solaris will make you very happy.

    • Re:If you need the power (Score:3, Interesting)

      by rodgerd ( 402 )
      Linux may be the answer for every situation, but Sun has competitors other than the free *ix world. Who are probably high-fiving right now.

      One of my customers has been flirting with ripping out Slowaris and replacing it with AIX. When they've finished shitting bricks over the US$160,000 it will cost them to upgrade their web farm, they'll be signing up with Big Blue.

    • Ecache Parity Error Anyone? (Score:5, Informative)

      by mrwiggly ( 34597 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @06:25AM (#3608212)
      These fees are not as expensive as having your network crash because some zealot thought he could set up an equivalent network in Linux instead of Solaris

      This used to be true, however, Sun dropped the ball big time with their UltraSparcIII. There was a bug in the CPU that caused "ecache parity errors". We had half a dozen E6500's loaded with as much memory and CPU's as we could. Each one of these boxes crashed at least once every week and a half! At first Sun blamed us! Our computing center had too little humidity, we installed the grounding strap improperly... Blah Blah Blah, none of it true. Finally they acknowledged the problem. It took them more than 6 months to work around the problem. Their workaround was a series of hacks and kludges (strange monitoring daemons and such).

      We've migrated half of production to linux now. It's not perfect by any means, but we've lowered our harware costs by 66%, and increased job performance by 75%.

      We're not looking seriously at Solaris in the future.
      • I think you mean the UltraSparc-II. If you wanted a US3, then you'd have a 6800, and be ranting about a problem with the prefetch pipeline (which Sun caught early-on).
      • The USII bug definitely caused bad experiences, but it is not representitive of Sun hardware and Solaris as a whole.

        I have an US IIi-based workstation with Solaris, and I love it. Except for one hard drive glitch, it has never had unplanned down time (24x7 for over six months at a time). It just doesn't stop taking my abuse. This experience is much more typical for hardware and software of this caliber.

        On the good side, once the USII was fixed, it was fixed. We move on.

    • If you want to serve some OSS projects, then all you need is a handful of Athlons and Linux. But if you want to serve a large enterprise system, you're going to need some big iron and big iron software.

      My shop has got Linux clusters, Sun E10ks as well as desktops Solaris and Linux.

      Linux works great and is economical like nothing else, and it's lately becoming a favorite choice on the desktop.

      Meanwhile, though, for ultra-reliable, high-throughput, convenient, easy-to-manage systems connected to SANs, the big 64-way Suns are absolutely the way to go.

      Dunno if that will still be true in 5 years, but it certainly is the case now.

      When you need that kind of service, the kinds of prices we're talking about here are not at all unusual. While everyone should constantly evaluate their options (i.e., will a MOSIX cluster do the job?), the right answer is still Sun in certain cases.

  • 2 vs 4 CPU apparent quirk isn't one (Score:3, Funny)

    by erlkonig ( 15872 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @01:41AM (#3607633) Homepage Journal
    The 2 CPU for $249 is for a server, while the 4 CPU at $199 is for just a desktop. Nice desktop, methinks.

    Now the question is whether Sun still doing the old 2-user Right-To-Use license from the old days or not, although, unlike some vendors, I don't recall them ever having enforced it at the software level.

  • The 4 CPU license that is $199 is a Desktop upgrade while the 2 CPU license that is $249 is a Server2 upgrade. Operating systems for servers are usually more expensive that operating systems for desktops so this isn't that surprising.

  • What is sun doing here? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by synx ( 29979 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @01:43AM (#3607639)
    I am frankly rather confused at Sun's approach here. Generally people use big big iron for only a few things, one being database servers. Generally you spread the load across many smaller cheaper Intel boxes.

    Considering that the database of choice is Oracle (Larry Ellison aside...) and I have heard from numerous people and DBA professionals which say that HPUX+Oracle is the way to go (don't take my word for it, both amazon and yahoo use HPUX for Oracle), where does this leave Solaris?

    I guess in the lucrative education market Solaris still has a major presence (my University certainly had a good number of solaris boxen). But with the trend to massively duplicated web services across high end Intel hardware combined with HPUX's strength with Oracle, where does Solaris fit?

    • Re:What is sun doing here? (Score:5, Informative)

      by guacamole ( 24270 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @02:29AM (#3607759)
      Sun sells more UNIX servers than HP, IBM, and SGI combined. I don't know about Yahoo, but the reason Amazon uses HP servers for the database backend is that HP was so depressed about their small market share that they sold a bunch of servers to amazon at much lower than usual price just to say "Amazon uses HP hardware"

      As for Oracle, Solaris is THE platform to run it on as Oracle people have told many times, Solaris is the prefered Oracle platform because Oracle is developed on Solaris and then ported to other OSes.
    • Sun doesn't sell "big iron". You could fit one each of all of Sun's models in a single semi trailer.
    • and I have heard from numerous people and DBA professionals which say that HPUX+Oracle is the way to go
      Stop trusting anything whoever told you that tells you.

      Oracle is developed under Solaris. Though Veritas products do exist for HP-UX, Veritas's happier dealing with Sun. There is a group of support engineers from all three companies working in the same place, answering calls together, precisely because the most common use of any of their products is with the other two. The ties between Oracle and Sun (and Veritas) run quite deep, and result in better performance.

  • other commerical unices (Score:4, Funny)

    by green pizza ( 159161 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @01:44AM (#3607641) Homepage
    Thankfully many other companies have kept a single price for their OS regardless of system size. IBM AIX is still that way, as is SGI's IRIX. In fact, the only real IRIX cost when buying a new machine from SGI is the (oddly) required media fee of about $200. I've been pretty happy with IRIX, it gets a pretty decent update each quarter, as does the SGI freeware archive (http://freeware.sgi.com) -- I wish sunfreeware.com was.

    But then again, if a person buys a brand new 512 CPU SGI Origin 3800 with 1 TB of RAM and and 25 TB of disk, SGI outta toss in a free car. Or house. In the swiss alps.
    • Fuck the car. For those prices, they oughtta toss in The Swiss Alps.
    • Though, I feel sorry for those SGI hobbysts most of whom can't get a recent version of IRIX to run on their precious O2s and Indys that were purchased on ebay and such. This has not been a problem in the Sun world for the past few years.

    • Solaris freeware (Score:3, Informative)

      by guacamole ( 24270 )
      I don't know how about how often the sunfreeware.com is updated. Note that sunfreeware.com is not run by Sun. However, starting with Solaris 8 Sun started bundling the free software companion CDs with the OS media kits. The ISO images and, possibly, individual
      packages are also available for download. Lots of good stuff is there, from gcc to gnome and kde. Sun has been updating this CD once in a while now and, given the popularity of free software, they'll probably continue doing so.

  • How to Milk Your Best Customers 101: (Score:3)

    by Henry V .009 ( 518000 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @01:48AM (#3607647) Journal
    Can someone explain to me why they even bother charging by the CPU? Why don't they just go out and charge customers by their annual revenue or stock market valuation or something. Or is there some important OS difference between 64 CPUs and 128?

    Software should be protected by copyright, not by license. It distorts the system too much this way. A software product no longer acts a a normal commodity.

    • Re:How to Milk Your Best Customers 101: (Score:5, Insightful)

      by squaretorus ( 459130 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @02:04AM (#3607689) Homepage Journal
      You have to have SOME manner by which you charge customers differing rates based on their 'need' and their 'ability to pay'. The greater their need, and the greater their ability to pay the more you can charge.

      Linux distros are cheap because there are loads of alternatives (lowering 'need' for your one) and the users are mainly cheapskates ;-)

      Solaris on a low-end system indicates a low need, and/or low ability to pay so a lower licence is charged so that you 'at least make something out of them'.

      The higher end systems indicate a greater need, greater ability to pay, and so these people should be milked dry!

      Seriously - if they could charge by market value they would! Banks do.
      • Good post. But you don't NEED some manner to charge customers differently. With most commodities it is impossible, because you can't control the used product market. Cars, food, what not, don't have this system. In fact, it is usually cheaper to buy things in bulk. Among other things, a healthy used product market helps balance price. And price balancing is the system which makes free markets so great at resource allocation. The rich paying the same price for bread as the poor is a feature of capitalism, not a bug :).

        OTOH, if someone can break that chain, then the advantage of having a free market to allocate resources goes away. This is what happens with software licenses.
    • Simple. They want to charge the big bucks only from people who bought uber-expensive big-iron systems (but then, the OS license fee is laughable compared to the cost of the whole server or even cost of the anual service/support contracts). At the same time, Sun wants to charge nothing or very little from users who use Sun workstations or low-end servers. Is this hard to understand?

      This pricing scheme is quite different from say the Oracle pricising which is a real ripoff. ($50K for -each- CPU, anyone?)

    • Most Sun customers cut the deals with the Sun
      sales representatives directly, avoiding sunstore on the web.
    • Simple... Cost of writing the OS is X. Often more work goes into higher end features like keeping 128 CPUs from trampling eachother. 2 or 4 is easy.

      So... Rather than charging the guy with the E250 $700 for their cut of the OS, they're transferring most of that fee to the guy whos actually buying the $2mil server.

      See, the $2mil guy probably doesn't care much if they have a 200k OS fee where the guy buying a $2500 server would really notice the $700 -- but not so much a $250 fee.

      People are used to taxes, etc. tacking on ~10% to a given purchasse -- so consider this an OS tax on the machine.
  • The Sun licensing page [sun.com] says "User Licenses are based on system capacity, not on the number of CPUs installed" (emphasis mine). So it's not the number of CPUs that you actually have, but the number that you could install in the future!
    Taking this literally you still need to buy a license for a system with two CPU slots, but no CPU installed!

  • *shrug* pretty cheap actually (Score:5, Insightful)

    by StandardDeviant ( 122674 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @01:58AM (#3607672) Homepage Journal
    compared to the licensing costs for some other commercial unixen... compare this to what SGI wants for the latest IRIX (their workstation IRIX is, iirc, something like $600). Given a) Sun's current financial position (could be better) and b) the fact that solaris is a project involving many, many highly paid engineers, them wanting some bucks makes perfect sense. They're still giving away (iso download soon, physical media now for $fairly_cheap) the 1-cpu version, which covers the majority of workstations and low-end servers...

  • sun = oracle (Score:2, Informative)

    by mexilent ( 469388 )
    sun's totally taking this cue from oracle, which changes its pricing model every other year just to make money off the confusion (with dominance of the enterprise db market, they're basically the Micro$oft of RDBMS's anyway).

    i love solaris, but it's not like they've ever made money off the OS--it's the hardware, stupid!
    • i love solaris, but it's not like they've ever made money off the OS--it's the hardware, stupid!

      Sun want to be like Microsoft (more money from the sale of cardboard boxes and shiny discs), but Microsoft want to be like IBM (keep bleeding your customers for services). And given the current level of quality of much Microsoft software, maybe they've just been trying to ensure that they have a good future income stream. :/

    • Re:sun = oracle (Score:4, Informative)

      by guacamole ( 24270 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @03:35AM (#3607880)
      Oh, this remark is pure bullsh*t.

      The Solaris 9 license fee is a tiny little fraction of the cost of the hardware or even the anual service/support contract. $240 to run Solaris 9 on a $10 server or, what? $400 is probably not bad at all for a +$20K quad CPU box. This fee is still symbolic compared to what other unix vendors charge. Even $6000 fee is not bad either if you're paying it to run Solaris 9 on a $200,000 Sun Fire 3800. Don't forget that you get to run it for free on single processor machines.

      This is quite different from oracle which charges absoletely crazy fees per concurrent user or per CPU (the cost is in tens of thousands of dollars per CPU and people still buy it)

  • Groan... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BJH ( 11355 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @02:14AM (#3607709)

    This is very relevant new for me - I just bought a Fujitsu Primepower200 [fujitsu.com] off an auction site, and I'm currently downloading the Solaris 8 installation CD [sun.com].

    The thing is, this machine has 2 CPUs. What I want to know, is it physically impossible for the Solaris 8 Free Binary version to run on multiple CPUs, or will it actually require a license? (I want to make sure the machine works before I fork out $249 for a license...)
    • There is no license enforcement code in Solaris 8 whatsoever. YOu can install and run it on both CPUs with no (technical) trouble.

  • Sun explains the licensing discrepancy (Score:5, Interesting)

    by schnell ( 163007 ) <.ten.llenhcs. .ta. .em.> on Thursday May 30, 2002 @02:15AM (#3607713) Homepage

    On the Solaris 9 order page [sun.com], Sun explains its seemingly incongruous licensing fees:

    "Note: User Licenses are based on system capacity, not on the number of CPUs installed."

    Sun's desktop and server/enterprise systems are built very differently. The number of CPUs (or even their MHz) on a system has little to do with their performance when considered alongside bus clocking, bandwidth, RAM, etc.

    As such, it appears that they're making a good-faith effort to correlate a system's performance class (and hence what type of customer probably bought it) with what they're charging for the OS upgrade. Associated with the above idea is probably their built-in support costs (e.g., a large company using Solaris on a mission-critical system will probably have greater support demands than an individual user on a desktop machine).

    If you're using Solaris rather than Linux or *BSD, chances are that you're doing so in a business environment where 24x7 commercial support and Solaris' other goodies are important. Unless you're a hacker who bought a $100 SPARC 2 box off eBay to tinker with Solaris, you probably purchased it because of its commercially-supported reliability and other kinky features like CPU and HD hot-swappability etc. on high-end systems.

    FWIW, I think Sun's licensing terms here are a rather good attempt at equating commercial use and mission criticality with licensing fees. So, here's the question: (GPL/BSD aside), can anyone think of a better (specific!) scheme for equating the need [and presumably consequent ability to pay for it] of large corporations to pay big OS upgrade license fees and letting individual/small business users pay smaller OS license fees?

  • Not that bad. Their CPUs, on the other hand... (Score:3, Informative)

    by IvyMike ( 178408 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @02:24AM (#3607745)

    For the older and lower end machines, this might have an impact on the wallet, but for their modern high end workstations, $249 for an OS license is pretty cheap compared the the price of that second processor.

    For example, click on one of the Blade 2000 systems on this page [sun.com]. Go down to the part where it says, " 900-MHz UltraSPARC III Cu Processor with 8-MB External Cache [add $4,500.00]". Now that's a spicy meatball. (It is a helluva processor, but 4.5k makes me gasp).

    I do sort of feel bad for the old timers with older systems, but if they're trying to be cheap, they do have the option of sticking with the same OS, or switching to Linux. Solaris really is a solid OS, and for a lot of people, $249 will be definitely worth the cost.

  • Sun's transitioning (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nrosier ( 99582 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @02:32AM (#3607764)
    "People say you buy a Sun server and get Solaris for free. No, you don't, The hardware is free as far as I'm concerned; we just charge $200,000 for Solaris." - Ed Zander

    Sun's trying to move from a hardware company to a service provider. Just look at all the software products and services they have to offer right now. The only problem is that their customers haven't realised this yet and still consider it a hardware vendor. I've heared people saying they were amazed about the products/services (SunONE etc...) that Sun has after attending presentations... they just didn't know.

    I guess Sun is trying hard to change that perception and is using Solaris 9 to wake people up.

  • Sol9 licensing. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mrbill ( 4993 ) <mrbill@mrbill.net> on Thursday May 30, 2002 @02:35AM (#3607766) Homepage
    I havent seen anyone mention yet that there is no actual license enforcement in Solaris 8/9; there's nothing to keep you from buying Solaris 9 and installing it on a machine with any number of CPUs. Sure, you're breaking license terms, but its not going to ask you for license keys or stop working.

    I've worked in a number of large Solaris shops, and never ONCE has a Sun sales droid or FE/SE asked about licenses. We spend $$$ on systems and support contracts; they dont bicker about petty things like per-CPU licenses for the operating system.

    I've got some reader reports about the Sol9 licensing issue on my web site, SunHELP [sunhelp.org].

  • and don't forget free patches and support 4 years (Score:5, Informative)

    by guacamole ( 24270 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @02:41AM (#3607779)
    One thing that many people don't know is that Sun supports the OS for much longer time than any Linux vendor -has existed-. This is a huge value. I am telling you as a system administrator who supports many many critical servers and hunders of desktops.. once you the OS machine is installed and running and it is doing what you need it to do, the -last- thing you want is to keep upgrading it every year. However, frequent upgrades are a norm in Linux world but it doesn't -have- to be that way. Do you think it is fun having to upgrade 200 or so boxes every 18 months or so? Fsck that. I am interested in doing fun stuff.

    However, Solaris 2.6 is five or six years old and Sun said they will support it for two more years. Do any Linux vendors support an OS version for six years, or five, or four? They hardly support it for three years. Last year I had to upgrade a bunch of perfectly well working RedHat 6.0 servers. Why? Because redhat stopped releasing updates for 6.0.

    Also, Sun backports the drivers to old Solaris versions. For example, they used to offer Solaris 2.6 and 2.5.1 until a year ago preinstalled on all
    of it's UltraSPARC II machines. Now, can you buy brand new IBM or Compaq x86 server with RedHat Linux 5.0 preinstalled? No.

    This is a huge value for real production environments. That's why Solaris is so popular..
  • Essentially Sun is saying that if you have a single processor box (that is a cheap machine), the OS is free. If you have a multi-processor workstation, you have to pay a license fee, however, this fee is much lower than the server fees are. $200 is not bad at all for a license to run this OS on a box that costs $5,
    $10, $20, or $30 thousand dollars (such as Sun Blade2000, aniversary edition). Finally, the price for server licenses is not bad at all either. A dual processor license is only $240 Now do you know how much a new dual processor Sun box costs? $10,000 -minimum- (with discounts). Maybe more. Quad and eight processor licenses, again, are not bad at all considering the overall price of the server. I also really doubt Sun would charge $400,000 even for a big-iron 100+ CPU Sun Fire 15000 server. Which I believe, can be bought for under 3 million dollars.

    The only problem with this pricing scheme is that it does penalize people who use very old, slow, obsolete, but still very reliable and useful hardware such as sparcstation 10, sparcstation 20, and Ultra2 all of which can be bought very cheaply on ebay.

  • Not too overly surprising (Score:3, Informative)

    by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @03:16AM (#3607845) Homepage
    Solaris has always charged for installations of more than 8 processors. They're simply lowering the limit to 2. The prices aren't unreasonable. You'll hardly notice the OS charges on the bill if you're purchasing a Sun server [sun.com]. Note: these are list prices, and nobody pays list prices.

  • Am I the only one who has actually PAID for Solari (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mridley ( 571519 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @03:18AM (#3607847) Homepage
    OK, this is just stupid. Everyone ranting on and on. Am I the only person who actually has paid maint. costs for Solaris machines here?! I have no idea what that crazy pricing on the SUN web site is but no one is going to pay that. Where I work we have quite a few (several hundred) SUN machines and while our maint. contract is in the six figures per year (ie. NOT free) we are certainly not paying $200,000 per system or whatever odd numbers are quoted on their web site.

    I know it may be something you don't know if you're 16 and you're only familiar with "Dude you're getting a Dell" but for some reason (I'm sure those with marketing backgrounds can elaborate more than anyone wants) companies feel the need to put list prices that are out of the ball park. I guess so their customers feel they're getting a great discount or who knows. Anyway if you go to the SUN online store and you think that's what people really pay for those systems no wonder you're having a conniption. Of course not.

    For real people who use real SUN machines to accomplish real work are not paying any attention to that web page. The media and the license are covered by the annual support agreement and it will just show up in the mail (well obviously only if you have support but again if you're a real SUN customer you do). I have no idea what functionality is even available in Solaris 9 that I would want...I got a card in the mail the other day but nothing really jumped out at me...although if they can fix that screwed up LDAP server product they have and make it easy to configure and install that would be enough for me.

    But really Solaris 9 pricing is a non-starter....unless I guess you buy a used E3000 on ebay and put it in your bedroom or something but I don't think any of SUN's marketing or saless are really too worked up about that.

    And as for running LINUX on a 24 processor SPARC box? What the Hell are you talking about?! No one does that. Sorry to rain on your open source parade they don't.

    I'm not saying LINUX doesn't matter but nobody doing real computing on SUN's is having wet dreams about LINUX because it's such a super 31337 operating system...now the fact that the Intel CPUs are substantially faster than the SPARC ones - that's what's driving LINUX adoption where I work. People just want their jobs to get done faster....that is all they care about. The tools they are using costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in license fees, the fact that the OS is free is a non-issue...it's all about the speed advantage of the Intel chips...

    OK rant over
    • The LDAP server in question is the iPlanet (now Sun ONE) directory server and is generally regared as being one fo the best in the industry. The install is fairly painless (14 questions as I recall), certainly no harder than say a typical Oracle install. To configure it you have the choice of some nice configuration files, which are very similar to Open LDAP, or a rather nasty heavy weight Java console.

      Before they gave a 200,000 licence version free in Solaris 8 and above, this used to cost a significant fee per user, I think the list price was around $10 per entry, even if you asume people payed 10% of that it is still an expensive product, and getting it free with Solaris 8 is a bargain.

      The server itself is very stable (version 4.x and 5.1 at least). I have been running it for three years to manage almost 200,000 entries, we replicate the data to seven servers worldwide and service well in excess of 4 million searches every business day. The servers are fast (much faster than Oracle's LDAP interface, OpenLAP or Active Directory), not resource intensive and are very stable, on a par with Apache for stability rather than say Solaris itself but still good. I would highly recommend looking at this product again, if you are interested in building a corporate directory it may be worth getting an E220 or two just to get hold of this product.
  • Solaris is certainly a capable os, but sheeze that seems like an awful lot of money.

    a 40% fee to make your $1M investment work like it is supposed to is not that big of deal.

  • You're confused... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by isa-kuruption ( 317695 ) <.kuruption. .at. .kuruption.net.> on Thursday May 30, 2002 @05:11AM (#3608058) Homepage
    Look...

    If you can afford a $3.4mill machine like a Sun Fire 15k, you can afford another $400,000 for the O/S to run on it's 106 processors...

    But the price isn't that bad for their lower end things. Compare the price of the 2 processor server license compared to that for Windows 2000 Advanced Server. Or compare the price of the 4 processor desktop version to a copy of Windows XP Professional (retail, not upgrade). The prices are relatively comparable.

    Sun spent a lot of time on development of the Solaris 9 platform, and they want to make money off of the development. That is why they are in business, to make money. They are not one of those dot-coms that was selling stock at $100/share and was still in the *coughred(hat)cough*.

  • This will rapidly devalue used sun hardware. This means that banks that considered them an asset last month will now consider them as worthless as PC's because they can't liquidate them. The short term effect of this is no one will loan money for small sun boxes and in time--the larger ones.

  • Free solaris on DVD (Score:4, Informative)

    by jpmkm ( 160526 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @06:05AM (#3608170) Homepage
    Free Solaris [sun.com] on DVD while supplies last.
  • This has been Suns semi-official line for a long, long time. See this netnews posting [google.com] from 1989 for an example.

    And as for licences staying with (or not with) the hardware, well, you can't have it both ways. When I buy a copy of W2K, I put it on whatever machine I want to -- provided I only have it installed on one machine at a time. When I buy a copy of Solaris, I'm currently stuck to a given piece of hardware since Sun won't sell me new hardware to go with my old licence.

  • cadillac vs honda civic of UNIX (Score:3, Insightful)

    by peter303 ( 12292 ) on Thursday May 30, 2002 @07:48AM (#3608474)
    Solaris 9 runs on 109 CPUs transparently compared to beawolf and other UNIXes. It supports nearly a terrabyte of core memory- several times more than the nearest competitor. It has been 64-bit tested for over eight years. Anyone knows that when you first use so-called 64-bit OSes, there is always some 32-bit bottleneck the engineers overlooked. We saw these in early Solaris and IRIX and see them now in Intel platform OSes.

    On the other hand you can get Linux at low cost. When something breaks, you can go in and fix it right away, given you understand it. Linux doesn't have the multi-CPU performance of Solaris. Its is not 64-bit battle tested. hwoever, SGI and IBM Linux are making a lot a progress in high ed Linux.
  • Ok, now this is worse than anything that MS bundles with their OS. Why does Sun think it can start bundling all this other software into the OS? This is the very thing that MS is getting in (or out of) trouble for. Does Sun think it's not ok only if MS does it?
    • I'm not 100% familiar with the J2EE bundle, but I think that the difference is that MS's "extras" are (supposedly) integrated to the OS and cannot be removed. (OK, there's that new XP patch, but I don't use 'doze anyway, so I don't care :P) I don't believe that the J2EE server is integrated to the OS - you should be free to delete or not install it and use an alternative.
      Similarly, there's a whole butt-load of apps that are bundled with nearly every linux distribution - you just don't have to install them.
  • The Software License NEVER came with a used Server, we bought a couple of them a while ago and had to buy a new Software license as well.

    Additionally, if you want to get a support contract from Sun for a used system they first come in and turn it upside down (which is a couple of thousand bucks).

    So in the end: Nothing has changed.
  • People who need it pay for support contracts. No one with a Sun support contract is going to be hassled over OS licenses. This only affects people who eschew support contracts, and then only if someone at Sun cares enough to proceed with a lawsuit. I have never known Sun to bring in the BSA or anything like that to enforce licence compliance. If Sun uses the license as legal leverage at all, it is to encourage you to buy a support contract, which is where they make a lot of their money.
  • In some cases it's the same motherboard, power supply and memory!
    ... which are the least relevant part of the price difference. The higher rate is for the faster system and I/O buses in Sun's Workgroup and Enterprise servers. You don't use Sun servers for processing, you use them for massive I/O. (You use Intel machines for processing these days, much as I wish it weren't so.)
  • It will be interesting to see of Sun reduces the cost of the hardware. Seeing as how the RTU previously was "built in" to the cost to the hardware, logic would dicatate that they would reduce the cost of the hardware with this new pricing scheme.

    But I'm not that naive.

  • The best thing about Open Source, is that if you spent that money _once_ on hiring a couple developers (that already work on the project) to develop the features you need, and release it back to the project under an open license, you'd then have that feature in a Free OS for all the future releases. So instead of paying that price every few years, you can pay for it just once.

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